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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?
As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally. The way war is fought today it seems to me women could substantially contribute in a way that was much less true before the industrialization of war. Especially in an existential context, it would seem foolish not to bend all society's available capacity towards survival. I find some amusement in the fact that, historically, this has been the more feminist/leftist position on the draft while the more conservative position has been keeping a gender-segregated draft.
What, exactly, does this entail? Are we going to restrict women's ability to work outside the home? Bring back a form of coverture? To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.
If we abolish the draft entirely then authoritarian states with less scruples would eventually overpower and dominate all the countries that tried to do so. Then they'd do things like what Russia did with the Donbass and use their subjugated lands to go after their next round of conquests.
If we instead drafted men and women equally, this would almost certainly devolve into mere performative equality where women are mostly given noncombat roles.
If we were really committed to equality then we'd run up against the reality that women don't make great frontline soldiers, and would face even greater risk of abuse if they were ever captured.
Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.
Evolution makes everyone into a warrior. Males may be generally better, but one glance at the dangerous wild and how basically all other species operates tells us that females will fight too when needed.. The world was and is not kind enough to let anyone coast through so easily.
But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did, what wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. Instead what truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.
Ukraine hasn't turned the tides on Russia because they sent ther men to the gym, but because they've engineered incredible new advancements in weapons systems and made tons of logistical optimizations. Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground. And it's only going to get more and more common.
The military is physically grueling beyond simply swinging a sword. There's a reason the Nazis and Soviets didn't bother drafting a large amount of their women into frontline combat despite both sides believing they were in an existential conflict and that the loser could very well be on the receiving end of genocide. From a trite view a women should be about as good as a man when it comes to shooting a gun or piloting a tank. Marching long distances under load, digging trenches, enduring cold and wetness, dragging wounded men -- all of these are things frontline soldiers had to and have to be able to deal with. And that's not even getting into the reflexes advantage men have as evidenced by esports competitions that others have cited below.
Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.
While not as many, a lot of women (hundreds of thousands) were still conscripted by the soviets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_Soviet_Union
Likewise the Nazis while against conscripting women for their idealogical beliefs, also turned to drafting a lot of women at the end
And both sides still had women doing other military related jobs https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/women-in-the-third-reich
So yeah, when push came to shove even the Nazis were like "fuck it, teenage girls take these guns and fight"
Yep, but that day is getting closer and closer. Might even be within a decade from now if AGI predictions pan out and we have another tech explosion from them.
Sure, women were a small percentage of the armed forces of some of the countries that fought in WW2. But they were overwhelmingly not on the frontline, and most were entirely noncombat. As I said in my first comment you responded to, I don't see noncombat roles as being anywhere close to as awful as frontline combat duty where the risk of being killed is far higher. If people wanted to subject women to the draft out of a sense of equality, but then the women ended up mostly just getting noncombat roles, I would call that performative equality.
But that's the thing, noncombat roles have become increasingly more important and likely at some point soon will be the only thing important when attempts to use armies of humans just swarmed by autonomous drones. Human soldier morale is going to plummet even harder and they'll fight back conscription more too when using them becomes even more guaranteed death compared to just making another bot.
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