I found it interesting during Tuesday night’s lecture to learn about the way that the futurists glorified war, and more significantly, glorified war veterans.  The idea of wounds as superior and attractive and as an ultimate man were very interesting because of the way that they still ring true in modern day military culture.  In many places around the world, being in the military does make you the ultimate man.  One must be sound of mind and of body, and is doing something that everyone in his life is taught to be considered honorable.  However, much like the futurists did, this idea of the ultimate man gets projected upon their sexual partners.  The values of power and strength that come with being in the military also lend themselves to the entitlement of sex.  In the US, sexual assault rates in the military are incredibly high.  Many argue that this is because of the hypermasculinity associated with being a soldier or a veteran.  There is an idea of sexual conquest associated with being the “ultimate man” in American cultural values.  Learning about the way that futurists saw masculinity and sexual conquest, it appears that this idea is not new.  It is incredibly old, in fact.  The way that our culture portrays masculinity as conquest is prevalent in many different forms of media, and can be traced very far back in history.  It is no surprise that the futurists, who were World War I veterans, felt the need to conform to the ideal of the ultimate man that they had been brought up with.  The futurists created a space for themselves in which not only were war veterans considered to be the ultimate men because of the power and strength that come with the position, but a space where wounds stood symbolically for this achievement of masculinity, because in order to get a war wound, one must have first been in the war.  I would argue that this idea of war veterans creating a space where their outward wounds are representative of their achievements in masculinity still exists.  However, modern veterans are able to do this in a way that the futurists were not able to understand in their time: modern veterans are able to use masculinity and the symbolism of their outer wounds as a cover for their internal wounds: insecurity as a result of PTSD.  Modern veterans who experience PTSD are able to use their achievement of masculinity as a way to overcome this insecurity through sexual conquest.  Not all of this conquest is violent, but for many war veterans there is an increased importance of having a sexual partner to codify masculinity.  For both the futurist veterans of World War I and the modern day veterans of various wars, glorification of the achievement of ultimate masculinity serves as a personal shield to the other insecurities that come with having survived a war.