Universal soldier: what Paula Coughlin can teach American women - sexual assault victim demands justice - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Katherine Boo

Deep in the 2,200 pages of Naval InvesbtigatiVe Service transcripts about the infamous Tailhook weekend, a moment of humanity interrupts a catalog of outrage and indifference. A man sees a distraught woman flee onto a hotel balcony, her clothes stretched and torn and three naval aviators fast behind her. As the men laugh and taunt, the Samaritan intervenes. Ordering the offenders to leave her alone, he fernes her out of the melee and into safety.

Unfortunately, our hero isn't a serviceman. He's a bartender. And that woozy night, it seemed as if you had to live outside military culture to recognize that attacking women isn't just boys being boys. Fortunately, however, the past few months have been a long, harsh-lit morning for the American military, as the official Lessons of Tailhook swim into focus. We've had lessons about outlaw aviator culture, about convoluted chains of command, about widespread service alcoholism, about women's place on the front lines--military lessons, all. Yet the timeliest lesson may speak, not to the guys in uniform, but to that anonymous woman who was chased around the Hilton--and to every other woman in America. It's the lesson embodied by 30-year-old Naval Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, a pilot mauled by her peers that weekend, who came forward at considerable professional risk to demand that the Navy bring her attackers to justice.

Her superiors ignored her; other victims deserted her; even the mini-skirt she wore that evening was held up to the light. In the usual doomed-whistleblower scenario, Coughlin would today be selling discount fatigues at Sunny's Surplus, cursing the day she spoke out against the Navy. There'd be a drink named after her--a sour one--at some Miramar aviators' bar. But a year after the raucous convention that ushered Tailhook into the civilian lexicon, this isn't shaping up like the usual story. In fact, there's a chance that Paula Coughlin's courage will actually change a culture many feminists had long given up as lost.

So why should female civvies care? Because a few weeks after Paula Coughlin was attacked, she and the rest of America heard lawyer Anita Hill explain her decision not to protest Clarence Thomas's repeated sexual harassment over the years in which she worked for him: "I was aware," she said, "that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career." It was a justification that provoked instant empathy from working women.

"I think that is something that a woman in that situation would do," asserted Hill's friend Ellen Wells at the heatings, a speculation that had women nodding in agreement across the nation. "You think, yes, perhaps this job is secure, but maybe they will post me in an office in a corner with a telephone and The Washington Post to read from nine to five, and that won't get me anywhere. So you are quiet and you are ashamed and you sit there and take it."

A decade after Hill sat there and took it, and a year after she sat there and told it, her choice of silence has been so energetically defended it now seems to rank among the unassailable feminine prerogatives. She personally is enough of an icon that campaign literature from Senate hopeful Carol Moseley Braun gives the Oklahoma law professor as much space as the candidate. Yet it is precisely for those who argue that Anita Hill had no other choice that Paula Coughlin's story is a countermyth of crucial importance, one that cries to be rescued from the brig of military lore. It says that a woman can fight against injustice in a closed, hierarchical, defensive culture. And, hell, she can even prevail--not just for herself, as Anita Hill did in silence, but for hundreds of thousands of other women.

Babes in boyland

The comparison between the two women is, of course, a ragged one. There's vast difference between privately tendered sexual innuendo and a populous hallway brawl. And Paula Coughlin wasn't victimized (at least at first) by her boss. Yet to fully appreciate her guts, it's worth rewinding, via the Navy transcripts, to the Tailhook weekend and the months that followed. That, mind you, was well before the beerswilling, crotch-groping, criminal-making aviators' party had made its way into the major press; before Navy leaders had their mouths frozen into outraged 'O's. Rather, it was back when the odds of Paula Coughlin's prevailing looked slim next to the odds of being ignored, marginalized, or even demoted---in other words, about as grim as young Anita Hill's.

While you'd have to strain to find a "good" arena for a professional woman to fight sexual harassment (although Hill's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should' ve come close), the military may have been the consummate hard-luck setting--a truth rounded on much more than a few rowdy weekends. Thus the likelihood of obtaining professional equality with male peers probably already seemed a long shot to Coughlin, an aide to Rear Admiral Jack Snyder at Maryland's Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center. Yet, like Anita Hill, Coughlin was no bristling, broadcasting feminist. For eight years she adhered to the bootstrap philosophy of equal fights: By making it yourself, you do a service to womanhood in general. "I had worked my ass off trying to be one of the guys," Coughlin noted later, "to be the best naval officer I can and prove women can do whatever the job calls for."