Bookplanet: best title this year, Sex and War

Reviewed “Sex & War” by Stan Coff. Now here be blurbing.

Filed under: General ,Gender ,AA - Buy "Sex & War"
By Stan at 8:03 pm, 4/7/06

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Editorial Reviews
Book Description

The notion that war is intrinsic to man’s nature is dealt a powerful setback in Stan Goff’s Sex and War. Goff, a former Special Forces sergeant, argues persuasively that rather than being born that way, men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power. Drawing both on his experiences in the military and on his reading of feminist writers such as Patricia Williams, bell hooks, and Chandra Mohanty — and as the father of a son stationed in Iraq — Goff journeys through wars, ideologies, and cultures, revealing the transformation of men into killers. His story encompasses not just the battlefield and the book, but the Swift Boat Veterans controversy, the eros of George W. Bush, pornography, the Taliban, and gays and lesbians in the military. Goff’s remarkable ability to connect his own personal experiences to contemporary feminist criticism makes for a provocative discussion of war and masculinity.

***

On “Sex & War”

“Men should thank Stan Goff for this loving challenge to us to reject all aspects of the male dominance of our society. In his riveting blend of personal experience and thoughtful analysis, Goff stares down the most brutal aspects of masculinity without flinching, as he opens up a crucial discussion about how we can get beyond being “real men” and beyond the cruel institutions and practices men have created.”

Dr. Robert Jensen
Professor, School of Journalism at University of Texas, Austin
author of “Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our Humanity” (City Lights Books, 2004)

***

“In Goff’s hands, the language of militarism, redemption, violence, sexist-misogyny, and war are prosaic yet poetic grenades, lobbed at American empire, television, the Hollywood cinematic machine with its mind-numbing trifles, religion, and neo-cons and iconoclasts like Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Michael Moore –the sacred and the profane are thrashed out in this opus on sex and war. Like prophesied deliverance, Goff’s insights should move those of us hitherto wishy-washy liberal-leftists, complacent hard leftists, and the seeming voices-in-the-wilderness race-gender-class radicals to rethink our strategies for bringing about a new human condition.”

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, (Ph.D., Brown, 1994) (Director) teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, Francophone Studies, critical race studies, feminist theory, Jazz Age Paris, film and hip hop culture. She is also Professor of French and Italian. Her books include Negritude Women (2002), Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (1999), Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998). She has co-edited three volumes, the latest of which includes The Black Feminist Reader (Blackwell, 2000). She is currently working on two books, one on young black women and hip hop culture and the other on black women in Paris from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

***

SEX AND WAR

By Stan Goff

Reviewed by William T. Hathway

“Stan Goff was the ultimate warrior, a combat-hardened member of the Rangers, Special Forces, and Delta Force. His conscience proved stronger than his military indoctrination, however, and he quit and turned against the state’s institution of terror. Once outside it, he devoted himself to understanding the social and psycho-sexual roots of organized violence. SEX AND WAR is his third and most ambitious book on this topic.

“The book is constructed as a mosaic, and that’s a difficult art form. Each piece needs to have its own discrete integrity, and it also needs to fit together with the others into a whole.

“Stan Goff has mastered this technique. SEX AND WAR is written in riffs and blips, in shards, with lots of edges. Some English comp instructors would give it a D for organization. But this seems the right form for this topic in our fragmented time. When the reader pulls back from the pieces, the overall pattern emerges. The book has two perspectives: in your face and off the wall.

“Goff writes often with grace, always with energy, and almost always with clarity, but his zest for theory sometimes propels him into convoluted, abstract sentences that require a second reading to spring forth the meaning, but the backpedaling is worthwhile.

“He flashes from vivid descriptions of his military operations, to related stories of the plight of women forced to live under patriarchal militarism, to insightful renderings of the stunted psyches of warriors, to Marxist analysis of the US’s violent drive for hegemony, then he connects us to the work of other writers on these issues, thus extending the discussion out in many directions.

“He gives us insider reports on the military mentality that make clear the inevitability of atrocities. Then in a synaptic leap he shows that the abuse of women is a similar syndrome but much more widespread throughout society. In his portrait of a Delta Force friend turned rapist, we see how rape in all its varieties is a mainstay of patriarchy as a whole, not just its military branch.

“Goff was a medic, among other things, in the Special Forces. Now he emerges as a diagnostician of the pandemic pathology of our culture. And like a good medic, he has suggestions for curing us of this disease of sexualized violence.

“SEX AND WAR is both a personal and an analytical tour de force. It’s a book that only Stan Goff could write, and I’m very glad he did.”

William T. Hathway is author of the novels A WORLD OF HURT and SUMMER SNOW.
«Duke Rape - from Biting Beaver Abu Ghraib - Newly Released War Porn »

6 Comments »

Workin’ on getting my Paypal to stick. I’ll be taking two copies.

So, just how many pages are we talking? Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it will leave a mark on my poor printer.

Randy

Comment by R.S. Morris — 4/7/2006 @ 10:56 pm

I’ve started reading the book directly off the pdf–I’ve only gotten to page 16 so far because of the depth of the reading and the shallowness of the comp monitor–but I wanted to thank you again for the work. When I start a new book by any author I’ve read before, there’s always a tiny, totally irrational fear that s/he will just be reiterating stuff they’ve already told me. Your book destroyed that fear in the first page. It’s just too bad I only have another 190 pages left.

Keep up the great work–books, website, marches, whatever else you can think of to keep pushing the communication envelope–it’s making a difference.

Randy

Comment by R.S. Morris — 4/8/2006 @ 11:37 pm

Stan, is there some way to pay by check ?

Charles Brown

Comment by Charles Brown — 4/9/2006 @ 2:14 pm

Oh , here it is.

If you are uncomfortable using Paypal, send the money as a check to PO Box
90691, Raleigh NC 27675, and an email address where you can receive the pdf,
and I will send it along.

Comment by Charles Brown — 4/9/2006 @ 2:49 pm

i did pre-order the book at amazon. do you mean it will now not be published and i will to order it here as a pdf-file? amazon has so far not cancelled the order.

Comment by astras — 4/10/2006 @ 10:46 am

Finished the book quite a while ago–sorry I haven’t thrown my endorsement here until now. Crazy life, dont’cha know.

“Sex & War” is exactly what I expected after reading Stan’s first books–and that is praise indeed. While his style continues to be meandering, it doesn’t detract in any way for me since his digressions bring a sense of familiarity and immediacy to the read, almost as if this complex mind is taking time to converse just with you.

For me, “Sex & War” functioned as a natural extention of “Full-spectrum Disorder.” I would even go so far as to call them a necessary set for someone desiring a broad-brush examination of modern society, its driving and corrupting philosophies and the hard reality of what’s needed to fix the problem.

Goff’s take is especially poignant for a male veteran trying to make the cognitive leaps necessary to start perceiving–let alone understanding and countering–the issues of misogyny, patriarchy, class warfare or racial inequity. Goff has travelled the entire length of the hyper-masculine yardstick, leaving his credibility unimpeachable to any “man’s man” just so long as that man wants to learn. And a man can learn much from Goff’s take on hyper-masculinity; as he says at the end of one chapter where he has just described the socially and psychically destructive results of our faustian connection to patriachy: “Been there. All the way to the top, to places most men for a thousand reasons will never go. Here’s what I found there. Nothing. It is a place without meaning.” The fact that by the time you’ve read that far, it is obvious that those words are not spoken as some ego-driven measure of masculine power, but rather as a plea–full of pain and regret–that other men might hear and pause in their pursuit of some “perfect sociopathic masculinity.”

My only significant criticism of Goff’s book is consistent from “Full-spectrum Disorder”: his penchant for using really big, unfamiliar words and philosophically obscure concepts. But even this isn’t breally the author’s problem, as it is society’s unwillingness to explore alternative economic and political possibilities that leaves us scrambling for a good dictionary. On top of that, in “Sex & War” Goff has very effectively utilized same-page footnoting, offering the reader instant access to definitions and references, turning what could have been a jarring excercise in context-mining and book-juggling into the pleasant, personal conversation I mentioned at the beginning of this review.

As with “Full-spectrum Disorder,” I will have to re-read “Sex & War” many times, as well as seek out several of Goff’s original sources on feminism, patriarchy, etc., before I feel like I’ve truly started to understand the complex dynamics he is trying to unmask. But I’m fairly confident that Stan Goff would be comfortable with that response…just so long as I keep searching.

All the best,

Randy Morris