For those that can’t read the image:
>playing some mtg with my college group that meets up at my best friend's every friday
>one of the players asks if his friend can join next time we play
>nobody has a problem with it
>next friday rolls around
>everybody gets set up
>knock on the door
>best friend opens the door
>immediate regret
>actual fucking fecal smell emanates from this mass of unkempt hairy adipose
>try my god damndest to be polite and try to ignore the smell and just play.
>he picks up the game pretty quickly, and thankfully he doesn't speak too often because each time he opens his mouth the halitose burns my nostrils.
>we tolerate this for exactly 10 minutes before the poli-sci dude in our group slams his can of altoids on the plaguelord's side of the table and blurts "do not fucking speak in my direction again until you've fucking emptied this your breath smells like death."
>dead fucking silence for 10 seconds.
>plaguelord gets up, apologizes, and leaves
>we try to pretend this never happened.
>next week rolls around, its still on everyone's mind.
>knock on the door
>takes a few moments to recognize the stranger in front of us
>holy shit its the plaguelord, and he's fucking clean
>completely shaved his patchy neckbeard
>is wearing what looks like a brand new clothes, his jeans even still have a sticker on them
>smells vaguely like strawberries instead of rotten onions
>teeth still stained but the halitose is completely gone and replaced with mint.
>apologized for last week, asked if he could play again
>fast forward a few months and now he's a regular at our table, he even brings homemade snacks.
Has this ever happened in your groups or is this some sort of anomaly/divine intervention?
We were Air Force, not Marines. Specifically, we worked as IT professionals. So if anything, we were professional nerds, not professional killers.
I deployed with Marines once. My Marine boss said she hoped to god that she never saw an Air Force member with a gun. That would mean the planes are down, the base is overrun, and the Marines are dead. She said we were the absolute last resort. So she told me that if shit hit the fan, I should hand my weapon to the nearest Marine and hide under my desk until it’s over.
Still, you’re correct. There was a surprisingly high rate of abuse and harassment of women across the military. My wife also served, and she got plenty of harassment from her peers. Even some guys that didn’t think being married prevented them from trying to date her. And there were always stories of people cheating while on deployments. Guys got especially horny on deployment because they were trapped on a military base for 6+ months and there were very few women deployed with them, if any at all.
Early in my career, the guys would joke about the 2-10-2 rule: while at our home station, women they worked with might be only a 2 on the hotness scale, but when you’re deployed and had no other options, they’d become a 10. Then you return home and they’re back to a 2. They also referred to this as "deployment goggles " (like beer goggles).
The Air Force specifically made great strides in cutting down on abuse of women. We sat through training courses annually, talking about abuse and harassment and how to respect your peers. The culture shifted greatly from when I signed up in 2002, to when I retired in 2022, and we were at a very good place when I left.
I hear the worst branches to serve as a woman are the Marines and Army. They also made great strides over the years, but they still have a much more toxic culture than we do. Heck, there was big news in 2020 about an Army woman being murdered and dismembered because she didn’t accept advances from a co-worker. They actually made a Netflix special about her. So they still have lots of work to do. But their culture in general is very toxic, not just against women, but everyone. They abuse the hell out of their members, treating them like govt property, not human beings. So until they can shift their mindset and start respecting their people as living, breathing people and not tools to be utilized, I don’t see them improving their respect of women anytime soon.