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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.
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.
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.
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:
- Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women
- Thales
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).
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.
If you would prefer an abrahamic source:
- fragment of a prayer, Cairo Geniza
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.
I think you'll need to be a bit more specific than that to move me.
This, of course, is why garbage men and truck drivers are among the most admired and desirable professions.
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.
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