This is just SO gallant of you to protect us, astro, but the truth is that women aren’t sent into combat because men won’t let them be. Men who say they want to protect women are men who end of controling women.
Wow!
It is truly phenomenal the lengths we men will go to in order to perpetuate our subjugation of women. I had always thought that the reason it is exclusively a man’s prerogative to be burned to death in a flying coffin, drowned in five hundred fathoms of freezing North Atlantic, or be sawn in half by a heavy machine-gun while impaled on rusty barbed wire, was that we thought that women ought to be spared such horrors.
It’s not very much to the point, I suppose, whether we thought they were too precious to expose to the living hell of the battlefield or too weak to fulfil their responsibilities adequately. Both sides of that coin turn out only to be a bad excuse for “protecting” women, so that we can maintain their second-class status.
Sheesh. We’re devious, self-serving sonsabitches, slice it whatever way you will. :rolleyes:
ClawsOfCatt: Men want to protect women. Women want to be protected by men. It’s human nature. Thousands of years of human history proves this.
Sorry if the truth hurts.
susanann, in what way do women not have “full equal citizenship rights” now? The fact is women have all the same rights without all the same obligations, which is morally unjustifiable.
Face it, kids, Women on average are weaker than men. Oh, sure, there was great genius women soldiers and women commanders russia may have had a kick-butt-and-chew-bubblegum sniper, but finding those kind of people are very limited. However, it appears that this point has become relatively moot, but not entirely.
In recent years, there has been a large force of analysts, support, tech, etc. in the military, mainly because as humans get relatively smarter at war, we find that it really isn’t so effective to send tens of thousands of people at eachother and hope that our guys will win. Women can just as easily fulfill these support roles as well as men. However, the meat of the problem is, do women WANT to join the army?
Through much toil and struggle, the Army has allowed women to join the military if they want to. Even some of the standards (not many, they still get treated like dirt, just as men do) have been changed for them to make the grade. Even so, a vast majority of the military is still men. The only women who go into the military volunteer for the job. If any draft were instituted, men would be more ready to gear up than women. I think that it is perfectly fair for only men to be drafted and not women.
You also thought that women ought to be “spared” the right to vote, hold jobs, own property, or control her own body.
Male societies have decided that one of the best ways to resolve conflict is by war. Then they say that women aren’t fit for war, therefore they are “too weak to fulfil their responsibilities.” If you didn’t have to decide things by war, the excuse for keeping women disenfranchised vanishes.
QUOTE]**Sheesh. We’re devious, self-serving sonsabitches, slice it whatever way you will. :rolleyes: **
[/QUOTE]
I would repeat that quote, only without the sarcasm smiley.
Keep your protection to yourself, Crafter Man. It is not wanted.
Pssst!
ClawsOfCatt, you might want to drop in here.
While I agree with at least some of those reasons, I haven’t seen anything to convince me they’re all true, so I’ll just use my own. My argument applies to yours too though.
The average man is bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive, and has higher stamina and endurance than a woman. These things are biological.
These are merely reasons for the average woman not being a good soldier. Or a good fireman for that matter. A soldier in the field should, in my opinion, be able to carry a fellow soldier out of harm’s way. More men than women would be able to do so. I don’t think anyone is suggesting equal representation, just equal responsibility when it comes to protecting their country. If a woman is as able as a man to perform the tasks necessary I see no real reason to have an inferior person take her place solely because he’s male.
Anyone who passes the fitness tests and other requirements should be judged equally. I doubt this would make women account for more than 10-20% of the total. With a higher ratio where physical attributes aren’t as important, or where different physical attributes than typically male have an advantage like for fighter pilots.
Same rules for everyone. Sounds reasonable to me.
It’s never easy to argue convincingly with someone who believes in a giant world-wide male conspiracy to subjugate women, and I’ve no very great hopes of persuading you this time, ClawsOfCatt. Personally however, I find a likelier explanation of how things worked out the way they did is something along these lines:
Right from the start, before we’d even developed language and rational communication and so on, we found that we had to fight off wild animals, as well as anthropoids who weren’t close relatives and who wanted a slice of our hunting and gathering range or a bigger share of the drinking water. Some of our ancestors knuckled under to aggressors, others buckled down to the necessary if unpleasant task of doing what had to be done to secure a sun-bed by the gene pool. Them that knuckled under got bred out. We can feel sorry for them, for all the good it does them. We can play what-if games about the enlightened, compassionate, egalitarian Utopia they might have founded, had they survived - and it’s certain there’s never any conclusive refutation of a what-if scenario.
It’s more than likely that at some stages of human pre-history, and even later on, some cultures flirted with the idea of making hunting and fighting equal-opportunity occupations. If they did, we have to assume they got their butts kicked right royally. After all, unless men were born sexist a million years BC, they would hardly cling on to the ridiculous idea of keeping such activities for men only if it meant getting taken to the cleaners every time the gender-neutral tribe next door came calling. Indeed, if the sexist men did manage to get their viewpoint accepted in the first place, they would have quickly lost the argument when, once again, the g-n.t.n.d. beat the holy crap out of them. Whether the warrior women couldn’t pull their weight, or in pulling their weight took too many breeding females out of circulation and pushed the birthrate down below survival levels, isn’t really relevant. If it had been a winning strategy, it would have been adopted. It wasn’t, so we conclude that it wasn’t.
That’s why, historically, men fight and women don’t, except in extremely unusual circumstances.
Now, you can get all upset about women’s lack of civil rights and political clout, but you need to remember that until a historical eyeblink ago, the vast majority of men had no more. The idea that every adult has a right to a vote is an extremely recent one. It’s not a self-evidently correct one either - which isn’t to say that it’s wrong, so much as to argue that we shouldn’t castigate our ancestors too much for not hitting on the idea straight away.
In fact, looking at the issue of comparative rights: two hundred years ago, men had the right to be dragged off the street and flung onto a leaky wooden ship where they would be poorly fed and worked brutally hard in extremely dangerous conditions. They had the right to be whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails for minor offences, or hanged for major ones, including running away. They had the right to get into seriously bloody battles where they could very well be maimed by foot-long wooden splinters, twelve-pound cannon-balls, or chain-shot. If they needed medical attention as a result of this, they had the right to have their ruined arm or leg sawn off, while they were being held down by four strong men and biting for all they were worth on a lead bullet, with no anaesthetic bar a shot of rum, and a hot iron or bucket of tar to keep them from bleeding to death after surgery. And in spite of the barbaric state of medical practice, being left to die of gangrene was worse.
Meanwhile, back at home, women were denied the right to vote.
Nearly ninety years ago, men had the right to be shipped off to a muddy field in France where they could take their choice of machine-gunning, shelling, gassing, or getting burned to death - assuming the insanitary conditions didn’t finish them off first. As before, death was the penalty for running away, and punishment for lesser offences had to be carefully tailored so as to make the ordinary, everyday hell of the battlefield seem like a preferable option. At least medical care had come along a bit - if you lived long enough to get any, and if the supplies hadn’t run out, at any rate. Some young men who weren’t old enough to shave twice a week got shot at dawn for desertion.
Meanwhile, back at home, women were still denied the right to vote.
It was doubtless a constant source of comfort to Jack Tar and Tommy Atkins respectively to know that at least they were helping to perpetuate a socio-political system that, whatever the cost in human life (mainly male), would at least keep women in their proper place.
Sheesh.
If you really believe that the leaders of any nation anywhere in all of history ever looked at the state of their country and thought “Oops! The women are getting uppity again! We’d better hold a war and not invite them, so we can dupe them into believing they’re being protected”, then all I can say is :rolleyes:, :rolleyes: and thrice :rolleyes: . I could say one or two other things too, but this thread isn’t in the Pit yet.
The issue, COC, isn’t whether or not women needed protection - it probably isn’t whether they still do, either. Like it or do the other thing, it’s what you owe your present existence to. Arguing that women never needed protection after a few thousand years of men taking the lumps and bumps for them smacks of gross ingratitude, at the very least.
And now, having completely failed to put one idea into your misandric head that wasn’t there already, I’ll leave you to return to that fantasy island you live on.
ClawsOfCatt, no-one thought women should be “spared the right to vote, hold jobs, own property, or control her own body.” Our society has never forbidden women any of these things, except for the vote. All men in the UK got the vote in 1918, women in 1928. After the 1830 reform riots it was only a matter of time until all men got the vote.
What’s a male society? Society is neither male nor female, men and women are both violent and warlike. If anything female leaders have been more likely to start wars.