This story reminded me of one of the most famous scenes in Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H", where the unit doctors expose Margaret "Hot Lips" O'Houlihan while she's taking her shower. Humiliating women in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy is all in good fun, amirite? Especially when she's an uppity sort, a stickler for regulations who gets in the way of the menfolks doing their hilarious thing! Ha, ha!
Notice how some of the nurses sit and watch. I guess they've figured out it's better than being victims themselves. And really, if women want to get along with men in the military, they should learn to put up with "hijinks"! (Or rape. Whatever.)
That's why this story really shouldn't surprise anyone:
Submarine crews are so tight-knit that they're considered a family — part of what made the revelations of illicit filming on the ballistic missile sub Wyoming so troubling.
The filming wasn't a one-off or a prank. It was a sophisticated and repeated invasion of privacy, where male Wyoming sailors acted as lookouts while a friend filmed female shipmates undressing with cellphones or an iPod Touch — both of which are banned aboard the sub.
One sailor admitted that he and a male peer rushed to secretly record each female midshipman while she was in the shower changing room. They filmed every woman each time she took a shower during the three-month patrol, he said — several times a day, according to a new report.
Peer pressure allowed this ring to persist for 10 months on the Wyoming, recording and sharing videos of dozens of women they served alongside every day. The new details into the case, which the top submarine commander called a "breach of trust," come in a new command investigation, obtained by Navy Times via the Freedom of Information Act.
The scandal has dismayed the sub force and some of the trailblazing officers who made history as the first women submariners. One officer, among the first to earn her dolphins in 2012, told Navy Times she couldn't believe her peers had been betrayed that way.
"The thing with the Wyoming is, to me that was such a shocking event," said Lt. Jennifer Carroll, who served aboard the ballistic missile sub Maine and was never recorded by the Wyoming ring. "It was completely 180-degrees out from what my experience was. I couldn't really even fathom that one of our guys [would] do that to me."
The report provides new details on how the ring allegedly filmed women with cellphones through a hole and then shared them without detection for months. Investigators with Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Kings Bay, Ga.-based Submarine Squadron 20 interviewed more than 300 people and included statements from the 12 original suspects.
[...] Of the 12 sailors who had known about the videos — filmed, distributed, watched or heard about them — eight were court-martialed (one was acquitted), three went to captain's mast, and one was released with no charges.
