Female (Venus) symbol and Male (Mars) symbol (public domain)
(20) S€XUAL WARFARE
I like to reserve my final or twentieth special mention for a light-hearted kinky entry, but sadly despite the name of this entry there’s nothing light-hearted or kinky about its primary connotation.
That connotation, including slavery or trafficking, has a history or indeed prehistory as long as warfare itself, despite being the aspect of war we find most viscerally disturbing in the modern period and have hence defined as a war crime.
Outside that connotation, it is perhaps not surprising that two professions proverbially described as the oldest, pr0stitute and soldier, should go hand in hand – often literally. The proverbial oldest profession has often been foremost among the “camp followers” of armed forces, putting another metaphorical tail in tooth to tail ratio. Of course, when military forces seek to enforce that camp following, then it takes us right back to that connotation defined as war crime.
Beyond that, there are the liaisons between civilian populations and military forces throughout history, perhaps best encapsulated by British description for American servicemen in their country during WW2 – “overpaid, overs€xed, and over here”. Australians expressed similar sentiments. The Japanese played upon something similar for propaganda pamphlets it spread to Americans in the Pacific War – what the wives of American servicemen were getting up to with civilian males back home. Amusingly, American servicemen collected these pamphlets with enthusiasm.
Finally, the term might be used for the metaphorical Battle of the S€xes – the cultural and social conflict between men and women throughout history, but particularly in the modern period that gave us the phrase.
