Women in Combat

Men and women are more alike than they are different, but differences do exist. And they will always exist, for biological reasons. Pretending they aren't there doesn't make them go away. Oversimplifying an issue doesn't make anything better.

When my grandmothers were growing up, women were treated more or less like property. There was almost nothing a married woman could do without the permission of her husband, and single women could only work as teachers or nurses.

You can't reasonably say that we have to operate at one extreme or the other. There is some sort of sensible middle ground out there somewhere.

 

It seems retardedly simple to me actually. I agree with fx20736: there are tests to pass if you want to be a let's call it frontline soldier. You want to join and you meet the requirements, you can join. So what's the problem then? I know several women who would be better soldiers than several men I know. We should ALWAYS be measured by our individual qualities in such tasks, not by our gender.

 

Soldiers do what they can to save each other! It's a code, and often the highest medal is awarded to those with such bravery. To do so for women is no more dangerous, then for men.

 

I know where you're getting at Karen, but that's a deep seeded chivalry way of thinking - women are equal but give me special treatment because I am a woman. As long as an applicant is qualified for a position, one’s gender is arbitrary. It is easy to recruit and deploy women who are in better shape than many men sent into combat. In modern high technology battlefield, technical expertise and decision-making skills are increasingly more valuable than simple brute strength. I guarantee you if a humve gets blown up by an IED, the guy laying in the wreckage is not gonna care if the person dragging him out has tits or not.

Widening the applicant pool for all jobs guarantees more willing recruits, plus women are better at some sensitive jobs that require interpersonal skills not every soldier has which I think doubles the talent pool. Combat duty is also a factor as it is need to help climb the promotional latter, having more women being able to climb the latter might perhaps cull the existing entrenched sexism in the military.

 

I'm not ignorant of history, I know the draft has been stopped and restarted more than once, so it can happen again. There's also likely to be more Republican presidents getting us into future bullshit corporate wars, and we could also be drawn into somebody else's war by North or South Korea, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. We have no guarantee that we will always be fighting no one other than militant groups that don't have a real army.

We're constantly making decisions that have unforseen consequences, because we don't look at enough different future scenarios. I've been throwing out scenarios.

Have we reached a point where men now benefit more than women from increasingly absolute equality? That would be ironic.

Thinking pragmatically, I suppose that will reduce the likelihood of a draft somewhat, but I haven't been focused on that kind of pragmatism. I'm not young enough to have to worry about a draft, so this is all going to be somebody else's problem. I'm just more than a little concerned about the world the next generation is going to inherit. Some of my friends have daughters who could be drafted.

Now that's one of the best points I've heard all week. :cheers2: Women in the upper chain of command are definitely not going to want to sweep rape cases under the rug.

 

I asked my cousin, who has fought on the front lines in Iraq, his opinion on the matter.

 

you are confusing the issue. Of course men and women are different. Men have penises, women have vaginas. I am speaking about equality under the law.

As long as people think like you progress for women will be delayed. Equality doesn't mean unisex toilets, it means employers paying women the same for a woman as a man for the same job.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/03/21/income-gap-women-make-more-men_n_1368328.html

 

what about the women in those three cities?

apparently, you too are missing the legal argument here.

 

What about the men in all the other cities?

I don't think I'm missing anything here.

 

It's off topic, but equal pay for equal titles is stupid. Whether I'm up against a man or woman, I want to earn the amount of commensurate on how well I do at the job. I know too many people with a terrible work ethic, and do the minimum, that should not earn the same as someone that does the job beyond expectations.

 

Nothing wrong with women in combat. :2thumbsup:

 

you're talking about raises based on performance for people already in a job. I'm talking about starting pay for new hires.

 

Start pay for new hires is commensurate on educatoin and experience. No way should it just default to the identical wage given no one is identical going into a new job.

 

I'm not convinced that we need more progress. To my mother's generation, I say thank you for a job well done.

We don't have a problem in this area. Women often have large gaps in their employment history due to pregnancy and childbirth. This is their personal choice, not something that an employer needs to address.

100% agree. As a person who has been supervising and hiring employees throughout my adult career, I can assure you that if I could get equally qualified women to do the exact same work as men for less money, I would be hiring women only. I would be stupid to do otherwise.

 

On that topic, you are only going by what has been told to you, and Other sources like TV and movies, or what you have assumed.

Your grandmothers maybe grew up in suburbia or maybe a small rural town, so the same kind of conventions that exist today. If you could go back in a time machine and live life to see how it really was, do you think it may be very different to what you have always assumed.

Jazz/ Cabaret clubs in New York in the 1920s and other cities of the world and that whole scene - single women only allowed to be teachers or nurses?

Then the Great Depression, anyone getting work anyway they can - hubby would choose not letting the wife get work in a factory over him and the kids not eating?

Then during WW2, women suddenly picking up a whole range of duties due to the lack of men - this was your grandmothers era

The way you have made it sound there is that before a certain time, somehow magically all women were submissive, did whatever their husbands told them and didnt nag.

I find it all curious comiing from you. nowadays at least on the fringe of the swinger set, seeing more about how underground that is, how clueless you were when you were 20 about what many 40/50 somethings get up too as you never saw it. On the flip side its not like as a grandma sitting down with the family and grandkids at Christmas you are going to tell stories about what you used to get up to with the fratboy types in college. Just as those girls in the 1920s, 60 years later are going to talk about all the wealthy gentlemen that took them to clubs and speak-easys that they fucked before they got married and moved to the burbs.

It would have all been very different to the way everyone makes out

 

And then ther is this:

Kind of why the whole argument is useless, its about what actaully happens with girls that fit that general description, not what most assume

The real tomboy types, they will get most of the flack along the lines of "Mimimimimi, why do you have to act like a boy?", mostly from other chics, or short dudes. Usually will have mostly male friends and find it a lot easier to get on with MEN that arent threatened by that.

Something like Special Forces the vast vast majority of males have no chance getting in or getting through selection. We are only talking about 1 in 1000 guys. There arent really any, or very very few, women around the world serving in special forces units, but you are talking about units that represent 1% of the armed forces. But with everything else women are already there. A lot of guys like that are used to growing up with the tomboy gal friend, especilly if they grew up as military brats. They arent going to give a shit if the mechanic, supply officer or chopper pilot is a chic. Its everyone else bickering at home

 

NYC was hardly typical of America back then, which was largely an agricultural society. Life in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans then was like being on a different planet from the rest of the country.

If you want to look at unusual people and situations, you will find interesting women all the way back to the Civil War times. They didn't change the culture at all, except for a few leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Sanger.

That was the big game changer. Nothing was ever the same again, once we got into the war. Both of my grandmothers were young adults by then. By the time my mother got out of school, there was a significant minority of women in the business world. The patriarchal empire was starting to crumble.

I said nothing about how my grandmothers felt about such things. They wouldn't have told me anyway.

I don't think this is the best place and time to get into a lot more of those historical details. Obviously, the full story was complicated, played out over several decades.

Trust me, there wasn't much going on in a typical American small town or rural community back then. Religion was very dominate, and opportunities for mischief were rare. Everybody was in your business, all the time. That was also before modern birth control and antibiotics. Both were game changers.

If we had a constitutional amendment on the books banning the draft forever, you wouldn't be hearing a word from me on this subject.

 

I think the exact opposite. I think all able bodied men and women should be required to serve, no exemptions. Then maybe we wouldn't get involved in stupid wars like Iraq.

Non college bound high school grads could do 1 year on active duty and then be in the reserves for a few years. College students could do active duty on Summer Break for 4 years and then do a few years in the Reserves.

Think what that would do for national unity and gender equality.

 

Its only progress that this should happen