Pete Hegseth’s call for “male standards” in the military echoes a far older code—one built on domination, denial, and silence.

Image: Andrew Geddes in the late 1870s. From Louise Barnett, Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army’s Notorious Incest Trial (Hill and Wang, 2000)

In September 2025, Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, announced that he would impose the “highest male standards” for combat roles in the US military. Why Hegseth felt he needed to make this announcement is anyone’s guess. After all, the military has been following the highest male standards for centuries, at least where incest and sexual violence are concerned—as is shown in following story.

In 1879, U.S. Army Captain Andrew J. Geddes accused fellow officer Lieutenant Louis Orleman of committing incest. For this, Geddes—not Orleman—was put on trial. In the courts-martial transcript, where the specifications of Geddes’ offensive act were recorded, we find only “not fit to be specified.”

What, exactly, had Geddes done that was too unspeakable to record?

The explanation reaches far beyond the culture of the time. Until the late 1970s, there was virtually no public acknowledgment of incest; many assumed it did not exist, believing instead, as historian Peter Gay once wrote, “civilization” was a “moat” against incest. But in reality, this is simply not true. Fathers have been committing incest—and daughters have been resisting incestuous violence—since civilization’s earliest written records.

Religious and legal texts reveal this historical oppression. The Talmud, for example, permits sex between a man and a girl “three years and one day” old, deeming intercourse with someone younger not criminal but merely invalid. In Leviticus 18, a long list of sexual prohibitions forbids men’s sexual relations with a daughter-in-law, a neighbor’s wife, and even animals—but says nothing about a man’s own daughter.

Why this omission? In biblical times, daughters were considered property and, as such, were stripped of all human attributes. The absence of any mention of daughters exposes the implicit belief that their sexuality was inherently the father’s possession. A daughter-in-law belonged to the son; a neighbor’s wife belonged to the neighbor. Sexually violating these women meant violating another man’s rights. But the unmarried daughter belonged solely to her father, and his sexual access to her offended no one with the power to intervene. As Judith Herman, author of Father-Daughter Incest has noted, this absence from the law was no oversight—it was a reflection of the laws of ownership and patriarchal culture’s ceaseless crusade to subordinate and disempower girls and women—most brutally through sexual violence.

But just as women are now calling out Hegseth, daughters have always objected to “male standards” of sexual domination. A Sumerian tablet written a thousand years before the Hebrews wrote their Bible and the GreeksThe Iliad and Odyssey records the young Ninlil pushing back against her father’s talk of “intercourse.” I am “unwilling…My vagina is too little.”

So, what was Geddes’s real offense? He called out a taboo that for millennia has functioned less as a prohibition than as a smokescreen—a masculinist standard protecting a father’s sexual rights to his daughter(s) and punishing those who dare to expose it. Hegseth’s call for “the highest male standards” simply reinscribes that same maculinist code: the fantasy that male domination, however violent or self-serving, is the measure of virtue itself—enforced through the suppression of those who speak against it.