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Notes -
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?
I honestly think this is a pretty reasonable take. A lot of people are attacking the claim that drafting people isn't controversial. It obviously is, but the majority of society still sees it as a necessary evil, as without it the nation could be overrun by other states that are less scrupulous. This is less of an issue for the USA that only has two relatively weak neighbors, but the principle is sound in general. Ukraine would have collapsed to Russian aggression long ago if it didn't draft its population to fight, and yes it's very controversial in that country with there being many examples of draft dodging enforcement actions that look more like kidnappings, but again it's still necessary.
Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death. While death in childbirth can happen, it's fairly rare with modern medicine. Death in war on the other hand is an expected outcome for thousands or millions of men. If women were told that raising the children was optional after birth, then they'd only need to go through the pregnancy for 9 months, give birth, and then they'd be done which compares to the years-long requirements for many draftees, with unclear end dates. If I was behind the veil of ignorance and told I either had to be either a man reborn to be drafted in Ukraine's war, or a woman forced to bear a child for the state, I'd choose the latter pretty easily.
The main 2 differences I can see between drafting and forced childbirth are the following:
Neither of these is very compelling in our current situation.
Great. Let's agree on this: every one of you men go off to war every year, while every woman gets pregnant every year. Happy with the bargain?
No? That would presumably lead to an absurd amount of unnecessary wars and would flip the underpopulation problem into an overpopulation problem.
Well, the flip answers on here don't seem to be based in reality, so why not throw one more stupid log on the bonfire of stupidity?
I work in a place that is 99.9% female and, surprise surprise, from time to time staff members get pregnant. There is currently one girl ("girl" from my POV, she's in her early to mid twenties) who is having her first child and she's very sick with it.
The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts. I'm not pro-contraception and I'm staunchly anti-abortion, but becoming and being pregnant is not "fulfil biological imperative" as easily as "I'm hungry, I need to eat something". There's a lot goes into creating and growing a new human being out of your own body, which never seems to be taken into consideration.
Do men who are subject to the draft have to turn up every week to a boot camp training them in case of war? Because "men = draft: women = pregnant" would be more like that in reality.
Dang it, all the guys on here carelessly proclaiming women are selfish carousel riders who should be compelled by the government weaponising social disapproval into having babies should have to undergo compulsory couvade linked to a real pregnancy (might be your spouse, a family member, or just at random out of the general population if you haven't managed to persuade some woman to throw her lot in with you). Get AI to work on how we can make that happen.
Once you, Dear Reader who suggests women should be barred from higher education and work and steered into getting married to man of parents' choice as soon as she leaves school at eighteen to be pregnant by twenty at the latest, experience the joys of pregnancy and childbirth in your own body, we'll see how enthusiastic you are about "women need to have their liberty stripped and be directed into Fulfil Biological Destiny", more than once.
Women of past generations had anything from six to thirteen children. I want you to go through eight couvades and then tell me you'll sign up for a ninth.
I've read a lot of what other people have been writing in this thread, and I can't find anyone who's asserting that pregnancy is a walk in the park. Obviously it's extremely rough on women's bodies in a number of ways.
But we're not looking at in a vacuum though. We're comparing it to war, and saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains. My response to this comment can be cross-applied here pretty much as-is.
My credulity is strained by "men are compulsorily enrolled for the draft, so women should be compulsorily enrolled for pregnancy".
If you're supposed to get pregnant, this is not the same thing as "well I might get called up for a war but probably not unless things get really bad". If the guys are all being frontline infantrymen in shooting wars, then yes that's equivalent (even Chesterton made the same equivalence!)
But that's not what is being presented.
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