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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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Women in the military

I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.

It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.

Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?

And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.

Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.

The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.

Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.

But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.

The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.

The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.

Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.

I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.

I think the problem is in part a lack of real-world pressure testing of our military. We haven’t had a global conflict that fully engages the might of the military since the Second World War, and no major on the ground engagement with a military on the level of our own since view an (hard to count Iraq War I when the military surrendered to CNN news crews).

This leads directly to people thinking of the military less as a War-Machine and more of a low key jobs program. Which then creates the problem that it’s increasingly difficult to say no to ideas that obviously reduce military capacity. Women, gays, transgender people are now fully integrated into the military without a second thought as to whether or not this would affect the war-fighting capability of the military. Putting women in those positions simply means they’re in danger without any military advantage to the country. Putting gays in does the same (we go to war with Iran, what would they do with a captured American gay soldier? They kill their own gay citizens).

The military isn’t the only place where this happens. But once you stop pressure testing any institution for its purpose, it tends to turn into a projection of whatever the laptop classes think will make them popular at dinner parties or get them promoted at work. Making into a diversity group does both, and they don’t need that group to be at top performance, so why not? Or you can use it to score points by following the latest trendy ideas in the field. This actually happens a lot in education. The old boring ideas of teaching kids mathematical concepts like addiction, subtraction, multiplication, and division— then making them practice it until they can do it right — has worked for centuries. Teaching phonics has created strong readers in any language with an alphabet for millennia. But you don’t get credit for that, instead you need a trendy new idea that makes you look with it and hip and forward thinking. Who cares if it means kids don’t learn to read and write? If the main criteria were the results— the kids can read on grade level, the military can win wars, the programmers can produce a working product on time, most of these issues solve themselves.

what would they do with a captured American gay soldier?

How would they know the soldier is gay? Are there pink triangles on their shoulder straps?

How would they know the soldier is gay?

Check his social media?

I wonder if this is reading too much into some pretty standard complaints about kid TV shows that existed since the 60s. Before Netflix parents had limited options even on devices, so kids shared a TV. Girl, guy, animal, older incompetent adult is a defensible permutation that prepubertal children can all enjoy equally. Shows that need emotional depth or interpersonal conflict are not parsable by kids in the same way being punched is, so action becomes default. The girlboss moments are irritating but its also a subset of kidbossing moments that dominate the show as a whole. Plenty of shows have the young disrespected kid of either gender show up the bossy adults or meaner kids. The boy ignoring his haughty crush and driving her mad because he's been lobotomized is an example of the anti-girlboss.

With regards to women in military, honestly its just hollywood optics. No one makes a drama about the paperwork grunts filing accounting claims in uniform. Intel briefs are not generated from spies downloading the USB inside the Chinese fortress mountain, its some dipshit shifting 20 million excel rows and trying to make Pivot table fit on a powerpoint. Men and women both are basically zombies fighting off the urge to OTH discharge early regardless of vocation.

We don't put many women in combat arms because combat arms already are fully staffed up (Ukraine is an exception because they are in a war and short notice conscription is pretty useless hence their manpower crisis). Women want to be in combat arms for that sweet combat pay, not because they're so intent on getting shot for their applebees discount. Since most combat isn't actually combat but rather patrol with random encounter chance and the fighting is 'shoot until you figure out where the attacker likely is before calling in an airstrike' the type of Vietnam era long endurance close range engagement is functionally over. Still need to boot on hill to hold, but there are plenty of backline vocations that need warm bodies there to begin with.

Women want to be in combat arms for that sweet combat pay,

I don't think this is it. The push for women in combat has come almost exclusively from female officers. There are to a rounding error zero women in the whole US trying to be enlisted infantry.

Officers want a combat billet for promotion purposes, and for the sweet sweet uniform garland. Bunch of awards you can only get in an infantry unit, and command of a combat unit is huge in officer promotions. There are essentially no women in the whole world who want to actually do the job of combat. Not for love, money or insanity. What there are is wanna-be girlbosses who need to stamp the Infantry page in their promotion journal.

Furthermore, women have an easy out of an actual deployment, because the Army doesn't deploy preggos. When the 11th deployed in '05, there was so many pregnancies in the support units that they had to transfer in eight hundred male soldiers to backfill all the women getting out of deployment. Only one female out of roughly a thousand deployed. And they weren't even combat arms!

Hear me now, believe me later, this is all bureaucratic manouver. There is no cadre of females who will actually fight in combat units. There are only two reasons women want to get into hardcore units, it's either promotion or pregnancy. They're looking for a star or a train.

Ah thanks for the clarification, I've heard women bitch that men get more pay for combat and also complain that women are underpaid so I conflated the two in my above. Forgot that women want the pay without having to work it. Not sure I'd blame this one on feminism as much as shitbirds being shitbirds.

I understand that pregnancy out is a problem in the USN. An ex-chief complained to me that half his female rates get knocked op before any sail longer than 6 months, married or not. Not sure about girls wanting to get a train run on them while at sea, or even having enough demand from men. I still believe the YMCA is the accurate depiction of USN proclivities.

Furthermore, women have an easy out of an actual deployment, because the Army doesn't deploy preggos. When the 11th deployed in '05, there was so many pregnancies in the support units that they had to transfer in eight hundred male soldiers to backfill all the women getting out of deployment. Only one female out of roughly a thousand deployed. And they weren't even combat arms!

Hear me now, believe me later, this is all bureaucratic manouver. There is no cadre of females who will actually fight in combat units. There are only two reasons women want to get into hardcore units, it's either promotion or pregnancy. They're looking for a star or a train.

This is the other side of the coin for the stupidity of training female soldiers. If they deploy and get killed, it's irrational for society. But if, on the other hand, when bugle sounds, female trainees all raise the W card to avoid getting deployed, training them turns out retroactively to have been a waste. It was just a handout for women, no more useful than fake email jobs at a tech company to make the gender ratio look good.

Although I must admit, your and @BahRamYou posts about military women getting pregnant to avoid service does give me a darkly amusing idea. With a universal draft and enough foreign wars, a hybrid woke/neocon managerial state could accidentally create breeders in the name of gender equality.

Universal draft and holding all recruits to male fitness standards would do it, no need for war.

Trust me, they'd get pregnant to get out of a ten-mile road march.

Fuck that in my company there was a guy who faked a pregnancy in basic. The others in his gang claimed he was possessed by a female spirit and would commit suicide (kill him)if she lost the baby, so he had to be on light duties till the baby came to term. Our top hat accepted it and instructed him to be locked in the infirmary till delivery, then he could resume training. As skaters go that was a particularly stupid one, but not the last by any means.

Well, considering modern combat a woman can pilot a suicide drone or a predator UAV just as well. They can also push pencils or work manufacturing jobs if its a total war.

her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime.

The average enlisted soldier serves less than 1.5 4-year terms. An 18 year old woman would be discharged at 22, 24 or on the outside 26 -- well before any appreciable drop in fertility. A 24 year old can easily have 4-6 kids, well over the current average (e.g. beyond the current most-binding-constraint).

Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly

Even in the worst of the wars, only 15% of young men died -- that would in France/Germany in WWI. So this is also off by a favor of 2.

I’m not familiar with any data on this but I seriously doubt the average woman who signs up for military service anywhere in the world normally does so at the age of 18.

A 24 year old can easily have 4-6 kids

Not unless she belongs to some dedicatedly natalist counterculture like the Amish or so - that is the current social reality in the West. And in that case she’s very unlikely to become a military volunteer. I also doubt that a woman doing military service is generally conducive to her ever entering a stable marriage in the first place.

Even in the worst of the wars, only 15% of young men died -- that would in France/Germany in WWI.

That would not be the worst of wars in terms of the loss of young men. The Paraguayan War of 1864-70, the Serbian army in WW1 and the Soviet army in WW2 all resulted in a casualty rate that was much higher than 15%, to name just three examples. Not that any of this disproves OP’s argument about the 30% figure in any sense but it needs to be pointed out anyway.

Yeah, I noticed this a while back: that even when fictional media has some supernatural excuse for women to be militarily powerful (often it doesn't), modern screenwriters, as part of the general delusion of modernity, tend to miss the deep unconscious discomfort associated with putting women in a military context as soldiers. There are basically only two contexts in which that happens in real life, and the one that represents the overwhelming majority of cases in the human condition is "a war is so existential that it is deemed worthwhile for the women to fight"; a war can get very, very bloody indeed before getting to that point. The other, distinctly modern case, in which the women are never actually expected to see combat and are functionally institutional decoration for gender egalitarians, is even more rarely what the screenwriters are going for.

In honor-based patriarchal cultures it was also generally expected of a woman belonging to the warrior class (by marriage) or the nobility to grab some bladed weapon and inevitably die a honorable death if the alternative is getting captured and gang-raped by a victorious enemy or mere criminals. (This doesn't apply to peasants, serfs and the servant class, as they are without honor and aren't expected to fight.) Thus it made sense for these women to have at least a minimal familiarity with weaponry. This is probably the reason for the common misconception that shieldmaidens or female samurai existed.

I just want to point out that Israel has been in multiple existential wars while conscripting women. They're also either the only, or one of a low single digit number of, developed countries with an above replacement fertility, depending on how you count borderline cased like Georgia and Kazakhstan(and yes, Israeli fertility would still be not only above replacement but higher than the conservative muslim societies surrounding it if we excluded the groups that don't serve in the military).

Now gender roles are good, but that isn't the reason.

Israel doesn't conscript women for frontline duties.

But very few conscripts in general are going to frontline combat in modern militaries anyways.

If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman —

You have here smuggled in a massive, unjustified assumption on which your overall construct needn't rest. Certainly a number of women find it fulfilling to have children - as, indeed, do many men - but it's hardly all of them. There is at the very least no reason, by your logic, why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve. And even among the majority who would find motherhood fulfilling, I would guess that there are significant numbers who could also find happiness in many other ways, i.e. motherhood is for them a possible path to self-actualization but not "necessary", as you claimed. I don't doubt that if a society tried to conscript all its young women to war, it would do a great disservice to a majority of them by depriving them of the chance to bear children. But you cannot flip this and conclude that anything which directs any woman away from child-rearing is doing her personal self-actualization a disservice.

This leaves "necessary for the health of society", of course; and I think that's what you actually have strong views about. Perfectly fair. But if the argument is "society needs a majority of women to tough it out and pop out babies, never mind what else they'd like to do; we need baby-makers just as we need farmers and beat cops and trash collectors, we can't wish it away, and unfortunately this is one hard manual job that only those citizens who were born with wombs can do", then let's not pretend that women's self-actualization enters into it; that's just lipstick on a pig, a just-so story to help the medicine go down.

If that's where you stand, better to bite the bullet that yes, motherhood might be a suboptimal way for many women to spend their lives, but society must nevertheless ask it of them as a sacrifice for the greater good of all. This needn't mean a dystopian portrayal of parenthood as some emotionless carnal duty - you can and should still talk about the ways it can be fulfilling and joyful - it just means cutting the bullshit about genders' supposed deep pseudo-spiritual purposes in life, and talking simple good sense about the practicalities of life.

To be sure, no society could survive if it told its citizens that they need only grow crops or collect trash bins if they feel it would add to their happiness, in the way that we tell women that they should only have kids if they really really want to. But contrariwise no society has ever tried to seriously gaslight its farmers and bin men into believing that their very bodies cry out for back-breaking work from dawn to dusk and they'll never be truly happy unless they work those specific jobs. They're just recognized as… hard jobs that need doing, and we pay people to incentivize them to perform those jobs, and while we're at it, sure, we tell the people to find what happiness they can in performing them capably and dutifully. But maybe at the end of the day you'd still rather write poetry all day or go on globe-trotting adventures, and society still has to shrug and say "well, ya can't. hopefully one day when we have better robots." I say the same applies to pregnancy.

There is at the very least no reason, by your logic, why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve.

I'm confused by the implication that being a lesbian or asexual means you don't want to be a mother, or can't find fulfilment by so doing. Many lesbians get pregnant via sperm donor.

Women have a very strong revealed preference for valuing motherhood above almost anything else, for the simple reason that women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again. I haven't seen much address of this point from your side of the debate, and there's lots of corroborating minor pieces of evidence- mothers overwhelmingly make large career sacrifices to prioritize motherhood, even when they could choose not to, for example.

You're also ignoring the reality of conscription specifically, which is that nobody wants to be there. It's entirely reasonable to say to the young women when the men are being drafted 'yeah, they don't want to be in the army, suck it up just like they have to'.

Women prefer to have more kids when they are mothers and single women do posit married life as an idealized outcome, but women are pretty shit at playing the dating game as young stupid adults because the typical dating pool there is other young stupid adults.

Frankly, the idea that motherhood is necessary for the continuation of the state is a modern concept that strikes me as a loose end looking for a connection. There has never been a state that died out as a result of female population collapse because a surplus of males just means the males invade another land and take those females for themselves, like what Arabs and Africans are doing to Europe. Europe will survive and even thrive (demographically though certainly not politically) in future because the women will be forced into a natalist patriarchy, or they will be replaced by homeland imports that do accede to the natalist patriarchy. At this point the local women may wish they were in fact conscripted so that they can fight back against their fate, but of course without help from any icky men who may themselves be Potentially Right Wing.

women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again

The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.

More seriously, my assumption here is that there's a kind of… not sunk cost fallacy, exactly, but "at this point"-ism to it. Once you've had one child, that's it, you are A Parent, you're going to have that dangling responsibility for the rest of your life come hell or high water. So you may as well make the most of it and keep on in that direction; trying to suddenly about-face to a high-flying career in rocket science would bring only the disappointment of never making it as big as if you'd jumped straight in without having a kid first, while with one kid under your belt, you're well on your way to becoming a very successful homemaker.

The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.

Why are you sceptical? Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.

Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.

Well, yes. But in the heroin case, "someone who's tried it once is likely to want to do more" doesn't prove that you are wickedly preventing people from self-actualizing by forbidding them from trying it the first time. In fact, quite the opposite - we recognize that getting hooked on a hard drug 'hijacks' people's preferences and gets in the way of their real wants and goals, so that allowing them to get exposed to the addictive substance is doing a disservice to their self-actualization! So, conceivably, pregnancy could be the same: a woman who tries it once might get 'hooked' and that's exactly why it's against a woman's better interests to have even a single child, lest she get addicted to the experience and let it ruin her life as she irrationally sinks all her time and resources into parenthood.

(I don't actually believe this, hence why it's an unserious gotcha.)

why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve.

Such women are exceptionally rare and not the best adjusted. It's really not worth the bother to make special accomodations for them, especially given that only something like 10% of young women can physically keep up with young men given enough additional training.

Multiply 0.02 by 0.1 and you get 0.002, 2 in a thousand. Is that worth the aggravation?

I'll duck some of the idiosyncrasies of the world of Avatar re: people with superpowers and how that might affect gender norms, and instead talk about what kind of story ATLA is. Namely, a fairly classic adventure fantasy in which virtually every character who matters is a warrior of some kind. You must be able to kick this much ass to participate in the plot. And that's the sticking point: "women can be warriors" isn't about literal military service (none of the main characters are soldiers anyway, and to my recollection the show takes a pretty negative view of militaries in general), it's about the idea that women are people whose agency matters and who aren't presumptively incompetent. The character who is most prominently on the receiving end of this messaging is Sokka, who begins the story as an overt sexist who discounts the ability of women to not only fight but to do basically anything non-domestic (an attitude that is still not uncommon).

"Well why don't they show it some other way" - it's not that kind of show. It's a children's show where people solve problems with the power of friendship and elemental superpowers. As I said, everyone who matters is a warrior, which is maybe not the greatest implicit message for children's television, but it shapes the kind of story-telling you get.

"The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did."

Aside from the fact that that's clearly not true and is just bravery posturing (and/or is an oblique appeal to tradition), 'sane and rational' does not equal correct or morally justifiable.

See also: Naruto, a story about the power of eugenics.

The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.

Maybe in the past that was the case. It doesn't seem to describe our current western society though. Most women aren't having children, and most soldiers don't die in a war. And either way the "community" doesn't care.

Ironically one of the subgroups which does still seem to get pregnant a lot is women in the military. So maybe putting more women in the military would actually increase our population?

and most soldiers don't die in a war.

There are no proper wars to speak atm of -it's all sedate counterinsurgencies or civil wars between people who, left to themselves would be living in mud huts and rustling cattle and struggle with zeroing rifles.

The Ukraine war is killing loads of people involved, and the casualties in a possible air/naval war with China are not worth thinking about as Chinese production of hard to intercept precision weapons is probably higher than that of all other countries combined.

Most women aren't having children

56.7% of women between the ages of 15 and 49 in the USA have had at least one child. 71.8% of women aged 30-34 have had a child, and 81.2% of woman aged 35-39 have had a child. Most women who are capable of having children (in the fertile window) are having children.

I think the point here is that most women aren't having children in present continuous, right now in a way that would stop them from doing much else.

In the very first episode of Avatar we see the end stage of male disposability: a 13-year old boy trying to train six year olds to be fighters against an industrial war machine. Sokka is brave: insanely brave. He's the butt of the joke for a lot of the series but that first impression sticks with you. An entire fire nation dreadnought shows up on his shores and he puts on his war paint and boomerang and goes to fight them. But there's not a fight. He's not even worth the effort of killing.

That is very, very bleak.

The Southern Water Tribe doesn't have any men left, and he's fighting against wizards with magic powers who have industrial technology. Sokka and Aang fight because literally anyone else that could is either in a gulag or genocided: meanwhile, the Fire Nation girlbosses fight because it's a flex and they can afford wasting resources like that.

The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.

On the other hand, women's participation in the North Vietnamese army is generally taken to be very high (I've seen figures like 30% bandied around, and certainly anecdotes check out), and since the war ended, Vietnam has done rather well. Its GDP per capita (Wikipedia figures) went about 60x from 80 USD to 4745 USD since 1975, while the US one went from ~12x from 7713 to 92883.

It's much easier for your GDP per capita to go up by a larger factor if you start at a small number, so the comparison to American GDP proves nothing.

The reality is that men are fairly expendable.

It is a reality that can't be accepted. If men and women are the same, then they must be the same everywhere. Physical strength is one thing, but an evolutionary difference in the value of a gender would break any pretense of gender similarity. Too often this is phrased a gender equality. No, girl-boss feminism doesn't aspire to be equal. They aspire to be the same.

I'm going on a slight tangent by rehashing a tired topic. But, women in military can't be decoupled from girl-boss feminism.

Girl-boss feminism states:

"1. The patriarchy exists."

This patriarchy gives men power over women. It allows men to self-actualize and gain power in their fields of interest. As a result, the woman is rendered powerless and forced into a contrasting lifestyle they may not want. To them, the military is the ultimate representation of this. Men 'get to' fight their favorite wars while powerless wives and mothers become the 'primary victims of war'.

If men are disposable, and if war is a horrible thing that they're forced into, then it bestows neither power nor self-actualization. It renders soldiers more powerless than their civilian wives, breaking the narrative of the patriarchy.

"2. Men and women are the same. And like men, the ideal woman is a woman's idea of a powerful man."

Instead of acknowledging that their framing of the patriarchy is wrong, girl-boss feminism treats this perceived male-power as the holy grail. Here, positions of power are objectively desirable. It's an inviolable axiom of the movement.

Women must be in the military, because military gives power, and power is good. If war weren't so desirable, then why would men 'choose' to do it ?

"3. Being a mother is not an identity"

Women can want kids, but it can't be their identity. A child is like a pet. A nice to have. Now, why would anyone spend 2 decades rearing a child if they're forbidden from making it their identity ? If I spent 20 years learning the guitar, it would be all I talk about. It would be my life's work. But no, a woman is not allowed to do that anymore. I've seen women get bullied for this. The bullying has a 'you lack ambition' or 'I can balance a job and kids' or 'your husband is a misogynist' framing. But it is effectively shaming the woman for wanting kids as her primary focus. I've seen Zillennial feminists push back against this. So, hopefully this one can be salvaged.

"4. 'Society' is how the powerful keep the powerless compliant. Rid yourself of its expectations. Rid yourself of society's burdens."

This idea is the bow on top that makes girl-boss feminism such a potent package. A young girl may ask: "If I do #1 -> #3 won't it destabilize society?". Well my strapping young lady, you're thinking about it all wrong. Because society itself is bad. People are not society. The peace, safety and stability of modern life are never at risk. Society can't take credit for any of it. Society is just all the bad things. So you rid yourself of the limitations of society, without worrying about destabilizing. You will get all of the freedom and it will have no negative implications. Because, the stability of modern society can be taken for granted.

You can see this in how European liberal women treat immigration. Integration of conservative arabs ? No big deal, piece of cake (NOT). Doubling the population of some rural area by dumping thousands of refugees ? Piece of cake (NOT). Remove maths from school curriculums ? Sure why not. Who needs it anyway ?

It is entitlement, plain and simple. In my experience, women undergo a change of opinion on this one the second they have kids. Once you have family, you interact with public services and society a lot more. You get to see how essential it is. This is when women swing to the right, violently. However, because women keep delaying when they have kids, relegating childcare to third parties or not having kids at all.... this reality punch keeps getting delayed by the year.

OP, your worries about society and male expend-ability, might as well be about Santa Claus. To girl-boss feminists, they aren't real. This belief is axiomatic in the way that for a religious person, God exists. Period.

Now ofc, I clearly believe that girl-boss feminists are hypocrites. Girl-boss feminism is a contrived belief system that requires continuous rejection of the self in pursuit of an identity you've been told you should want. The fragility of this house-of-cards is never revealed because the first world is sheltered. It stops the rubber from ever meeting the road.

Girl-boss feminists aren't unique in this. We are all hypocrites in our own ways. Whether that be residents of flooded Florida towns or white collar professionals who're convinced that their power point slides are made of gold. We're all hypocrites. But, girl-boss feminism is special in the sheer size of the cultural shadow it casts. No other non-religious ideology comes close.

The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did

Yeah.

Or, to phrase it a bit differently, girl-boss feminism states:

Men are inherently better than women [usually stated as "the patriarchy exists"]

Ok, so there's your foundational anxiety right there. If men are better than women, then women are inherently subordinate to men. How best to negotiate from a position of weakness?

Men are better than women because they are more powerful [usually stated as "men and women are the same; the ideal woman is a woman's idea of a powerful man."]

See above.

What you have to do for a man shouldn't define you [usually stated as "Being a mother is not an identity"]

Humans aren't meant for captivity or subordinacy, so yeah, I get it. Childbirth is just as much a curse as toil, and is arguably worse because this involves a man. This is the standard hippie "quit being a slaaaaaave, man", and most of the other stuff feminists say about this follows naturally (also, this + "men are better than women" = all sex is rape). Hazing for 'you lack ambition' (ironic) or 'I can balance a job and kids' or 'your husband is a misogynist' (by being better than women, he definitionally isn't entitled to anything) framing.

So, you should lie flat and demand everyone else take care of you [usually stated as "Rid yourself of society's burdens."]

Because The Man itself is bad. Women are never The Man. The peace, safety and stability of modern life are never at risk. The Man can't take credit for any of it. The Man is just all the bad things. So you rid yourself of the limitations of The Man, without worrying about destabilizing. You will get all of the freedom and it will have no negative implications. Because, the stability of The Man can be taken for granted.

No additional comment.

then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.

Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?

You are failing to understand the world and the source material. Bending is quite the force equalizer. We literally have the chosen one: 11 year old child with no muscle, beating fully grown shredded adults. Apparently strength, speed or endurance is less effective than technique, genius or secret martial arts knowledge(lightning bending, metal bending, blood bending, spirit bending). There are a ton of examples of this in the source material. This is a very chinese/asian mentality vs the western mentality. You see it in many of the old martial arts movies which avatar is undoubtably an homage to. If it was warrior on warrior alone, (Sokka x Suki) you have an understandable take but the vast majority of the girlboss fights are bender vs bender, or super ninja chi blocker(secret knowledge) v bender.

On a meta sense you are doing the same thing wokies do when they put a black elf or dwarf in Rings of Power and offer no explanation other than: "notice it and you are a bigot". You are ignoring the art, the source material, the world building, and are instead trying to force your own worldview on to the material to conform to what you think is right. Just because it's fantasy doesn't mean it doesn't have to be consistent BUT it is also fantasy so it doesn't need to be "real-world accurate". It's a story, let it be one.

I mostly agree regarding female benders, but in the episode OP is referring to, the warriors who humiliate Sokka are Suki and her Kyoshi warriors - all non-benders.

In recent years when it became a cancelable offense in any non-explicitly right-wing institution to say, "transwomen are not women", it got me wondering when did majority elite opinion first require believing obviously insane things. There has always been crazy beliefs, but many of those crazy beliefs are at least plausible if you don't have firsthand experience and are just reading about it in the books. For instance, I believe in HBD, not blank slatism with regards to race, but unless you spend a lot of time interacting with a cross-section of each race, it's at least plausible to believe that it's just a matter of education or not getting a proper chance. But when did majority elite opinion become crazy in a way that required people to defy what they saw with their own eyes? My answer is allowing women in combat. Sex differences in size, strength, demeanor, interests, are just so great, the importance of women to childbearing is so obvious, that believing women have a right to be in combat is both crazy and crazy in a way that defies obvious common sense, defies what people see with their own eyes. A few years ago I happened to be watching the Ruth Bader Ginsberg documentary and they were praising her for the famous Citadel case where the Supreme Court acquiesced to an appeals court grant a constitutional right to a woman to attend a state funded military academy. RBG is praised for her brains, but to me, that signifies when elite opinion had totally gone off the rails.

Do they actually believe it? If their kid was in a burning building would they want a female or male firefighter to rescue their kid? Would they be equally comfortable with a transgender person in their daughter's gym changing room as they would be with a woman? Are the refugees welcome in their neighbourhood or in their kids schools? How many of these elites would want to to walk through harlem on a Sunday night after the police was de-funded?

These people want people to become generic interchangeable worker/consumers. Some narratives push the world in that direction, they believe in it to the same extent that Bush believed Iraq had nukes.

Are the refugees welcome in their neighbourhood or in their kids schools?

Yes.

Elites weren’t captured by these ideas, they were the ones actively promulgating them for the longest time. The Russians understood this phenomenon for a long time:

“The fish rots from the head.”

I think we're so many decades down from moral education that people believe at least some of it. Which seems to function as being forced to profess belief in all of it because you cannot deny bits and pieces of the blank slateism without being at risk of destruction.

People don't want female firefighters or Marines, but the inability to be honest without threatening the apple cart makes it impossible to check people who exploit the legal system to push us just one step further (unless something truly absurd happens like a Lia Thomas situation that cannot be ignored - but even in that case people are likely benefitting from Title IX being explicitly about sex so these attempted redefinitions can run into a hostile court).

Groups are actively leveraging this. It's very common with the trans stuff. There's constant claims that black women will suffer from going back to sexed bathrooms (yes, the new left wing take is that black women are so manly banning men will keep them out). Similarly, a common line of attack is that you're an essentialist and being essentialist is bad because what next? Race essentialism? If sex is real, why wouldn't someone argue race is real?

If they never believed in any of this none of this would have force. That poor professor who got fired for being frustrated at how badly her black students are doing wouldn't have been frustrated or have any cognitive dissonance at all.. You think Amy Wax is losing sleep over it?

That's why it's so difficult to dislodge this gender ideology stuff. Everyone is trapped in the same lie. No one can stand outside of it in the simplest, most expedient manner ("men are men and women are women and, frankly, the government shouldn't be involved") robs them of their own tools and stories.

I think in context, the party line you should reference is "There is no war in Ba Sing Se."

I've only seen a few episodes of Avatar and it's been a long time, but if I recall, being a "warrior" in the world of Avatar is more like being a DnD Adventurer or a Knight of the Round Table than it is like being an actual soldier in a real-world war. Warriors rarely die, when they do they die heroic and meaningful deaths, everyone's fighting for a meaningful cause, etc. In a world like that, where war is fun, it feels unfair to exclude girls from the fun so they are obliged to include them. Even Tolkien had a few badass girlboss warriors in LoTR. In the real world, and in more realistic or gimdark fictional settings, it makes more sense to exclude women from combat.

I'd say the crazy and hot (maybe implicitly sexually aggressive) warrior girl who also has male-coded interests (weapons, martial arts etc.) is a fairly typical male fantasy and is the main reason for the inclusion of such characters in Avatar, for example. I remember binge-watching the series a couple of years ago and while there are only a few aspects I can recall, not once do I remember getting any impression that it carries a (radical) feminist message. But maybe I'm just dull.

No, I don't think you're dull. Pretty girls who do sick martial arts moves and kick ass are fun, one doesn't need to give it some kind of culture war explanation to make sense of it.

My point is that there may have been a palpable feminist message in the series for all I know but I surely don't remember it. My memory is not the best though. To the extent that girlboss characters are present, I don't recall them being portrayed positively.

I don't believe that Tolkien generally has female characters campaigning with men. My impression is that outside of a few extreme outliers such as Galadriel, women in Tolkien's works are mainly apt to fight only when left undefended, such as when their men are away at war, or perhaps in a situation where defeat means annihilation of their people anyway.

Definitely don't get the impression that Tolkien's works are full of girlboss fighters who run around being warriors most of the time. Rather, like reality, they contain a few outlier women who are somewhat capable of standing their ground in desperate moments, but would really prefer not to unless absolutely necessary.

It helps to remember that the movies changed this up a bit; a lot of Arwen's badassery in the movie was actually Glorfindel in the books.

Luthien's an odd case to be sure, and I've never been quite sure what to make of her as a character. In any case she's definitely an extreme outlier.

Luthien's an odd case to be sure, and I've never been quite sure what to make of her as a character. In any case she's definitely an extreme outlier.

Luthien is half god, and the only battle power she has is that she is astoundingly beautiful and has an astoundingly beautiful singing voice (song being a source of godly power in the universe, as it was created by song), and her military feats all involve her basically singing really hard.

Eowyn is the character on point here.

With Eowyn, entering the battlefield isn't really celebrated or glamorized by Tolkien. It's sad. It's an expression of Eowyn's hopelessness. She thinks her options are to die fighting or to die cowering, and so she picks to die fighting. After the battle, she has to turn away from this kind of thinking and instead garden for the future.

Given that Eowyn is the female character given the most "screen time" in the entire trilogy, inherently her role is glamorized and elevated over that of the other women in the series. Galadriel and Arwyn are distinctly side characters (in the book rather than the film, where Arwen got a lot more girlboss prominence and we see more of Galadriel), Eowyn is only a step below the fellowship in character importance to the story.

I'm not sure that's true.

What do you fear, lady?' he [Aragorn] asked. 'A cage,' she [Eowyn] said. 'To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire

Seems like she was interested in the glory of battle, not fighting because she was forced to by circumstance.

I always thought Eowyn was Tolkein's weakest character. Iron age aristocrat women didn't sit around demanding the right to kill and die like their menfolk. And the fact that she was only able to kill the Witch-king through a linguistic loophole is particularly galling.

I always thought Eowyn was Tolkein's weakest character. Iron age aristocrat women didn't sit around demanding the right to kill and die like their menfolk.

Do we really know that? I mean, undoubtedly very few did. But Eowyn is an exceptional character. I'd be willing to bet that a tiny percentage of women throughout history did indeed wish they could go out and fight and do glorious deeds. Probably a very tiny percentage - but it's not so silly to make one such woman a character in a fantasy novel.

It's funny, Tolkien gets a lot of flack from leftists for being "too white" and his problematic depictions of brown people (the usual accusation being that orcs are meant to represent POC), and also for being "too male" (not enough Strong Female Characters).

Yet when you point out that in fact he did have a handful of Strong Female Characters, and that he even admitted that one shouldn't assume that orcs are all born evil - rightists will scoff and say it's totally unrealistic to have a woman who ever wants to take up arms, or orcs who aren't mindless spear-fodder.

She didn't, or at least she only killed the witchking in the same sense that aragorn threw down the black gate or Frodo threw the ring into orodruin.

And the fact that she was only able to kill the Witch-king through a linguistic loophole is particularly galling.

English majors gonna English major; how could Tolkein resist the Macbeth callout?

I always thought Elaine was done very well as a strong heroine. Still makes me laugh when I remember playing this as a kid.

She really does fit the girlboss trope (except for being somehow, inexplicably attracted to Threepwood), but it's a series full of exaggerated characters that lampoon pirate tropes, so I think it works well. Unfortunately I think if that series had been released today, I might have considered Elaine more cringy and woke. It's a good demonstration of just how oversensitive I've become, due to the complete saturation of modern media with this message. I wish I could go back to just enjoying stories without waiting for the woke shoe to drop every time a woman or minority shows up.

Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?

No. I’ve essentially thought the same thing forever.

I think it was Mike Huckabee who said when he was on the debate stage years ago, “… the military isn’t a social experiment. The military’s job is to kill people and break things…”

When you’re a society as affluent as the US is, you can afford to have your head deep in your own ass and believe all kinds of absurd nonsense like this when you have no real problems to deal with. People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.

I used to sometimes teeter around a bit in how I should view this. On the one hand they should be kept out of combat roles. On the other hand, if you’re stupid enough to sign up for the front lines, natural selection will fix the problem for you by eliminating people who think this way and it’ll strengthen future generations with less of those people anyway. So long-term it’s a win/win. Nature will beat you over the head with the correct answer whether you like it or not.

Militarily women have no business being a front line soldier. That’s a suicidal death sentence.

People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.

Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society. There's a happy medium between following the examples of western progressivism and those of societies where people live in caves and use goats as a medium of exchange.

...and use goats as a medium of exchange.

On the other hand, goats have actual uses beyond 'Alice will give me useful stuff in exchange for this because Bob will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because Carol will give him useful stuff in exchange for it because Dave will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because....'; they'll clear out overgrown vegetation, fuel themselves in doing so, and are delicious!

(I still don't get how people can be like 'USD is only valuable because people think it is, but gold has real value.'; they both derive their value from that same endless loop.)

Perhaps the solution is dollars backed by a goat standard?

But somebody's going to have to clean up a lot of poop in Fort Knox.

On the other hand, goats have actual uses beyond 'Alice will give me useful stuff in exchange for this because Bob will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because Carol will give him useful stuff in exchange for it because Dave will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because....'; they'll clear out overgrown vegetation, fuel themselves in doing so, and are delicious!

The drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Goats are not fungible (no two goats are exactly alike), goats are not durable (they die after a decade or two), goats are cumbersome to move and transfer, etc. Money is simply a tool to make exchange easy; it is the goods and services of an economy that are valuable.

(I still don't get how people can be like 'USD is only valuable because people think it is, but gold has real value.'; they both derive their value from that same endless loop.)

Apart from being a Schelling point (gold has been used around the world for thousands of years while the fiat dollar has only been around since 1971, 54 years ago) The big difference is that you can't fuck with the supply of gold the way you can with USD. Gold exists in limited quantities and more gold can only be mined from the Earth with great effort (equivalent to crypto's proof of work).

To some people this is gold's great advantage, the only way to enforce a modicum of discipline on governments, and all economies since we departed from the gold standard are a house of cards. To other people, this is gold's great weakness, and you cannot have a modern economy without fiat currency. I don't have the economic chops to have a firm opinion one way or the other. But I do recommend Extra History's excellent "History of Paper Money" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6).

Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society

Context: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b/

People in third world countries don’t have time for [gender equality], so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.

Do those people believe that men and women are "spiritually and morally equal before God in dignity and respect"? (Quote from the pre-edit version of the above comment)

Practitioners of the faith obviously do.

(Edit was due to my remark not being relevant to the OP’s comment.)

We all have complimentary roles to play for one another.

I really think the barrier to people accepting this (obviously correct) perspective is that while there are many, many, many important things that men can generally do better than women, there's almost nothing that women can do better than men except that it has to do with bearing and raising children. In which case they do shine!

But people notice this and fundamentally flinch away from the idea, because our entire generation has been raised to hate it and find it low-status.

I would dispute this; I would actually go for this qualifier:

There's almost nothing that women can do better than men that society values. If society valued these things, I don't think the issues between the genders would be anywhere near as clownish as it is today.

The other thing is that on a graph, men are the extreme outliers at both ends of the graph; in a world that tries to reduce everything to binary ones and zeroes, you'd end up self-selecting the extreme outliers at either ends of the scale.

There's almost nothing that women can do better than men that society values. If society valued these things, I don't think the issues between the genders would be anywhere near as clownish as it is today.

That was G. K. Chesterton's issue with feminism.

But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.

-- What's Wrong with the World (1910)

Aren't even low IQ women better at reading faces and emotions than high IQ men?

I guess that feels nebulous compared to Science^(tm) and hand-eye coordination but it matters a fuckton in the real world.

There are also obviously other things (e.g. leveraging sexuality) but this doesn't play well with old or new moral codes and it has a shelf life

Also, it's women who build and maintain the entire social world, which is also sort of important.

If I was a woman I would also object to the tone of this statement too. I recognize what you’re trying to say and still would dispute a lot of it, but it lends support to a number of prejudicial ideas that do, in fact demean women.

If you’re a woman for instance who violates the “nice” and “nurturant” stereotype, you can often find yourself being penalized in hiring and evaluations. In a man’s world, that’s part of who we are. A woman does it and she’s a bitch. In my own experience of 1 personally, the best bosses I’ve ever had have been women. I’ve had good and bad of both, but the best female boss I had vastly outstripped the best male boss I had. The worst boss I ever had was a 40+ year old spinster who acted like a Stalinist and was an idiot.

Who is more prudent? Who is more happy-go-lucky? Who is more practical? Who is more imaginative? Who are better educators? Men or women? I really don’t know. And there’s a thousand questions you could subject this analysis to. The one categorical area men unambiguously tower over women in is raw physical strength and force. The average man could wreck the shit out of the average woman in a physical fight. Okay, fine. One can win that argument.

I think acknowledging sex differences can be harmful at times, insofar as it can play into the hands of others who want to serve some bad ideas. I think the harm of ignoring sex differences is far worse. Biologically men and women are different enough that you don’t have to agonizingly compare individuals for every trait, you can aggregate experiences.

I’m a pretty far right leaning guy but there is a basic point to be made that women do face significant social deprivation in traditional societies. And that downward pressure can in turn suppress inborn personality traits. And if you always have to modify your expressions to meet the tendencies of your culture’s social norms, it’s going to warp how you view the other gender. Yes, the same thing can also be said about men. But one interesting feature about egalitarian societies is that they’re simpler in one respect. Both sexes are freer to do what comes naturally. And that’s for better and worse.

If we flinch away from the idea, it is because we realize that such norms are incompatible with dignity of womanhood. If woman's sole appropriate domain is the bearing and raising of children, then Schopenhauer and Thales are substantially correct:

Because women in truth exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends here, they live more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual. This gives to their whole being and character a certain frivolousness, and altogether a certain tendency which is fundamentally different from that of man; and this it is which develops that discord in married life which is so prevalent and almost the normal state.

[...]

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women

There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune: that I was born, first, human and not animal; second, man and not woman; and third, Greek and not barbarian.

- Thales

If we flinch away from the idea, it is because we realize that such norms are incompatible with dignity of womanhood.

Quite the opposite, insisting that we're equal is what is incompatible with the dignity of womanhood. If we're the same, but women fail to reach the same heights as men, that has far harsher implications than if we're different, and have different strengths. This is why we end up with "systemic sexism" and other epicycles to keep the theory alive, and to drive men and women even more at each other's throats (which really is the whole point of the equality meme to begin with).

Thales

Oh no, not a barely-out-of-the-bronze-age pagan!

If womanhood is synonymous with femaleness (that is, performing the biological role of the female sex), then woman has no more claim to dignity (that is, the natural sense which leads us to value man over animal and noble over savage) than any other mammal.

Oh no, not a barely-out-of-the-bronze-age pagan!

If you would prefer an abrahamic source:

[…] who has created me a human and not beast, a man and not a woman, an Israelite and not a gentile, circumcised and not uncircumcised, free and not slave.”

- fragment of a prayer, Cairo Geniza

If womanhood is synonymous with femaleness (that is, performing the biological role of the female sex), then woman has no more claim to dignity (that is, the natural sense which leads us to value man over animal and noble over savage) than any other mammal.

Sure it does. Any value that humanity has above other animals is completely dependent on motherhood, and is therefore subordinate to it.

Also, you haven't addressed anything I said in the previous comment.

If you would prefer an abrahamic source:

I think you'll need to be a bit more specific than that to move me.

Any value that humanity has above other animals is completely dependent on motherhood, and is therefore subordinate to it.

This, of course, is why garbage men and truck drivers are among the most admired and desirable professions.

If we're the same, but women fail to reach the same heights as men, that has far harsher implications than if we're different, and have different strengths.

The point is that, from a bioessentialist framework, the female role requires little to no particular strength of character. Pregnancy is a completely automatic process, caring for babies may be arduous but is not particularly skilled work, and if you believe the hereditarians, the actual raising of children has little effect on how they turn out. Additionally, none of the above tasks is particularly suited to cooperative effort, stunting the potential for camaraderie; as the saying goes, nine women can't make a baby in one month. Thus, if woman's sole or primary duty is to fulfill the female biological role, she will be naturally baser and ignobler than the men she pairs with, who must cultivate virtue in themselves to become capable protectors and providers.

The question, then, is how much impact has this lack of incentive for virtue had on the evolutionary development (or lack thereof) of the female mind. While I personally believe that ingrained differences in potential for virtue between men and women are relatively minimal, what differences exist are surely exaggerated by restrictive norms surrounding women's options for societal contribution.

Several wartime militaries have included large percentages of females. The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII, but the Chinese, Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies have fielded large percentages of female soldiers. In no case have any of these armies treated women as "fully equal" to men in combat, but neither does the US military.

I suspect that a look at the population graphs for these countries would support your thesis, but it seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.

Large percentage? Extreme doubt, source please. What percentage of the soldiers in the Soviet military were women? Not cooks and nurses, soldiers. And of those, what percent of soldiers who actually saw combat were women?

Israelis

As I understand it, most women are given homeguard duties, it is very rare that they actually go out and fight. Of all the Israelies who have fired a weapon in combat in the last 20 years, what percent have been women?

Out of ~400k trained sharpshooters there were 2,500 female ones who mostly did quite well. 500 survived the war. I remember remarks how women are good at being sneaky and patient from period memoirs.

There were about 20-30 female armor crewmen, mostly achieved that through being insanely persistent. E.g. donates enough money for an entire tank, writes letter to Stalin to be allowed to fight. Or a tractor driver (tractors were often tracked then) whose husband was drafted and whose children died convinced an army doctor to pass her off as male in paperwork, then went on to have some success as a tank driver

About 400 women served as combat pilots.

About 40% of medics and radio operators were women, and later in the war (43 onwards) the % of women involved in frontline air defense was very high, often up to 50%.

I recall reading that 12% of Soviet military pilots were women at the start of the war, actually.

Of all the Israelies who have fired a weapon in combat in the last 20 years, what percent have been women?

A number of the hostages in Gaza were female IDF soldiers, but I have no clue how many of those actually fired a weapon.

Back in March I read many of the accounts in the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report which attempted to document all recorded attacks of the day. Based on that, a common role for female IDF women kidnapped or killed on October 7th were in listening or surveillance outposts along the border. There were at least a couple instances of women (and men, too) holing up in a command post or signals room while others put up resistance waiting for relief. I got the vibe that the border gals weren't really expected to engage in combat if it could be avoided. Of those that had a chance to react they were placed in last stand territory. They were not, generally, put out to defend the wire.

It seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.

Well

The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII

Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.

Chinese in (or 'around') WWII

Their society experienced complete collapse major problems (EDIT: To be fair) a generation later.

Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies

They haven't fought a high fatality war. I'll admit I haven't looked into the correlation between peacetime women military service and their fertility, but do you seriously doubt it will be negative?

I haven't crunched the numbers here, so calling me lazy might be fair.

Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.

You can also mention the massive purge of the military before the war and the subsequent mess they were in when it started.

Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.

This is not the point you think it is. The Soviet generation that fought WWII ended up with a 5:3 sex ratio in favor of women.

Russia's gender ratio is still warped to such an extent that is has become a meme of russian women going on holidays in neighboring countries to hunt for men.

So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.

Recent field data from Ukraine would imply otherwise. Although Eastern Europe generally is quite conservative in social attitudes so perhaps it would be different elsewhere. I suspect that in first world countries getting drafted and sent to the front would somehow be declared to be very patriarchal and un-feminist.

Obviously the West saw what was happening during the Ukraine War and the result was to a) pass over it in silence or b) complain that transwomen were not allowed to defect from their sex and leave

Ah yes, but they also praised the Stunning and Brave trans-men that immediately stopped taking testosterone, threw on a dress, and jumped the border into Poland. So it all works out.

Its perhaps a huge irony that when we identify biological women of particularly notable and valuable ability, especially in arenas that are traditionally male-dominated, the single best thing we could do is pay them tons of money to produce and raise several children with a man of particular notable ability, in the expectation that the children are more likely to have the same traits that produce that notable ability and can themselves sire more kids with those abilities.

The value of her talents now is almost intrinsically less than the value of her ability to produce more individuals with those talents going forward, all the more so because of the narrow window in which she is able to produce them. Its like Nature's most brutal tradeoff, especially since it echoes through the generations either way.

Our options are to exhaust the capabilities of one (1) exceptional individual during their life, but lose their abilities after they die... or have them produce, hopefully, 2-3 at least somewhat exceptional individuals who can, on net, produce 2-3x more value during their lives than exhausting the exceptional individual would have during theirs.

Wow, we've got a woman of genius intellect, showing prodigy-level talent in science and math, as well as the drive to actually compete in those fields... and if she does compete as hard as she can, we're basically guaranteed that her genes won't pass on and thus whatever genetic advantages she may have possessed will be expressed less in future generations.

Maybe its generally better for everyone if she channels that competitive drive into raising the most talented children possible and nurturing them to maximum potential.

A woman with a towering stature and musculature that actually holds her own in physical feats against men in her weight class? Uhhh yeah make sure she marries a reasonably intelligent corn-fed U.S. Marine so her kids can be the next generation of super-soldiers.

A woman with an exceptionally cool head, innate motivational ability, and a keen business sense? Well we could plug her in as a CEO but why not guarantee that all of her offspring will be admitted to Wharton School of Business on a full-ride scholarship and have her raise a generation of top-tier MBAs? (mostly tongue-in-cheek, that's probably a waste too)

And no, I'm not saying that women with good genetics should be diverted into state-run eugenics programs. I'm just remarking that any sane economic calculus would support a large ratio of these women not being pushed into careers (ESPECIALLY combat where they might die before reproducing) and instead into stable, supportive marriages where her talents are focused on raising a few kids that will carry her genetic legacy and are more likely to produce great achievements going forward.

And she should be considered extremely high status for her contributions, perhaps even moreso than if she'd gone on to get a PhD in Rodent Biology and made a minor breakthrough towards curing pancreatic cancer in rats with her time.

Yes, an incidental effect on this will be even fewer women represented in the upper echelons of scientific achievement. Another incidental effect is that these women are more likely to sire a few multimillionaires who will hold her in high regard and ensure her comfort and well-being for the rest of her life.

At least, if we fix the cultural norms around marriage/family formation along with this, which I would agree is an important prerequisite.

Because the only other approach that makes sense from a civilizational point of view is to let high-achieving males with notable ability have kids with a comparatively large chunk of the women, and yet not have him divert too much attention to child-rearing so he can still crank out his achievements in with his spare time. I know this general sort of thing has been proposed before.

That's also ensuring that the genes that propagate those talents are more heavily represented in the next generation, but lessens reliance on the exceptional women to assist with the propagation.

Okay, I did hide one assumption in there. This argument also supports just having high-achieving women donate their eggs and then find surrogate mothers to bear and raise their kids so that the high-achiever can go on to do their thing whilst their offspring are raised (hopefully competently) by someone who is not as much of an outlier.

My assumption is that a biological mother and father are inherently better-suited to raise kids that share their genes than anyone else, and thus keeping a stable nuclear family environment is better for them overall. If you don't share that assumption, then multiple alternatives present themselves.

I think it adds a large complexity penalty, however, if we need to create and maintain the whole "donate eggs, find surrogate, ensure they raise the child well" system rather than just using a pretty tried-and-true social structure to achieve the preferred outcome.

And I am very open to "negative second-order effects" arguments. I just point out that we're currently living through the second-order effects of giving women nearly unfettered reproductive choice and we can see and predict what that leads to.

It's worth mentioning that it is, in fact, possible for a woman to have above-replacement level fertility and a big significant career. If a woman marries at 20 and has four children, all of her kids will be in school by the time she is 30. The President of the European Commission has seven children, to give a real life example.

Early marriage is the secret sauce that allows us to put our best women to work and to pass on their genes.

The real problem is the extended adolescence of the modern elite.

How does one start a high ability career at age 30 after spending one's 20s having babies instead of going to school or building skills? This seems pretty impractical and unlikely, though I do not doubt there are various individual cases of women bootstrapping themselves into a high-achieving technical career after close to a decade of childrearing.

Presuming that compensation follows ability, shouldn't we just expect high ability people to be able to afford nannies and so forth? Why wouldn't we look at policy such as expanded EITC for kids that would make it more affordable for careerwomen to have bigger families?

How does one start a high ability career at age 30 after spending one's 20s having babies instead of going to school or building skills?

College degrees are mostly signalling, but even if you assume that they are a literal requirement for a professional career, they only take 3-4 years, putting our hypothetical woman at 21-22 years old.

At which point she can either alternate years between working and having kids, as is typical in the UK (women can take up to a year of maternity leave and still return to their old job). This is in no way incompatible with later career advancement. Or she can take 4-8 years and give up work entirely, before returning to the workforce in the same position as a new graduate. She'll be a few years behind her childless peers, but crucially she won't then need to interrupt her career in her 30s to have children. She'll have done the hard part while she's young and full of energy. Given that the average woman born today probably won't retire until she is 70, losing 5-10% of her working years to maternity really isn't a big deal.

And don't think I'm just speculating here. I'm literally describing a couple that I know in their mid-20s. Two young professionals who will go on to earn high salaries, and who will probably have four children (number two is due next year).

I have a female coworker who got married at 19, has 3 kids, and I'd estimate her career is approximately 2 years behind where it would be at her current age if she had not had any kids and just went nose to grindstone from 17-current. Most of those 2 years is time she actually took off postpartum. Any other woman in the company would probably have to take off MORE time to have those same 3 children from 30-40 (and often times spend lots of money to achieve conception) as compared to her doing it 19-27.

But, people really overestimate how hard college is. You can easily get a high GPA with pregnant with one and breastfeeding another. What you are actually losing by taking that path is 4 years of alcohol soaked hookups which you (as a female) are statistically likely to regret.

People do start high value careers at 32 years old. Every elite law school has a few people in their 30s in every class. It's rare, but it doesn't have to be.

Presuming that compensation follows ability, shouldn't we just expect high ability people to be able to afford nannies and so forth?

No, taxes and the general cost of employing someone, and cost disease, have made that impractical for anyone who isn't a C-level executive.

Why wouldn't we look at policy such as expanded EITC for kids that would make it more affordable for careerwomen to have bigger families?

Because policies of that sort have been used throughout the Western world for decades, and TFR has done nothing but drop. It just doesn't work.

Not going to disagree.

The 'dirty' secret is that a woman can actually "have it all," bear and raise some kids, enjoy significant amounts of leisure time, and end up with a rewarding, even high-status career if she marries well early on. A guy who can support her while she's at home raising kids, and can give her career a boost when needed, and take her on nice vacations once they're financially established solves this equation entirely.

The extended adolescence thing seems like a particularly nasty trick on women since front-loading their 'fun and games' time is the opposite of their ideal strategy. Do all the leisure stuff up front, then try to get a career going, and ONLY THEN give consideration to marriage and kids? The failure modes for this are numerous.

Of course, the risks of early marriage are significant, if they pick the wrong guy things can blow up and backfire. So its easy to get them too scared to commit to a guy unless they believe they are capable of supporting themselves if he leaves.

But their current dominant strategy hedges against the wrong risk. The pool of 'good' available men is largest in their early 20s, and then will inherently shrink along with their ability to attract said men. And there's no take-backs or do-overs if they miss that boat.

By my own personal observations, if a woman isn't in a stable relationship by approximately age 26, or isn't aggressively working to lock one down at that age, the safe bet is she probably won't get one with a higher value guy, for reasons not even related to "the wall." Its just a combination of her own heightened standards, the shrinking pool of eligible men to choose from, and the general increase in competition from younger girls for said men... AND her fading youthfulness working more against her as time passes.

Exceptions exist. Taylor Swift seems to have done well in the end, but again, the risks of waiting are more severe than they look when you're young and impressionable.

The 'dirty' secret is that a woman can actually "have it all," bear and raise some kids, enjoy significant amounts of leisure time, and end up with a rewarding, even high-status career if she marries well early on. A guy who can support her while she's at home raising kids, and can give her career a boost when needed, and take her on nice vacations once they're financially established solves this equation entirely.

The extended adolescence thing seems like a particularly nasty trick on women since front-loading their 'fun and games' time is the opposite of their ideal strategy. Do all the leisure stuff up front, then try to get a career going, and ONLY THEN give consideration to marriage and kids? The failure modes for this are numerous.

From "Fertility" by The Dreaded Jim:

Ovaries dry up a lot quicker than testicles. At age thirty six two fifths of women are infertile, and most of the women that are theoretically fertile have a hard time getting pregnant, plus there is a substantially higher risk of the pregnancy going wrong. So you should have your babies before thirty six. If planning three babies two years apart, need to get pregnant at thirty one. If pregnant at thirty one, married at thirty. Which is why your prospects for getting married plunge abruptly at thirty, because any potential husbands are doing the same arithmetic. Yes, some woman you know got pregnant and married at forty four – but your chances of being that woman are not good.

Getting married and having kids is going to deep six your career to the same extent regardless whether you marry at eighteen or thirty five. Being successful in your career makes you less attractive to men, because of the higher divorce risk, bitchiness risk, and infidelity risk of successful career women. You can always do the career thing later. You cannot do the baby thing later. Male doctors marry nurses. They do not marry female doctors.

If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant.

Yep.

A good relationship should indeed accelerate both party's life trajectories. This requires taking a gamble on the other person's capabilities/potential. But its easier to realize said potential when you have a good, complementary partner backing up your efforts, and you theirs.

Discouraging early marriages is probably making younger people seriously poorer than they'd otherwise have been.

It definitely contributes to higher housing prices. Lots of single people living separately will on the margins drive prices up compared to people pairing off and sharing a space at younger ages.

Alas there is some truth to the Redpill adage that women often prefer to wait at the finish line and marry/fuck the winner.

Gets to the point that a young woman should really have some men in her life, father and brothers, ideally, who can make a judgment call on whether a given suitor has the chops to become a general someday.

This requires taking a gamble on the other person's capabilities/potential.

It's true, but to be fair to women, this gamble is much higher stakes than for men. If she makes a wrong decision, the consequences for her are worse (in terms of finding a good mate to build a life with). Your last point is critical to making that kind of system work, but the culture generally makes that an uphill climb.

How so? Just from a common perspective I've seen, marriage is a much higher risk for men. If you are successful the woman might still leave you, take the kids, the house, and a huge chunk of your future income. If you are less so, she takes the kid, the car, and a huge chunk of your future income.

For one, men have much greater variation than women: the worst men will mess up your life more than the worst women. That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.

For two, after a divorce, a man can more easily start over and find another high quality wife. A single mom with kids may find someone else, but she'll have to limit her expectations of a mate much more than the man does.

Alimony exists and is often unfair, but it does nothing to help women facing the consequences of bad partner choices: he will not pay alimony or child support, and he certainly doesn't have a house to be granted to you.

If the husband is significantly above average, the calculation changes substantially, but most women can't marry men who are significantly above average.

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This requires taking a gamble on the other person's capabilities/potential.

Oh, so that's how sexuality works.

The real problem is the extended adolescence of the modern elite.

No, the real problem is that it's not economically viable to get married at 20 (the fact the modern elite has successfully memed that one shouldn't want that is a separate problem, and certainly one they financially benefit from as net beneficiaries of the education-managerial complex). For a woman to get married at 20 you need to have economic conditions that allow 25 year old men to become attractive to them (read: economically established), and the ability of a single income to sustain that for a while.

The age of family formation closely follows those economic conditions.

When economic conditions are good and you can get a career straight out of high school, that age goes down and families form rapidly (though the market of existing potential buyers has to clear first). As that happens, the population goes up and economic opportunity per capita goes down, so this only lasts until the slack in the economy is taken up.

When economic conditions are bad- let's say housing prices outrun the ability to afford one on a single income (pick your favorite reason why)- that age goes up. If it goes high enough, you've priced them out of the market, families don't form, and children are not born. However, as that happens, the population goes down and economic opportunity per capita goes up, so it's self-correcting... unless steps are taken to stop that from happening, like mass immigration.

A society in economic equilibrium has a TFR of 2.0.

Uh, aren't most early twenties women actually in cohabiting relationships- which our ancestors would readily recognize as concubinage? The difference between a wife and a frill wasn't the husband's economic prospects; it was social pressure on him to actually marry her, either from the Christian church or from her family's social status.

Cohabiting makes your cost of living go down, having children makes your cost of living go up.

I'm skeptical of economic explanations from simply looking at how much poorer the west was when it was fertile, how poorer countries are more fertile, or even how poorer people in the west tend to have more children.

I could see some economics-mediated social cause, like having children making people go down a few steps on the social ladder. Another theory I heard was that it used to be possible to have a relatively dignified life while being poor, while nowadays this will inevetibly send you to some high-crime spot. It's easier to imagine going down a few steps when it's juat about having a smaller house/flat and fewer consoomer goods, it's another thing when it will get you stabbed or your kids abducted by a rape gang.

Finally I feel like that data on relationshiplessness of zoomers contradicts the "purely economic factors" explanation.

You're never going to find a single Golden Ticket solution to the TFR question(because, ultimately, there is no single golden ticket solution to TFR), but economic conditions allowing for succesful, established men relatively early in life so they can support a family is atleast a very strong factor in play here.

The hidden question here that few people ask; If men as a whole were richer and more established, would women quietly choose to be stay-at-home-moms or instead go for the go-girl-business-boss path? We really don't know.

On the other hand, we should still probably want for successful, established men early in life, because even if a good chunk of women still go for the go-girl-business-boss path, the stay-at-home-moms may very well make up for the slack if they're churning out 3 to 4 kids at a time.

relationshiplessness of zoomers contradicts the "purely economic factors" explanation.

I can't see how you reach this conclusion. If anything, going by current economic conditions, it blatantly supports it.

I can't see how you reach this conclusion. If anything, going by current economic conditions, it blatantly supports it.

Pairing up is an economic advantage. You can split your rent by two incomes, and it's a lot more comfortable / enjoyable than co-renting with friends, let alone randos from classifieds ads. You can say you're not ready for kids, and just live together without having them for years. Economically it's an obvious boost. These kind of pseudomarriages were the default mode for every millenial I knew.

but economic conditions allowing for succesful, established men relatively early in life so they can support a family is atleast a very strong factor in play here.

As FiveHourMarathon said, "If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant." It's unreasonable to expect men to be successful and established before forming a family, and it's ahistorical too. They may have to be on a path to success, but that still is quite possible.

I don't disagree. If anything, I feel that this developed habit of women 'waiting at the finish line' is contributing to some of the bitterness men are feeling toward woman who demonstrate this.

Sadly, I have no utter clue as to how one could even go about correcting this, so I can only focus on the one element that could be fixed - IE, making men more successful, earlier.

I don't think anything can be done until the wisdom of "there aren't gonna be enough unattached successful men at the finish line for all of us" forms anew for women.

There are plenty of historical societies where girls could expect to be married to an established man in their teens. Those were age gap relationships but calling them 'ahistorical' is a stretch, they were very common. They're out of style now, I suspect because most women do not actually like double digit age gaps.

This is all a just-so story. Family formation and TFR were dropping at precipitous rates when housing prices were low. It is still true that 25-year-old men can be economically established; that they aren't attractive to 20-year-old women is for other reasons. It's fashionable to blame everything on housing (because it provides a reason for housing socialism, i.e. taking houses from everyone older than Gen Z and putting the previous occupants on an ice floe), but while housing is bad, it's not the reason for drops in TFR or household formation.

Mostly housing prices are high now because Millennials are doing catch-up homebuying, while Gen X is staying put and Boomers are stubbornly refusing to die. So demand is high. Supply is low for various reasons, but the biggest and intractable one is there's only so much land in desirable areas; back when housing prices were lower, many cities were utter shitholes and both jobs and population had moved further out. You can densify, but that gets you mostly rental pods and not homes. On top of that there's urban planners and their opposition to sprawl, and unwillingness to develop greenfields after the disaster of the GFC left many uncompleted exurban developments to rot.

Some of this will be solved; the boomers will die. The rest, probably not, so any relief will be quite limited. Unless the housing socialists get their way, and then housing will be like health care and higher ed, permanently.

Family formation and TFR were dropping at precipitous rates when housing prices were low.

And yet, there was a baby boom when economic success per capita in the US was at an all-time high, with TFR far higher at that time than at any time after the US became an industrialized country.

It's not just the rent, though that is a part of it. Countries that don't have the housing problem (and aren't clearly being sabotaged for the purpose of pumping up rent; and the US in particular still manages the highest TFR in the developed world despite that sabotage) still have a population contraction problem, anyway, and the market for family formation is (like all markets) irrational, dependent on limited information, and as life-alternatives get better the clearing price for forming one goes up anyway (the "stop educating women/ban porn and birth control" memes are pointing at symptoms of the root cause).

the US in particular still manages the highest TFR in the developed world despite that sabotage

No it doesn't, Israel has the highest fertility in the developed world(or for that matter anywhere outside of Africa or Central Asia).

The baby boom was caused by a massive increase in male wages without a corresponding increase in female wages combined with conservative social norms. We're uh, not going to replicate that. Especially not on purpose. It wasn't just a generalized increase in prosperity, people just consume more when that happens. It specifically made marriage more attractive to both men and women and had the social norms to ensure marriage=babies.

And yet, there was a baby boom when economic success per capita in the US was at an all-time high, with TFR far higher at that time than at any time after the US became an industrialized country.

Yes, the Baby Boom happened. But... that was it. TFR peaked in 1960, collapsed, and remained collapsed. You want that back, you probably need to win a non-nuclear WWIII -- and that condition is probably necessary but not sufficient.

Housing isn't going to make a dent. It's putting the cart before the horse anyway; the Levittowns and later suburbs were built because there were young families looking for houses; young families didn't form because there were now suburbs available.

reasonably intelligent U.S. Marine

One who only eats crayons with the wrappers removed first?

The value of their talents now is almost intrinsically less than the value of her ability to produce more individuals with those talents going forward, all the more so because of the narrow window in which she is able to produce them. Its like Nature's most brutal tradeoff, especially since it echoes through the generations either way.

Our options are to exhaust the capabilities of one (1) exceptional individual during their life, but lose their abilities after they die... or have them produce, hopefully, 2-3 at least somewhat exceptional individuals who can, on net, produce 2-3x more value during their lives than exhausting the exceptional individual would have during theirs.

Wow, we've got a woman of genius intellect, showing prodigy-level talent in science and math, as well as the drive to actually compete in those fields... and if she does compete as hard as she can, we're basically guaranteed that her genes won't pass on and thus whatever genetic advantages she may have possessed will be expressed less in future generations.

Yes, this is the kind of thing you do in an existential emergency. If there was an asteroid about to crash into Earth in a decade, maybe, and you needed to gang-press every last human with a bit of STEM talent into the global effort to deflect it.

Or, for a less fantastical example, it was understandable when the Soviets ended up making their women into bomber pilots and snipers during World War II. They were eating the seed corn, but if they lost the war they were all going to die anyway; their time-horizon had collapsed to surviving the next battle. And once the war ended, they turned back to celebrating motherhood.

Needless to say, America is the last country in the world to face an existential military crisis. Canada and Mexico aren't going to invade, the US Navy rules the seas, and then there is the nuclear triad deterrent. It is insane for a country under such conditions to push women into military service as hard as it does. If a woman has eight children, half of them boys, you have a choice between half a soldier now and four full soldiers in the future, plus another four women who can go on to have eight kids each. How shortsighted do you have to be to pick A?

A woman with a towering stature and musculature that actually holds her own in physical feats against men in her weight class? Uhhh yeah make sure she marries a reasonably intelligent corn-fed U.S. Marine so her kids can be the next generation of super-soldiers.

A woman with an exceptionally cool head, innate motivational ability, and a keen business sense? Well we could plug her in as a CEO but why not guarantee that all of her offspring will be admitted to Wharton School of Business on a full-ride scholarship and have her raise a generation of top-tier MBAs? (mostly tongue-in-cheek, that's probably a waste too)

From in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die:

Aroden might renounce her and if that happens she will have to pursue different life plans but it's still very hard to imagine them involving children. She argued it endlessly with her mother, when she was a child.

"If I'd gone off to be a holy warrior," her mother had said, "none of you would exist, and instead I raised three noble and good sons who will serve Aroden, and that's three times the effect any man can have, no matter how great. If you are unusually suited to His service, so will your sons be; character breeds true."

"If Aroden foresees that will be better I guess He won't pick me," says Iomedae, though of course if that were all there were to it she would be indifferent and she isn't.

But women with eight children are solidly outgroup to the main body of the american elites; women having 5+ children is itself a threat to their position.

Historically, high-status women would have been forced to take on relatively little burden in raising their own children. The suburban nuclear family didn't produce the great men of the 19th Century, the aristocratic/bourgeois household and the governesses/boarding school did. If it weren't for Baumol's cost disease and other factors raising the cost/lowering the desirability of that option, we'd have a very simple solution: CEO-lady pops out plenty of kids and they get raised by the staff.

This is still true today in poorer countries. The word for a married woman and a married woman with status are different in our language. What status? Almost always that they have servants.

In America, most great men did come from the middle-class nuclear family, they were the sons of farmers, mechanics, doctors, and ministers.

Pregnancy still has a pretty big toll physically even if the child rearing is completely handled by others.

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