What do you do if you're a woman in the Marines, and you make a sex video, and your fellow Marines see it?  Claim you're being sexually harassed, of course!

It seems that a number of female Marines are having sex with male Marines and filming it, and then, when they break up, the male Marines share the sex videos with their comrades.  This is said to have provoked a major crisis in the Marines.

Marine officials on Sunday said the branch was looking into a number of Marines, as well as current and former service members, who shared naked and compromising photos of their female colleagues on social media through a shared drive on a Facebook group called Marines United.

"It's Marine Corps wide," said Marine Pvt. Kally Wayne, 22, who joined in 2013 and was removed from the service three years later for disciplinary problems. In early 2016, her ex-boyfriend, a Marine, posted a sex tape they had made in 2013 to a Marines Facebook group, which quickly spread, eventually getting posted on Marines United, which has 30,000 members, where it appeared sporadically.

I guess you could said that her sex tape went viral.  I think they should change her rank from Pvt. to Non-Pvt.

"I went to the police to get them to take it down and they told me because I didn't live in North Carolina they couldn't do anything," Wayne said. "I went to his command and they said, 'Why don't you not make sex tapes?'"

Exactly.

Wayne said she knows at least 10 other women who have endured online sexual harassment.

How is it sexual harassment for other people to view your sex video?

There are more stories like this.  The New York Times has the story of a brave Marine who has to endure her comrades watching her striptease video.

"I wanted to make sure I could do anything male Marines could," she said. "I didn't want anyone to hold me to a lower standard."

Later, she was dating a Marine, and when he was stationed outside of Arizona, she sent him a short strip tease video.

The video was soon added to the cache of hundreds of photos and videos of active-duty Marines and veterans – filed with the subject's name, rank and place of duty – that is being circulated by Marines United and other groups. 

Herein lies the problem.  The problem is not male Marines watching striptease videos of female Marines.  The problem is women in the Marines.

Women and men can and do work together in the workplace.  But the armed forces are different.  Soldiers are stationed in close quarters 24 hours a day.  They are often cut off from their husbands and wives, who keep them happy in that special way.  In such a situation, you have the perfect recipe for sexual tension that can disrupt unit cohesion.

What happens when sergeants start dating privates and corporals start dating captains?  What happens when officers are perceived to be showing favoritism to subordinates they are having sex with, or subordinates are attempting to seduce their superior officers?

This is why having women in the military is problematic at best.  The reason these videos were circulated is because female Marines were dating male Marines in their own ranks.  It has enormous potential to disrupt unit cohesion.

The viewers of the videos are blameless.  The only ones to blame are the unhappy boyfriends who disseminated the videos and the female Marines who made them in the first place.  If the worst thing male Marines have done is to view nude videos made by their female comrades on a Facebook page, then I would say the problem of real sexual harassment in the military is close to zero.  The problem of unit cohesion, however, is very real.

But instead of having a discussion about the proper role of women in the military, the military is now on a hunt for homemade porn that got on the wrong Facebook page.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.