The current buzz at the Naval Academy is over an upcoming court martial of a lieutenant who allegedly made crudely sexual comments either to, or in the hearing of, midshipmen while on a Yard Patrol craft cruise in Norfolk. Printed reports of this have by now appeared in the Annapolis Capital and The Washington Post. If important aspects of the case are as reported, they constitute, in my view, a gross misapplication of a well-meaning system. Or, more to the point, two well-meaning systems, separate and unrelated. In fact, I pointed this out last June in a memo to the Academy's superintendent (which has never been acknowledged). My interest in the issue then was that I was in something of the position that this lieutenant is in now.

No, I wasn't accused of having made grossly sexual comments. I have been known to make these, but any decently socialized adult knows you don't make them in a professional environment or in front of the people you're trying to educate and socialize in their turn. In fact, I wasn't accused of anything. Yet still, the same system that has gone into action against this lieutenant created countless hours of discussion (“counseling”) with my department chair and the senior Marine at the Academy, my division director, before petering out, as it shows no sign of doing in the case of the lieutenant.

Time to come clean: I certainly did speak about “phallic imagery” in a poem and, in visual form, on the government-funded “spirit buttons” of midshipmen-produced art that used to be produced before football games. (One of them, the artist told me, was based on the male-male rape scene in “Pulp Fiction.”) This notion of phallic symbols comes from Freud, whose important work dates from more than a century ago, and who is taught at every college and university in the country.

Apparently (I say “apparently” for a reason; keep reading) a female student, debriefing in a casual chat session with a female secretary here at the Academy, noted this as one of the many new-to-her things she'd heard in her classes. The female midshipman was not offended. But the adult was. The adult made a complaint on behalf of the midshipman. This produced the first round of “counseling.” I was called in: Did I say so-and-so? Of course, I responded; ever heard of Freud? Then I asked: Who is complaining? Answer: no one. Who is offended? We can't tell you.

The answer was a classic Catch-22, though with a Stalinesque twist. Until there was a complaint, the identity of the complainant was to be kept a secret. There was no complaint, so I couldn't know who had been offended. But I could be counseled.

It was only after the second go-round that I got, off the record, some names on this and a sense of what had apparently happened. The same adult woman had apparently continued to pump the same female midshipman for things that Prof. Fleming said that she, the adult, found questionable. A few months later, she hit pay dirt: I had explained what a sex change operation entailed. In class! She “documented” a “repeat offense.” Once again I sat in the Colonel's office. The midshipman, talking later with my (female) department chair, asked, “Is this a witch hunt against Prof. Fleming”? (At the time I'd just published a piece on the Academy's admissions procedures that got many people upset.)

Why would I be explaining a sex change operation in English class? As I explained to the Colonel (by his own admission, not a literary man) it had to do with the novel Madame Bovary , assigned reading in all colleges. There is some evidence that Emma, Madame Bovary, doesn't like being a woman, that some of her problems would have been solved if she had been born a man. Others of her problems come from her having married, at least arguably, the wrong man. Nowadays in the US she could get a divorce, something virtually impossible in the Catholic France of the l830s where the novel is set. Would that have solved any of her problems? I asked the students. Nowadays too, I noted, she could have gotten a sex-change operation and become a man. Would that have solved any more?

At this a midshipman raised his hand. “Sir,” he said, “what's a sex-change operation?”

“Come on,” I said, frankly surprised. “You don't really need me to explain that.”

“Yes sir,” he said. “I think I do.”

So I did. It's clinical, it has nothing to do with sex (though you have to use the word “penis” to explain it) and a recent article in the Washington Post about a Ranger who'd gotten one had made the topic timely and in the public domain. (I've since had e-mail from a USNA grad, once Eddie, now Edie, on this very subject.)

This explanation had upset the adult “documenting” her conversations with the still un-offended female midshipman. She was complaining on behalf of the student.

“Gee, Colonel,” I said that day. “A student asks me a question. I'm a professor. I'm supposed to give information. What would you have had me do?”

He smiled (he understood the absurdity of the situation, I think): “Tell him to look it up on the Internet,” he said.

When later I ploughed through all the various SECNAV and USNA Instructions dealing both with CMEO (Command Management Equal Opportunity) and SAVI (Sexual Assault Victim Intervention) programs, I discovered the following:

What this third-party adult was alleging was what's called a “hostile working atmosphere.” The notion comes from the CMEO Instructions. There is nothing in the CMEO Instruction that suggests that a third party may find somebody else's atmosphere hostile, and complain on that person's behalf.

The Catch-22 aspect of all this came from a confusion of the CMEO Instruction and the SAVI instruction (both are handed by the same people at USNA, and I assume elsewhere). The SAVI instruction includes a weird presupposition (besides the assumption that there has been a “victim” at all -- this is before anything has been proven, or even necessarily alleged) that the less the “victim” says, the more beaten down, victimized (s)he must be. Others have to step in to be her (or theoretically his) advocate. This was being applied to a CMEO ( not a SAVI) issue, so that it was assumed others could legitimately go to bat for someone who wasn't offended. It was SAVI presuppositions that produced the response they couldn't tell me who was offended: that would be more punishment to the “victim.”

This is not the case in the CMEO system, which clearly provides a structure for someone who feels in a “hostile working environment” to make a complaint at the lowest level of the chain of command -- or if I was too fearsome, one step up, my department chair. The assumption of CMEO is that people who sense a “hostile atmosphere” are expected to take steps to make their discomfort clear. Usually this results in an apology (people don't usually go out of their way to offend), or an explanation of why the language was necessary. And that's that. The system is not designed for somebody else to pick the issue up and carry it forward.

From reports, it seems that that was that in the case of the lieutenant. The midshipman accepted his apology. But her superior, and his, evoked the same conflation of CMEO and SAVI that I too experienced. According to reports, the complaint against the lieutenant came from someone who wasn't there, another and more senior adult.

From the way I read the instructions, there's no legal basis for this. Nor should there be. The assumption that people can't be trusted to decide if they're offended infantilizes people in the fleet and at the Academy: they can't see things clearly by themselves, the poor dears. Being offended at something said is not part of the same scale that ends in sexual assault, not...