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Notes -
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've only seen a few episodes of Avatar and it's been a long time, but if I recall, being a "warrior" in the world of Avatar is more like being a DnD Adventurer or a Knight of the Round Table than it is like being an actual soldier in a real-world war. Warriors rarely die, when they do they die heroic and meaningful deaths, everyone's fighting for a meaningful cause, etc. In a world like that, where war is fun, it feels unfair to exclude girls from the fun so they are obliged to include them. Even Tolkien had a few badass girlboss warriors in LoTR. In the real world, and in more realistic or gimdark fictional settings, it makes more sense to exclude women from combat.
Mainly (1) Eowyn, and she is suicidally depressed, looking for her culture's validated "glorious death in battle" as the only worthy and honourable ending to a life because she can't see any better outcome for her. Her healing comes when she puts all that behind her and sees the hope of a meaningful life:
(2) Galadriel, and she has put the "riding around on horseback waving a sword" days behind her in her youth, which again were not so much for "badass girlboss warrior" reasons but "fight or die" reasons; crossing the Helcaraxe was not a fun stroll.
The one who is closest to "badass girlboss warrior" is Aredhel, and her wilfulness gets her into trouble.
(3) Maybe Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, who takes on a human-sized Ruffian with only her umbrella 😁
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