As US troops carry out high-stakes missions from Venezuela to the Middle East, the Pentagon has waged an unlikely new battle at home: the war on sex toys.
In its latest culture-war skirmish, the Daily Mail can reveal military officials recently blocked the delivery of sex toys to troops overseas, igniting ridicule and debate over how far the military should police private life.
First came prohibitions on piercings and nail polish for male military members. Then followed a ban on books with LGBTQ+ and anti-discrimination themes in military libraries.
Then Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sniped at overweight troops, those with religious beards and chaplains embracing what he deems as new-age beliefs.
Now the Department of War, as Hegseth has renamed the Defense Department, is taking aim at a new target – adult toys.
In a glaring display of sweating the small stuff, Hegseth’s Navy sent two testy letters to an adult emporium in Toronto slamming it for fulfilling an order to American personnel on a US base in Bahrain.
The items in question: a bullet vibrator and butt plug.
‘Pornographic materials or devices are not allowed into the Kingdom of Bahrain,’ warned one letter sent from the base with the subject line: ‘Adult item identified during X-ray mail screening,’ along with the returned pleasure goods.
Another letter categorized the items as ‘posing an immediate danger to life or limb or an immediate and substantial danger to property.’
The Pentagon has declined comment on the letters, sent over the summer, which the Navy framed as acts of cultural sensitivity meant to avoid offending the conservative Muslim majority in the Persian Gulf island kingdom.
But official customs lists published by Bahrain’s government don’t explicitly list sex toys as forbidden, although they do prohibit the sale and importation of ‘obscene or immoral materials’ that – by either Bahraini or Hegseth’s standards – could apply to personal pleasure devices.
A Navy instructional publication for trainees explicitly states that ‘possession of adult sex toys in the barracks is prohibited’.
The letters have triggered a host of playful social media posts, including sex-toy war stories about which dildos, penis pumps and anal beads current and former US service members have been using to pleasure themselves on overseas bases.
Troops deployed to Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf countries face strict social restrictions and limited interaction with locals.
One of our Pentagon sources notes that maintaining mental health among troops has been a challenge in the region, pointing most notoriously to the 2018 suicide of Vice Admiral Scott Stearney, the commander of the US Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet based on Bahrain.
Hellbound and Down 