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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.
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.
Yeah.
Or, to phrase it a bit differently, girl-boss feminism states:
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?
See above.
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.
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