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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 am not sure that is entirely true.
First off, men are doing more than one kind of plowing. A man can easily father a couple of dozen children, but feeding them is a very different matter. Per acoup, a lot of ancient societies did not maximize their reproduction rate (mostly by delaying the marriage of women). To outcompete other societies, you do not want to make more babies than them, but more adults.
Secondly, if you live in times where you can lose 30% of a generation to warfare, you probably can not afford a 30% short time reduction in your capability to wage war. In the first system of warfare, your ability to inflict costs on other tribes in the area will determine what areas and resources you have access to.
Today, the requirement for strong people to plow the fields in back-breaking manual labor so that your population does not starve is mostly gone, but also, most countries care about other things than just how many warm bodies they house. While there are certainly plenty of women working careers which are essential to keep a country running, I think that men generally do their fair share of economic labor. Cut out a big chunk of the workforce, and times will be bad.
I think that the preference for men doing soldiering historically comes down to the fact that humans with high T used to make much more effective soldiers than humans with low T. If things were the opposite way, and the median woman had twice the weight and three times the strength of the median man, then your heavy infantry would have been basically women only, with men perhaps serving as skirmishers. The main reason few ancient societies sent their women into battle is the same why they did not send their 12yo boys into battle -- it is simply not the competitive advantage of that demographic, generally.
Aggression and physical conditioning are still very important to infantry combat, though- men sprint faster, jump better, etc. The physical advantages are all around, not limited to upper body strength(and given modern combat kit loadouts, this is likely less reduced in importance compared to the age of the phalanx than you might think). And non-infantry combat specializations might have different demands, but if one of them favored women the Israelis, Soviets, or North Vietnamese would probably have figured it out, and they didn't. IIRC competent artillerymen basically have to be male because it involves a surprising amount of moving heavy objects, at the very least.
Source, included in the record of a 2016 Senate hearing on this topic by John McCain
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