"Sen. McSally says she was raped in the Air Force. Here’s why it matters to military women like...

“You have only three choices. You’re either a dyke, a bitch, or a ho.”

I would learn later that the last option was considered the worst, and that this lecture was common for young women training to become Marines in either boot camp or Officer Candidates School.

I remember my lecture; in a quiet squad bay as our platoon of female candidates got ready to sleep for far too short a time, we listened to our sergeant instructor (a drill instructor for officers) tell us about the way Marine Corps culture would look at us as women if we ever graduated training. We would be a minority in a conservative place, and we needed to keep our reputations free of anything X-rated. It was fine to be thought of as unfriendly, but never as sexual or sexually available. The instructor training us was a woman with a long career under her belt; she thought she was doing us all a favor with her words.

Warnings aside, I would go on to active duty in the Marine Corps for six years, stationed on both coasts and in Iraq. I’d occasionally run into women Marines who’d been with me in that squad bay, and we’d remark with wry humor on the prescient words.

I didn’t have the foresight at the time to think about what this might mean if I were to experience sexual assault or harassment (I eventually did) and how reporting that to a superior might go. The idea was to conform and to avoid scandal at all costs. If association with sexual assault questions or accusations could be a career killer, what ambitious military woman would want to publicly accuse a colleague?