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I've been really thinking about this tweet.
This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.
Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.
Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.
The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):
Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.
Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".
From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.
I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?
You'll have better luck drafting women for war, especially since it's rare even for men.
The more society pushes women to act like men, the more like men they will act. Much of modern society heavily encourages women to act more like men in a variety of ways. Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings. They should wear jeans and t-shirts most of the time. They should sleep around a fair bit in their 20s, and get the same jobs as their male peers. If they do choose to give birth, they should work those same jobs that are also worked by men right up until they're having contractions, and should come back when their babies are six weeks old. This is even true of women heavy professions like teaching! They're leaving their two month old infants with strangers all day to go to work. This is not appealing! But women who take a year or two off to raise their infants are also isolated, because we have no villages in much of the West. Societies that show such distain for motherhood don't deserve babies.
I suppose we could trial a military base for new mothers, where pregnant women are assigned a cohort to bond with, do exercise and nutrition classes together, and they get a housing discount or can move to a government compound with their husbands. They and their husband and baby can move around to various places where the US has interests every few years until their babies are all old enough for school. I might have signed up for that deal.
That gets things entirely wrong. It's not that women have been masculinized and gone into masculine roles; it's that institutions have been feminized, offering roles that are much less competitive and much more about your social standing. Universities now are scared to grade on a curve that might imply some people perform better than others; you turn up, and you get an A. It's much more about consistency and the kind of conscientiousness that women excel at.
Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.
You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.
Maybe not at your school, but Harvard (hardly a no-name example) currently awards something like 85% of its grades as 'A's. It's gotten bad enough that the faculty plan on capping the number of 'A' grades handed out starting next year, which has spilled a nontrivial amount of ink in arguments back and forth. Yale is also considering similar actions.
I don't think it's quite universal (it seems more an issue at top-tier schools), but it is often acknowledged as a problem.
I think that's silly. Universities should teach material, not create rat races. If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.
Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.
Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.
Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.
A friend of mine was working as a graduate TA of a freshman physics class a couple years ago at a prestige university, and they had a fairly reasonable initial grade distribution. School administrators yelled at the professor and told him he had to give more As.
Professors generally respect intellectual effort and accomplishment and want grades to reflect that. But when admins, students, parents (sigh) are all on the opposite side pushing for inflation, the easiest path is to lower standards.
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