Women in the military: A threat to MRAs, not to feminists
Few subjects cause Men’s Rights Activists to become as irrationally angry as the requirement that young American men register for selective service.
MRAs regularly declare this obligation to be a form of “slavery,” a sign that society views men not as human beings but as “mere beasts of burden designed for the expendable whims of a gynocentric system.” If you’re a man in the United States, A Voice for Men’s “Janet Bloomfield” indignantly announces, “you must agree to die.”
Well, not so much. There is no draft, and there is approximately zero chance it will be resurrected any time in the forseeable future. But that doesn’t stop MRAs from complaining endlessly that women are allowed to vote, and own property, and do all sorts of other citizeny things without having to undergo the meaningless exercise of signing their names on a selective service registration card.
But it looks like that’s going to change. Now that women are being allowed into combat positions in the armed forces, it seems all but inevitable that women will be required to register alongside men.
You might expect MRAs to be jumping for joy at the very prospect. Nope. Because, it turns out, many MRAs don’t think women belong in combat positions — or even in the armed forces at all. Women, they say, just aren’t up to the job.
In a post on AVFM yesterday, for example, Michael Conzachi derides the notion of women in combat as a “monstrously stupid social engineering” experiment, claiming that anyone who knows anything about combat knows
that women simply do not have the physical strength nor the warrior, “Sheep Dog” mind set to do this dangerous arduous job, and to voluntarily and willingly place themselves in harm’s way; to protect the Sheep from the Wolf.
Adjusting his metaphors slightly, he goes on to declare that
You don’t hook up a covered wagon to a sheep, not even if you put a Rambo mask on it, you hook it up to a horse. Is that not clear? …
This is not an issue of equality, it’s an issue of ability.
Weirdly, Conzachi also waxes indignant at what he thinks will be the reaction of feminists to the possibility that women will have to register for the (still nonexistent) draft:
The shrill lobby who jumped up and down like circus monkeys screaming and demanding that all military combat jobs are open to women, will now start jumping up and down like circus monkeys complaining that they didn’t really mean that women will now have to actually register for the draft, and if they don’t, they will be subject to the same penalties and possible prosecution as men if they fail to do so.
The typical delusional uber-feminist speak, “we demand, we demand, we demand, combat jobs.” “Oops; well, we didn’t really mean that we would have to register for the draft, and be subject to the same penalties as men if we fail to do so, we just want equality, equality, equality.”
It’s a revealing complaint. I’ve seen precisely zero feminist opposition to the idea that women should be required to register for the (nonexistent) draft alongside men. Sure, I know plenty of feminists who would prefer that neither men nor women have to register; indeed, I’m one of them.
But the feminists who have been pushing to open the armed forces fully to women have done so knowing that equality would almost certainly result in women being required to register.
Indeed, when selective service registration was restarted back in 1980, the National Organization for Women and the League of Women Voters were two of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that would have made women as well as men subject to the registration requirement.
Yes, that’s right: they wanted women to be subject to the same requirements as men — even though at the time women didn’t have the same opportunities as men in the armed forces. As the New York Times summarized their views, NOW and the other plaintiffs felt that “women [would be] relegated to second-class citizenship by exclusion from a fundamental obligation of citizenship.”
The Supreme Court ruled against them, and male-only registration continues to this day.
Feminists don’t have a problem with equality in the armed forces; MRAs do. It will be interesting to see their reaction as they lose this favorite talking point of theirs.
Because, let’s be honest, that’s pretty much all it is. Registration is essentially meaningless. Not only has no one been drafted since selective service registration was reinstituted in 1980, but no one has been prosecuted for failure to register since 1986. (There were only a tiny handful of cases from 1980-86, mostly brought on by plaintiffs challenging the law.)
MRAs complain that — as they see it — women have been given the right to vote without taking on the obligation to serve (or at least the obligation to sign a meaningless piece of paper that in some alternate world might lead to them being required to serve). But MRAs, or certainly a good portion of them, also think that women are psychologically and physically incapable of taking on this obligation.
It seems abundantly clear that MRAs don’t really want gender equality, in the military or anywhere else; they want women to be relegated forever to second-class status.
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Welp, David, it appears that no Link Mammoth defense is troll-proof.
Really? Because I always thought it was the politicians who make the rules and the laws who had “political authority”, not the voters.
And since most of Congress and the House are male…
I would assume they were the ones calling the shots, not the voters.
Because, believe it or not, not every single thing our government does is voted on by the public, so I have no idea where you seem to get this idea that we run this shit, and thus can choose when we go to war. Because we (as in women as a whole) don’t. Congress does. The president gets to direct the army, but Congress is the only branch of government that can declare war.
Women may be the “electoral majority” in the USA and other countries (and I would like to see some stats to back up that claim), but they’re certainly not the majority of people making the decisions.
These people want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to complain the draft is some plan devised by the evil feminist cabal, yet they don’t want women to fight because their masculine fee fees don’t like it.
Hey, Conzachi? You and people like you suck.
Have a nice day and bite me. =)
In the US, the congress is gerrymandered to be more right wing than the national population as a whole. The presidency is decided by the electoral college votes, not the popular vote. You can’t simply count the number of voter registrations and determine from that women have a disproportionate amount of power. Actually, it is whiter, older, suburban and rural voters that have the disproportionate amount of power.
I sure as fuck am not the one voting for warmongerers.
Plus, since women are a majority of the population, if they’re also a majority of voters, that’s a proportionate amount of power.
@Alan Robertshaw
Anyone who follows the news will know about the Kurdish women kicking ISIS’s arse.
Thanks for the history lesson, Alan! My current favorites are the Kurdish female fighters.
Yeah, it’s almost as though history books are written to exclude women!
Paradoxy, Katz and WWTH are all over this already, but I would also point out that even if every single bill were taken to the public rather than their overwhelmingly white male representatives, there are still power brokers at that top deciding what makes it on the agenda and what the limits of public discourse are. And those people are mostly, le gasp, white men.
I’d suggest you dip into a little public choice theory before you go making any more half-baked assertions, troll, but who am I kidding: you’re not even reading this.
And even when there are referendums, there are still (depending on the state) rules for how you get a referendum on the ballot and fulfilling the requirements often takes money and pull. Plus, money and power can get a referendum passed because the rich and connected can get the media time and buy the ads. Just look at Prop 8 passing in CA.
Then there’s also the barriers to actually getting out to vote that exist in the US. Election day is on Tuesday and it’s not a national holiday. Employers are required to allow you some time off to go vote, but it’s unpaid and a lot of people don’t know that their employer is required to give them the time off. Then there’s the fact that there are fewer voting machines in poorer neighborhoods, so there’s longer lines and more problems.
There are just so many reasons that a group can be a minority and still have the power. Even in a Democracy. Rich white men don’t need to be in the majority demographically to have most of the power.
sbel — oh the meat of your comment was certainly valid! I just provide random facts 😛
Cuz yeah, over 25, even if we reenstated the draft, odds you’d be drafted are approximately zero. And over 30 the odds are zero to anyone that isn’t a maths geek, hell, that might be enough zeros even for stats peeps to round off to 0!
It may not be likely to have a call up but ask any of the Korean or Vietnam war vets if registering for the draft has a down side. These days there are lots of ways to serve that do not require physical strength. And there are plenty of women that could serve in combat. Their is a lot of evidence that women can be just as violent as men.
@WWTH: Don’t forget places like Texas requiring birth certificates if the name on your ID isn’t the name you’re born with, thus trying to limit married women and transgender people from voting too.
There are lots of ways that lawmakers try to disenfranchise people. And women, racial minorities, and LGBTQA+ folks are at the top of that list, most likely because we’re more likely to vote liberal instead of, you know, people who actively despise us and try to revoke our rights at every turn.
“You might expect MRAs to be jumping for joy at the very prospect. Nope. ”
DEFINITION OF MRA.
If they do ever draft that high, we’d have significantly more to worry about than the nuances of the selective service system, that’s for sure.
@Compton Shaw –
Nawp.
If your premise were true, we’d get into significantly less military conflict than at present (and historically).
I’m not going to go chasing down stats right now (jumping on while on my phone), but women consistently poll and vote more liberally than men (hence the MRA refrain of, “Women weaken us by only caring about social programs! BAH!”) and liberals are consistently less likely to be pro military intervention, expedition, and conflict.
Sooo…yeah.
That’s about as much attention as your post warrants.
Don’t worry! The majority of men in the USA now realize that the USA is “Woman World.” That is why they now say: “Let women defend it. Not Men!”
The following is the URL of an article entitled: “Pentagon: 7 in 10 Youths Would Fail to Qualify for Military Service.”
http://time.com/2938158/youth-fail-to-qualify-military-service/
The article, written by Nolan Fenney , appeared in the June 29, 2014 online edition of Time magazine (time.com). Because the URL of this article may not be allowed as per standard protocol in this post, here are some pertinent partial quotes from the same: “Approximately 71% of the 34 million 17 to 24 year olds in the U.S. would not qualify for military service because of reasons related to health, physical appearance, and educational background, according to the Pentagon.” “Only 1% of young people are both ‘eligible and inclined to have a conversation with ‘ the military about possible service, according to the Defense Department.” “The quality of people willing to serve has been declining rapidly,” Major General Allen Batschelet, the U.S. Army Recruiting commanding general told the WSJ.”
Aaaand we’re back to “it happened in the past, so obviously it will happen in the future.” Circular argument is circular.
What does this
Have to with this?
Are you really saying a large majority of young men in the US got unfit or got tattoos or dropped out of high school on the off chance that WWIII will happen and the draft will be reinstated? This is all a vast conspiracy to be ineligible for service so women will have to do it?
But I thought feminism made women all fat and tattooed?
Wait. Did I just stumble across Katie’s secret plan? We thought we had to get fat and cover ourselves in tattoos to oppress men by making our boners sad. But the real purpose was to undermine the secret plot of the menz to pass conscription duties on to us!
Wake up sheeple!
Peel the conspiracy onion!
@CV Compton Shaw
Ah, the classic MRA argument by non sequitur.
MRAs discussing the notion of women in combat roles: “Women are soooo weak and they just don’t have the natural fighting instincts that men do!”
MRAs discussing domestic violence: “Actually, women are more violent than men. The notion that women can’t do violence and inflict extreme bodily harm is a total myth.”
Y’all, y’all – I have a CVCS impression:
Disregard conversation, paste topic-oriented canned response.
If you drafted all those who would qualify, you’d have an army of 10 million plus, or over three times the size of the present US armed forces (according to Wiki), which figure would only increase over time in any war requiring a draft, as more young people aged into the draft range. If one really needed more soldiers to fight the Mexican-Canadian-North-Korean-Muslim invaders, I’m sure that the standards could be lowered to grab, say, 50% of the appropriate age group, or the top age range raised to include more late-20s adults.
It’s not as though kicking women out of the armed forces would magically make the (male) youth of America instantly more manly; you’d still have the same proportion of candidates failing the standard, so that you’d have fewer enlisted to fill the same number of jobs. Which situation would probably have to be fixed by lowering the standard so that a greater proportion would pass.
Really, I don’t see the problem: there has to be a standard, whether it’s passed by 30%, 10% or 50%. And the calculus of that standard is going to include the number of roles available, the health and education of those applying, and the number of applicants. At present, the US armed forces think the balance falls at 71% failure (though I guess in practice it’s probably less than that; a lot of sub-prime candidates just wouldn’t volunteer, and the marginal cases are probably encouraged to go away and exercise more before trying again).
And people are pretty healthy, these days. I wonder what proportion of the cohort from, say, 1941 would pass today’s standard.
Not to mention that, if you have the luxury of kicking out otherwise qualified people for reasons like having tattoos, that suggests that you’re not really hurting for human resources.
Since the US military runs on lots of very expensive equipment, it can presently afford to be really picky when selecting recruits, even considering that it’s all volunteer, because despite having by far the largest military budget on Earth, it doesn’t need all that many soldiers compared to others.
If it became draft time, you can bet that the education and tattoo rules would both disappear.
Re who’s in charge, I thought we more or less quantified this last year:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The-US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html
@guy:
I assumed that the facial tattoo and education rules were at least partially a coded race- and class-based thing.
Many, actually, if you’re just talking about the physical aspects, since many of the disqualification happen because of visible tattoos, a criminal record (especially when you consider how many people are currently arrested for non-violent drug offenses), or weight / PT requirements.
We were significantly less sedentary back in 1941, if for no other reasons than that we did more walking and a higher percentage of the population worked in agriculture.
That’s not to say that I agree with all of the criteria in place today – if someone can pass the PT requirements, who cares how they tape as long as they can still use standard issue equipment? – though I do agree with having some standards in place re: tattoos (gang activity amongst the lower enlisted is a legitimate concern, if for no other reason than that you don’t want Solider A to not have Soldier B’s back because of shit from back on the block).
More people would pass the education requirement though. I know people like to imagine we’re getting less educated and more ignorant by the year, but we’re not. I think a lot of it is fear mongering from those who want to privatize education.
As I understand it, the education requirement is mostly because a high-school education is generally handy. It’s not necessary for a private in the infantry, but artillery wants people who can do calculus, senior enlisted write a lot of reports, maintenance requires good technical literacy, etc. Reason enough to impose it if they can still get enough recruits with it in place.
I don’t know if it’s too late to keep mentioning female warriors, but there was Wang Yi, a general under Cao Cao during the three kingdoms era.
We can also add Moroccan women to the list of ladies not to mess with 🙂
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/woman-knocks-man-unconscious-with-single-punch-after-he-pinches-her-bum-in-cctv-video-at-morocco-a6781686.html
@ weirwoodtreehugger
Yeah, I don’t quite understand quite what’s wrong with parents being given a choice of kinds of school. Like, do people really want to take away the choice to send a child to the type they’d be happiest at, rather than for some abstract ideological point?
Of the three countries I have citizenship in one drafts only men and is widely recognised as a Terrible Place To Be A Woman, one drafts men and women, and one hasn’t drafted anyone since the 1940s. Naturally, the second and third have fallen to the hordes of ISIS.
It has been 3-4 decades and three wars since any men were subject to mandatory military service in the US.