Why don’t women have their heads shaved during basic training?
The goal of Basic is NOT humiliation, contrary to what you might be led to understand. The goal is to learn to work together as a team. They do that by requiring everybody to look and dress the same and by having them do the same things, which creates unity where it may not have existed before.
Women historically have not shaved their heads, so to make them do so would be to humiliate them. Instead they have very specific rules on how the hair is to be worn and how long it can be. For all intents and purposes they all look the same anyway due to the rules, so there really is no point in taking it any further than that.
Remale? :dubious:
That we would a male -> female transformation, then back again?
So why then, historically, do men have to?
Because men traditionally have shorter hair, it grows back very quickly, and it dismisses the possibility of uniqueness of hairstyle. That comes later, although that is also governed by regulation (in the Air Force it is AFI 36-2903 if you care to look for yourself).
Tonsorial Shock. It gets the message across to the recruit that life as he knew it is very, very over.
The women recruits in Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government army did shave their heads, but that may have been in line with the traditional reason for head-shaving: lice & cooties. And anyway, these women soldiers’ main purpose was to shame the men into continuing to fight the Germans.
IMHO, the reason female recruits don’t have their heads shaved while the men do is because they don’t need to be broken like young men do. Women are more adaptable to sheding thier individuality and getting with the program, and offer their superiors less resistance.
What about people who have serious moral, ethical, or philosophical objections to shaving their head?
Those remales are always getting preferential treatment. Fuckers.
Men, who are preparing for combat shave their headsin order to prevent lice, ringworms, etc. It is also done to keep the enemy from having something to grab on to. Women are not yet in combat roles, so the shaved head does not need to apply to females. ( At least that is what I was told in BCT for the US Army)
Sgt Schwartz
They shouldn’t join, assuming they can avoid it; some locations know they have a group with this problem and fit regs accordingly, either allowing them long hair or allowing for “civil service instead of military”. The Indian army doesn’t force shij to cut their hair, since it would be humiliating and keep from joining it a group of people who are traditional and proud warriors. I’m sure Israel has its own mechanisms to deal with it.
I remember seeing a news blurb about Spanish forces in Afghanistan. They interviewed, among others, a female corporal. She talked about making sure that they were “decent”, but of course no burka; about the way people reacted to seeing men take orders from a woman. Many people were more amazed that the female soldiers were decently covered (unlike the notion of “occidental women are all sluts” that they had) than at the soldiers obeying, once the soldiers said “hey, she’s the corporal! What, you never took orders from your mother?” One of the things the corporal said is that she’d considered cutting her hair much shorter or even shaving it, but talking about it with other girls they’d figured it gave them more visibility* and visibility was a Good Thing. So they didn’t shave.
- This particular corporal had curves the uniform didn’t hide, but I know many women that would be perfectly able to pass for men, in clothing that baggy.
I served in the US Army in the 1980s. I recall that there was a reg that forbade women from shaving their heads or wearing crewcuts. The reg explicitly stated that women rectuits were to maintain a feminine appearance. Sorry, can’t give a cite; this was 20 years ago.
Women were not, however, allowed to let their hair touch the collar. Most women had their hair cut short but girly - think Catherine Bell in JAG. That scene in G.I. Jane where Demi Moore shaves her head just wouldn’t have happened.
A friend of mine who was a BAM (Broad-Assed Marine) said that when she was in Marine Basic Training in the late 1970s, the women recruits, who were a tough bunch indeed, had to take a course in table manners, deportment and makeup application.