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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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