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