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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.
You have here smuggled in a massive, unjustified assumption on which your overall construct needn't rest. Certainly a number of women find it fulfilling to have children - as, indeed, do many men - but it's hardly all of them. There is at the very least no reason, by your logic, why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve. And even among the majority who would find motherhood fulfilling, I would guess that there are significant numbers who could also find happiness in many other ways, i.e. motherhood is for them a possible path to self-actualization but not "necessary", as you claimed. I don't doubt that if a society tried to conscript all its young women to war, it would do a great disservice to a majority of them by depriving them of the chance to bear children. But you cannot flip this and conclude that anything which directs any woman away from child-rearing is doing her personal self-actualization a disservice.
This leaves "necessary for the health of society", of course; and I think that's what you actually have strong views about. Perfectly fair. But if the argument is "society needs a majority of women to tough it out and pop out babies, never mind what else they'd like to do; we need baby-makers just as we need farmers and beat cops and trash collectors, we can't wish it away, and unfortunately this is one hard manual job that only those citizens who were born with wombs can do", then let's not pretend that women's self-actualization enters into it; that's just lipstick on a pig, a just-so story to help the medicine go down.
If that's where you stand, better to bite the bullet that yes, motherhood might be a suboptimal way for many women to spend their lives, but society must nevertheless ask it of them as a sacrifice for the greater good of all. This needn't mean a dystopian portrayal of parenthood as some emotionless carnal duty - you can and should still talk about the ways it can be fulfilling and joyful - it just means cutting the bullshit about genders' supposed deep pseudo-spiritual purposes in life, and talking simple good sense about the practicalities of life.
To be sure, no society could survive if it told its citizens that they need only grow crops or collect trash bins if they feel it would add to their happiness, in the way that we tell women that they should only have kids if they really really want to. But contrariwise no society has ever tried to seriously gaslight its farmers and bin men into believing that their very bodies cry out for back-breaking work from dawn to dusk and they'll never be truly happy unless they work those specific jobs. They're just recognized as… hard jobs that need doing, and we pay people to incentivize them to perform those jobs, and while we're at it, sure, we tell the people to find what happiness they can in performing them capably and dutifully. But maybe at the end of the day you'd still rather write poetry all day or go on globe-trotting adventures, and society still has to shrug and say "well, ya can't. hopefully one day when we have better robots." I say the same applies to pregnancy.
Women have a very strong revealed preference for valuing motherhood above almost anything else, for the simple reason that women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again. I haven't seen much address of this point from your side of the debate, and there's lots of corroborating minor pieces of evidence- mothers overwhelmingly make large career sacrifices to prioritize motherhood, even when they could choose not to, for example.
You're also ignoring the reality of conscription specifically, which is that nobody wants to be there. It's entirely reasonable to say to the young women when the men are being drafted 'yeah, they don't want to be in the army, suck it up just like they have to'.
The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.
More seriously, my assumption here is that there's a kind of… not sunk cost fallacy, exactly, but "at this point"-ism to it. Once you've had one child, that's it, you are A Parent, you're going to have that dangling responsibility for the rest of your life come hell or high water. So you may as well make the most of it and keep on in that direction; trying to suddenly about-face to a high-flying career in rocket science would bring only the disappointment of never making it as big as if you'd jumped straight in without having a kid first, while with one kid under your belt, you're well on your way to becoming a very successful homemaker.
Why are you sceptical? Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.
Well, yes. But in the heroin case, "someone who's tried it once is likely to want to do more" doesn't prove that you are wickedly preventing people from self-actualizing by forbidding them from trying it the first time. In fact, quite the opposite - we recognize that getting hooked on a hard drug 'hijacks' people's preferences and gets in the way of their real wants and goals, so that allowing them to get exposed to the addictive substance is doing a disservice to their self-actualization! So, conceivably, pregnancy could be the same: a woman who tries it once might get 'hooked' and that's exactly why it's against a woman's better interests to have even a single child, lest she get addicted to the experience and let it ruin her life as she irrationally sinks all her time and resources into parenthood.
(I don't actually believe this, hence why it's an unserious gotcha.)
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