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Bring me men--or an equivalent thereof.

Article Excerpt
Kelly Flinn. Proud To Be: My Life, The Air Force, The Controversy. New York: Random House, 1997. 259 pp. Photographs. $23.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-375-50109-6.

Kelly Flinn was born to an Irish Catholic family, the youngest with four much older brothers and sisters. She grew up a proverbial tomboy, reveling in trucks, dirt, speed; oh, yes, definitely speed; and played hard and strong with boys from the beginning. She dreaded the onset of puberty with its inevitable physical changes, and prayed her menstrual periods would never start, thus condemning her to a life of femaleness complete with all its undesirable expectations and restrictions.

Puberty came, however, as it tends to do, but Kelly remained an exceedingly active girl, playing as many sports as she could while waiting for life to happen. She was basically an outsider, having no interest in typically "girl" pursuits, and when her father read about Space Camp she jumped at the chance to go. Already fascinated with flying from the hours spent watching planes land and take off with her mother as her father came and went for his job, Space Camp was the crowning event of her young life. She made the decision right there and then to fly, and with luck, as an astronaut; if not that, airplanes. She never wavered from this dream.

This meant the Air Force Academy (tellingly, she notes that while she realized the Navy had women pilots, they had a reputation for treating women badly), and she was ecstatic to obtain a coveted, and extremely competitive slot to attend. She would become a pilot, thus fulfilling her lifetime dream and ambitions.

When Flinn entered the Academy she was notably socially inexperienced and lacking in knowledge of typical male-female interactions; she was simply excited to have begun at last to fulfill her dreams to fly. She wanted to fly the fast, sexy fighters she had almost worshiped for so long.

Flinn soon found herself less than ecstatic when she began to experience the extreme misogyny and abusive treatment her male counterparts were quick to mete out. Oddly, she does not seem to have recognized this as a chronic pattern of abuse, nor as part of an overwhelmingly destructive culture within the Academy.

Her shock and anger at being sexually assaulted in her room, and the reactions of her sexually promiscuous roommate (who was also sexually assaulted, but appears to have considered the event a joke) as well as the small numbers of people she told about the incident, would be traumatic. When she finally sought help from a woman counselor she was even further victimized and traumatized by a counselor who indicated that Flinn must have been drunk and invited the assault. The counselor then...

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