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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.
The thing is that those constraints often created and maintained an incentive structure that mitigated the negative effects of TV shows.
In the case of content, keeping the family limited to one screen in a public area means that you can’t just pump whatever you want into your show. Mom and Dad can see what’s on the TV screen, and thus at worst bad ideas had to sneak in as subtext. And because the screen was the only one in the house kids couldn’t use it for more than an hour or two before Mom wants her soaps or Dad wants his golf. A TV show featuring women in combat would likely have been cancelled because no adult was going to let their kids watch it any more than moderns would allow kids to watch programs where the heroes smoke. TVs still have an off switch, but because kids have their own TVs that adults can’t control (or don’t control) any script writer with an agenda can put that out without worry about losing ratings when the adults turn off the television and warn their kids not to “let them catch you watching that kind of garbage.”
Personally, I regard screens like I regard any other hyperstimulous— it should be a rare treat, not a staple part of your daily diet.
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I think it is. GP would have a more solid case if he went after Korra. Suki's "I'm a warrior, but I'm a girl too" line would never be spoken by any of the Modern Girlbosses. Sokka is meant to be young and immature so that he can grow up across the show, and no modern western show would give Sokka the arc that he got. A I'll grant GP that Master Pakku is an idiot, and his refusal to teach Katara (the only living waterbender in the southern water tribe) would have meant that knowledge dying out among half of the water tribes. (His mind is changed by the presence of a trinket, so that the rest of the plot can happen.)
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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.
1: The Navy is heavily, but not exclusively homosexual. Thousands of dudes on a ship, and it only takes one to knock up the girlboss.
2: If you've seen the level of attractiveness of military women, a gay man could be forgiven for making a mistake.
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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.
I'm sorry, what?
Hold on, I think I've watched this anime...
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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.
Yes, women are perfectly capable of doing basic office jobs so long as no hardship is involved. Not sure that qualifies as "military", but we let the officers wear uniforms, so waddaya waddaya.
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