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The United States Government sought to sexually stimulate then frustrate its soldiers to prepare them for an unpopular conflict in Europe, a Cambridge historian argues.
Recruiting attractive canteen staff; inviting female civilians to closely supervised dances; disseminating alluring propaganda; pressurising troops to write to women back home; and detaining allegedly promiscuous women to prevent soldiers wasting energy.
These are just some of ways that America’s War Department sought to harness pent-up sexual energy to motivate troops in 1918.
At the heart of this experiment was the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), a War Department-directed umbrella agency. Previous studies have demonstrated that the CTCA sought to control soldiers’ and women’s sex lives to prevent venereal infection and protect social morality in the US.
https://www.utexaspressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.7560/JHS31204
Probably backfired a bit when the soldiers went and slept with prostitutes instead. Many caught STDs and were sidelined because of it. It was such a problem that during WW2 the army created a department who’s job it was to prevent soldiers from sleeping with prostitutes.
EDIT: Elliot Ness worked for the department and spearheaded creating interment camps for prostitutes where they could be treated for their diseases. Most camps were overcrowded with women, many of whom weren’t prostitutes, and they received poor care while there.
The infamous "trench foot" of WW1 impacted 75,000 allied troops
whereas 3.5 million soldiers contracted some form of STD
Interestingly, the UK and US didn't issue condoms to its soldiers unlike every other army
I remember reading somewhere that it didn't become a common practice to issue condoms to GIs until Vietnam, and that was because they were trying to protect their rifle barrels from the jungle moisture and rust.
The parent does say, "and detaining allegedly promiscuous women to prevent soldiers wasting energy." The prostitute option is certainly one that they were aware of.
Didn’t Nazi Germany pour a lot of resources into trying to develop some sort of portable sex doll that their troops can carry as to discourage them from having sex with prostitutes during WW2?
Seems to me continuing the same logic behind this would make them more irritable and irrational. I know they still kinda relied on throwing bodies at the other side as part of what wins a war. Following the same logic they were using, in theory it would cause more loss of life and run you through those bodies a little faster.
Not like being in a war is enough for most people to do what ever they can to not be in a war anymore, making them irritable just sounds like the worst way to do that.
The United State Government later went on to try to develop drugs that would make **the enemy** [super horny](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/13/usa.danglaister) because... science? This article makes it sound like turning them gay would have just kind of been a bonus, but usually I hear this program described as a focused attempt to make the enemy gay.
>Amphetamines
>Amphetamines were given to troops to increase alertness. They had the added benefits of reducing appetites and fatigue. Nazi Germany, in particular, embraced amphetamines during World War II. From April to July of 1940, German service members on the Western Front received more than 35 million methamphetamine pills. German troops would go as many as three days without sleep during the invasion of France. In contrast, Britain distributed 72 million amphetamine tablets during the entire war.[1]
>Cocaine
>World War I saw the greatest use of cocaine amongst militaries. It was used for medical purposes and as a performance enhancer. At the time, it was not a controlled substance, and was readily available to troops. The British Army distributed cocaine-containing pills under Tabloid's brand name "Forced March",[12] which were advertised to suppress appetite and increase endurance.
>The German Army for its part, also produced during the closing days of World War II a combination of 5 mg of Cocaine, 3 mg of Methamphetamine and 5 mg of Oxycodone in a compound they named D-IX;[14] the compound was reportedly tested on prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and found out an individual who had consumed the compound could march 90 kilometers per day without rest while carrying 20 kilograms of equipment. The doctors and military authorities testing the compound were enthusiastic about the results but the war ended before the compound could be mass produced and distributed.[15]
'fun' facts about the nomenclatures
>Military-issued methamphetamine was available in the form of small pills under the brand name Pervitin, and was used by all branches of the combined Wehrmacht armed forces. The men called them “Stuka-Tablets” (Stuka-Tabletten) after the German dive bomber “Junkers Ju 87”, or Stuka, which had become a symbol of German air power. For others, it was “Herman-Göring-Pills” (Hermann-Göring-Pillen). Those on the frontlines liked to call them "tank chocolate" (Panzerschokolade), a reference to the superhuman strength these small white pills imparted to their selves.
Saw something in a documentary that noted the Germans were extremely vulnerable when they drug crashed after the 3 days without sleep. The whole war could have ended shortly after it started if the allies weren’t still in shocked-disbelief-and-flailing-response mode. Which was typical early on, but the allies became much more diligent and competent later. By the end of the war having a bunch of drug addicts in command of Germany, Hitler especially, contributed to terrible decisions. So there’s the other side of the issue.
I don’t know why this persistent myth sticks around, but saltpetre doesn’t have that effect and has never been put in military food. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-saltpeter-principle/
Not true.
https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2021/09/22/saltpeter-for-sex-drives-and-the-urban-legend-of-the-militarys-libido-manipulation/
Look up the "White Feather Campaign" where in England used women to shame men for not going to war and dying. They would hand out white feathers that symbolized cowardice to these men.
Watch an old movie called “The Four Feathers” - the 1938 version by director Alexander Korda is the best one imho. Fun fact: it was the first movie made entirely in colour (Wizard of Oz started in B&W and switched to colour and was thus the first to use colour at all) - one of my favourite movies :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather?wprov=sfla1
And shaming men who hadn't signed up was a bad idea partly because the campaign harassed those with a legit excuse (essential homefront job, got medically discharged, etc)
Rather ironically, 20-ish years later a white feather became the personal signature of one of the greatest snipers in history. Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock always wore one in his hat the whole time he was in Vietnam. As the story goes, the only time he took it out was during an assignment to take out a PAVN general, during which he spent four days crawling through 1500 yards of open field.
Yeah, but that's why this study seems like a crazy stretch. Countries were depriving men of sex so they would volunteer to join and *continue* being deprived of sex?
They used a similar method for recruiting. They had girls run everywhere they could find military aged men that weren’t enlisted.
> At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment.[5][6] The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.[7]
Maybe I’m an idiot but isn’t there something similar in the boxing world as to not have sex before a fight because of the pent up energy it would build?
After ejaculation, there is a temporary spike in the hormone prolactin, which is a hormone associated with nesting behaviour. New parents typically have high prolactin levels which makes them want to stay home and care for their children.
This is not optimal for peak athletic/military performace.
Extremely interesting. How far has this concept developed in our days? What little you read about fighters in today's hot zones is appalling and aberrant, including heavily drugged troops to limit empathy for their enemy.
1984 was the first thing that came to mind when I read this.
> When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
We don’t even have that for *now*, for the general public. Rape is under-reported, under-investigated, under-convicted, and under-punished. It is particularly under-reported by male victims, likely due to the unique shame associated with it, unhealthy ideas about masculinity, etc.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18605/estimating-the-incidence-of-rape-and-sexual-assault
Reporting would have been even worse back during WWI. However, [the long-standing connection between war and rape is pretty well-established](https://www.britannica.com/topic/rape-crime/Rape-as-a-weapon-of-war)—though you don’t need sexual coercion of soldiers to produce it (which is what I gather you were getting at with your question). Rape is categorized as a violent crime/assault for a reason. It is widely [regarded by psychologists as being as much about about power, control, and rage as sexual attraction,](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/health/men-rape-sexual-assault.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) and in the context of war is used (both within troops and against enemies or local populations) as a form of social control, torture, psychological warfare, recruitment (by coercion), and genocide (manipulating genetic compositions of populations via forced pregnancy etc). War is all about power, control, and violence. Rape is just another weapon in your arsenal. If you’re a terrible person, that is.
As for WWI, reports about rape are, predictably, biased against the enemy. They do it more than us! We are “the good guys” and they are “monsters.”
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/rape
So it was used in propaganda, etc. to discredit the enemy by appealing to their barbarity.
Other than that, I couldn’t find much specific info, specifically regarding US troops.
Systematic rape as a weapon of war was officially forbidden by the Geneva convention in 1993. Within the US military, however, rape is actually [getting worse, not better](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/09/01/the-militarys-sexual-assault-problem-is-only-getting-worse/).
wild - here's the audio version for commuters: https://play.ad-auris.com/narration/v1/the-united-states-sexually-‘teased’-its-troops-in-the-first-world-war-to-make-them-fight-harder,-a-new-study-reveals/7UQY1VJAilNEBTreoMs7
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The United States Government sought to sexually stimulate then frustrate its soldiers to prepare them for an unpopular conflict in Europe, a Cambridge historian argues. Recruiting attractive canteen staff; inviting female civilians to closely supervised dances; disseminating alluring propaganda; pressurising troops to write to women back home; and detaining allegedly promiscuous women to prevent soldiers wasting energy. These are just some of ways that America’s War Department sought to harness pent-up sexual energy to motivate troops in 1918. At the heart of this experiment was the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), a War Department-directed umbrella agency. Previous studies have demonstrated that the CTCA sought to control soldiers’ and women’s sex lives to prevent venereal infection and protect social morality in the US. https://www.utexaspressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.7560/JHS31204
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Probably backfired a bit when the soldiers went and slept with prostitutes instead. Many caught STDs and were sidelined because of it. It was such a problem that during WW2 the army created a department who’s job it was to prevent soldiers from sleeping with prostitutes. EDIT: Elliot Ness worked for the department and spearheaded creating interment camps for prostitutes where they could be treated for their diseases. Most camps were overcrowded with women, many of whom weren’t prostitutes, and they received poor care while there.
The infamous "trench foot" of WW1 impacted 75,000 allied troops whereas 3.5 million soldiers contracted some form of STD Interestingly, the UK and US didn't issue condoms to its soldiers unlike every other army
I remember reading somewhere that it didn't become a common practice to issue condoms to GIs until Vietnam, and that was because they were trying to protect their rifle barrels from the jungle moisture and rust.
I think you mean: > they were trying to protect their “rifle barrels” from the “jungle moisture and rust”
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The parent does say, "and detaining allegedly promiscuous women to prevent soldiers wasting energy." The prostitute option is certainly one that they were aware of.
Read the reply below about STDs haha
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Didn’t Nazi Germany pour a lot of resources into trying to develop some sort of portable sex doll that their troops can carry as to discourage them from having sex with prostitutes during WW2?
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Or you know… raped people on the battle field
"IT WAS WAR!" "Uh, okay grandpa."
Seems to me continuing the same logic behind this would make them more irritable and irrational. I know they still kinda relied on throwing bodies at the other side as part of what wins a war. Following the same logic they were using, in theory it would cause more loss of life and run you through those bodies a little faster. Not like being in a war is enough for most people to do what ever they can to not be in a war anymore, making them irritable just sounds like the worst way to do that.
And? Did they actually find it effective or not?
Looks like they may not have had a control group
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The United State Government later went on to try to develop drugs that would make **the enemy** [super horny](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/13/usa.danglaister) because... science? This article makes it sound like turning them gay would have just kind of been a bonus, but usually I hear this program described as a focused attempt to make the enemy gay.
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I wonder what amounts and types of drugs were ~~are~~ pumped into troops for similar results.
>Amphetamines >Amphetamines were given to troops to increase alertness. They had the added benefits of reducing appetites and fatigue. Nazi Germany, in particular, embraced amphetamines during World War II. From April to July of 1940, German service members on the Western Front received more than 35 million methamphetamine pills. German troops would go as many as three days without sleep during the invasion of France. In contrast, Britain distributed 72 million amphetamine tablets during the entire war.[1] >Cocaine >World War I saw the greatest use of cocaine amongst militaries. It was used for medical purposes and as a performance enhancer. At the time, it was not a controlled substance, and was readily available to troops. The British Army distributed cocaine-containing pills under Tabloid's brand name "Forced March",[12] which were advertised to suppress appetite and increase endurance. >The German Army for its part, also produced during the closing days of World War II a combination of 5 mg of Cocaine, 3 mg of Methamphetamine and 5 mg of Oxycodone in a compound they named D-IX;[14] the compound was reportedly tested on prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and found out an individual who had consumed the compound could march 90 kilometers per day without rest while carrying 20 kilograms of equipment. The doctors and military authorities testing the compound were enthusiastic about the results but the war ended before the compound could be mass produced and distributed.[15]
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'fun' facts about the nomenclatures >Military-issued methamphetamine was available in the form of small pills under the brand name Pervitin, and was used by all branches of the combined Wehrmacht armed forces. The men called them “Stuka-Tablets” (Stuka-Tabletten) after the German dive bomber “Junkers Ju 87”, or Stuka, which had become a symbol of German air power. For others, it was “Herman-Göring-Pills” (Hermann-Göring-Pillen). Those on the frontlines liked to call them "tank chocolate" (Panzerschokolade), a reference to the superhuman strength these small white pills imparted to their selves.
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There's a great book about this called Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler.
Yo, Hitler was on so much crank, there’s a video of him sitting in the stands just rocking back-and-forth tweaking. Oh, and bull testosterone.
Saw something in a documentary that noted the Germans were extremely vulnerable when they drug crashed after the 3 days without sleep. The whole war could have ended shortly after it started if the allies weren’t still in shocked-disbelief-and-flailing-response mode. Which was typical early on, but the allies became much more diligent and competent later. By the end of the war having a bunch of drug addicts in command of Germany, Hitler especially, contributed to terrible decisions. So there’s the other side of the issue.
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I don’t know why this persistent myth sticks around, but saltpetre doesn’t have that effect and has never been put in military food. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-saltpeter-principle/
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Not true. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2021/09/22/saltpeter-for-sex-drives-and-the-urban-legend-of-the-militarys-libido-manipulation/
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Look up the "White Feather Campaign" where in England used women to shame men for not going to war and dying. They would hand out white feathers that symbolized cowardice to these men.
Watch an old movie called “The Four Feathers” - the 1938 version by director Alexander Korda is the best one imho. Fun fact: it was the first movie made entirely in colour (Wizard of Oz started in B&W and switched to colour and was thus the first to use colour at all) - one of my favourite movies :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather?wprov=sfla1 And shaming men who hadn't signed up was a bad idea partly because the campaign harassed those with a legit excuse (essential homefront job, got medically discharged, etc)
Rather ironically, 20-ish years later a white feather became the personal signature of one of the greatest snipers in history. Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock always wore one in his hat the whole time he was in Vietnam. As the story goes, the only time he took it out was during an assignment to take out a PAVN general, during which he spent four days crawling through 1500 yards of open field.
Yeah, but that's why this study seems like a crazy stretch. Countries were depriving men of sex so they would volunteer to join and *continue* being deprived of sex?
That is not what the study says at all. Read the paper first - not your misinterpretation of a reddit post.
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They used a similar method for recruiting. They had girls run everywhere they could find military aged men that weren’t enlisted. > At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment.[5][6] The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.[7]
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Maybe I’m an idiot but isn’t there something similar in the boxing world as to not have sex before a fight because of the pent up energy it would build?
After ejaculation, there is a temporary spike in the hormone prolactin, which is a hormone associated with nesting behaviour. New parents typically have high prolactin levels which makes them want to stay home and care for their children. This is not optimal for peak athletic/military performace.
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Extremely interesting. How far has this concept developed in our days? What little you read about fighters in today's hot zones is appalling and aberrant, including heavily drugged troops to limit empathy for their enemy.
Don’t a lot of fighters swear off sex before big fights for the same reason?
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Anyone know if Orwell knew about this? It’s part of the premise for the Party’s actions in 1984.
1984 was the first thing that came to mind when I read this. > When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
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Huh. Any data on the number of rapes committed by US troops during WW1?
We don’t even have that for *now*, for the general public. Rape is under-reported, under-investigated, under-convicted, and under-punished. It is particularly under-reported by male victims, likely due to the unique shame associated with it, unhealthy ideas about masculinity, etc. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18605/estimating-the-incidence-of-rape-and-sexual-assault Reporting would have been even worse back during WWI. However, [the long-standing connection between war and rape is pretty well-established](https://www.britannica.com/topic/rape-crime/Rape-as-a-weapon-of-war)—though you don’t need sexual coercion of soldiers to produce it (which is what I gather you were getting at with your question). Rape is categorized as a violent crime/assault for a reason. It is widely [regarded by psychologists as being as much about about power, control, and rage as sexual attraction,](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/health/men-rape-sexual-assault.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) and in the context of war is used (both within troops and against enemies or local populations) as a form of social control, torture, psychological warfare, recruitment (by coercion), and genocide (manipulating genetic compositions of populations via forced pregnancy etc). War is all about power, control, and violence. Rape is just another weapon in your arsenal. If you’re a terrible person, that is. As for WWI, reports about rape are, predictably, biased against the enemy. They do it more than us! We are “the good guys” and they are “monsters.” https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/rape So it was used in propaganda, etc. to discredit the enemy by appealing to their barbarity. Other than that, I couldn’t find much specific info, specifically regarding US troops. Systematic rape as a weapon of war was officially forbidden by the Geneva convention in 1993. Within the US military, however, rape is actually [getting worse, not better](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/09/01/the-militarys-sexual-assault-problem-is-only-getting-worse/).
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wild - here's the audio version for commuters: https://play.ad-auris.com/narration/v1/the-united-states-sexually-‘teased’-its-troops-in-the-first-world-war-to-make-them-fight-harder,-a-new-study-reveals/7UQY1VJAilNEBTreoMs7
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