The commander of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island has come under fire for his comments about female recruits at boot camp.
"I think we're trying to find, recruiting-wise, those women who were handed lacrosse sticks and hockey sticks growing up and not Barbie dolls," Brig. Gen. Austin Renforth told Military.com for a June 6 story. "We don't always get that."
Renforth also said that female recruits need time at the beginning of boot camp to break societal stereotypes about women before they can be just as confident as the male recruits.
"You get one chance to make a first impression," Renforth told Military.com. "The women, it takes them a couple weeks to understand that they can do more than they think they can do. The men come in, and they're sort of presumed brave by how they were socially engineered growing up."
Two days later, Assistant Commandant Gen. Glenn Walters posted an official video distancing the Marine Corps from Renforth's "Barbie dolls" comments.
"When it comes to hockey, lacrosse or Barbie dolls, quite frankly, I could not care less what games a recruit played prior to making the commitment to be a United States Marine," Walters said in the brief video.
At the beginning of the video, Walters said he had been asked for his opinion about the Military.com article, but a Marine Corps spokesman declined to specify on Tuesday exactly who had asked Walters to weigh in.
Walters also praised Renforth's efforts to have male and female recruits train together "where it makes sense," adding that boot camp is now more gender-integrated than ever.
But the advocacy group Not In My Marine Corps, which was founded to combat sexual assault and harassment within the military, feels that Walters' comments fall short.
Renforth's words have weight and consequences because Marines, recruits and poolees listen carefully whenever senior leaders speak, said group co-founder Erin Kirk-Cuomo, who left the Marine Corps in 2010 as a sergeant.
"When Gen. Walters defends a commanding general who is actively reinforcing the idea that female recruits are mentally weak and a distraction to the males, that women can't compete; those words undo any progress made on combating a culture of sexism and misogyny," Kirk-Cuomo said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Marine Corps needs to be much more forceful in condemning misogyny if it wants to eliminate disrespect toward women with the ranks, she said.
