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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.
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.
Yes.
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