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

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Katherine Boo

By summer, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, found himself publicly vouching for Coughlin's career on national TV. The folks who ignored Tailhook, on the other hand, weren't nearly so well protected. Two days after Coughlin went to the media, Navy Secretary Lawrence Garrett, who himself had attended Tailhook (he was hanging out on the patio outside a suite where strippers and prostitutes were working), was forced to resign. And thanks to enormous public pressure to ensure that this time around the charges are thoroughly investigated, there may be more U.S. military casualties by the end of the Tailhook affair than there were in the Persian Gulf.

That part of the story is kind of fun to watch. But the most important outcome of Coughlin's action is a subtier one. In 1989, when Admiral Virgil Hill dismissed as "highjinks" the chaining of a female Naval Academy student to a toilet, and the five midshipmen who had abused her were allowed to graduate, the semaphore was surely read by the ranks. This time around, as naval officers and enlistees take their new training on sexual harassment policies and hear rumors of another officer canned for looking the other way in a harassment case, the old message has gone the way of the B-1 bomber. Sure, the smarmy slogan now playing on billboards at bases across the country --"Not in Our Navy"--will probably never be true, but the Navy's commitment to making it so may be.

Of course, it is futile to try to predict the full repercussions of speaking out as Coughlin did. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Tailhook would revive the revanchist idea that women shouldn't be allowed in the military? And as for credit, don't count on it, even from those you help.

When Lt. Commander Roxanne Barrett, one of the highest-ranking women harassed at Tailhook, was asked recently on a D.C. radio station whether Coughlin's coming forward had prompted her to tell her story, she emphatically demurred. She had thought it better for her career to stay silent, Barrett said, until the Naval Intelligence Service came banging on the door. "I thought that was the right time," she added primly--ignoring the fact that, without Coughlin's willingness to take the risk that Barrett herself opted out of, that time would never have come.

In other words, it was because one woman stood up and spoke out that a misogynist culture is now forced to reconsider its ways. So why hasn't People magazine called? Perhaps it's because we like stories of damsels in distress better than stories of women triumphant. Or maybe the lieutenant simply didn't do enough TV. Nevertheless, we shouldn't allow the lesson to float away. Anita Hill's message to American women was that it's okay to choose our own professional advancement over loftier social goals. Paula Coughlin reminds us that, if we sweat for it, we may sometimes have it both ways.

Katherine Boo is an editor of The Washington Monthly. Research assistance was provided by Emily Nelson.