No Difference
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A guy in Israel studied male-female combat injuries in the Israeli Army and announces the Emperor has no clothes!
Plainly, he’s a hateful sexist. He’ll be purged, soon.
Equally plainly, the Rules of War need to be changed so women can play, too.
Joe Doakes
Victory for the agenda is the only victory some care about.
June 13th, 2014 at 8:04 am
“uterine prolapse”
Drops mic, walks off.
June 13th, 2014 at 9:35 am
The response is interesting; they merely deny the allegations without providing contrary evidence. So either it’s false and they’re just too darned lazy to contradict it, or it’s true and politics won’t allow them to admit it. I’m going with the latter.
June 13th, 2014 at 9:35 am
and I’m guessing the women have a much higher rate of uterine prolapse than the men. Way out on a limb there, I’m sure.
June 13th, 2014 at 9:51 am
I think uterine prolapse explains DG.
June 13th, 2014 at 10:07 am
Reminds me of the account, ‘Professor Gleason’s prolapsed anus’. Swiftee wasn’t that you?
June 13th, 2014 at 1:58 pm
LOL! That was genius. It wasn’t me, but I wish it was.
June 13th, 2014 at 4:54 pm
While it may be that some infantry roles are better suited to hairy knuckle draggers, I’m not at all sure that driving a tank, truck, plane or ship is a gender-specific activity.
I also think that recruits ought to be evaluated by their performance, not their plumbing.
I guess I’m some kind of wacko feminist. 🙂
June 13th, 2014 at 6:04 pm
You’re entirely correct, Andrew, that there are plenty of non-combat jobs the physically weak could do in the military. And to forestall objection, let me concede there are plenty of women who could kick my lazy ass.
Having said all that, let’s focus on Front Line Combat, which is the subject. Who should be on the SEAL team? Marine Recon? Army Rangers? Remember Barry Sadler: “Only 3 win the Green Beret?” If we go strictly by performance, women can’t compete which is politically unacceptable, so now what? Water down the standards? Are the enemy watering down theirs? Because if not, we’re intentionally weakening our ability to win.
Equal Opportunity or Affirmative Action, you can have one or the other. And since it’s our front-line combat troops we’re talking about, it truly is a matter of life and death. Chose wisely.
.
June 13th, 2014 at 6:54 pm
Mr. Rothman, there is an issue if the weaker recruits are both overwhelmingly female and assigned to non-combat roles. You end up with defacto sexual segregation, which is how our armed forces were run for decades. No fighting, no combat experience, no promotion. This is not acceptable to our feminist overlords.
I expect that driving a truck, airplane, tank, or ship all require very different physical attributes. Do you really want a female tank “driver” who has to stand by while the men equip or repair it? Or a truck driver who can’t replace an 80 lb. spare tire?
June 13th, 2014 at 10:59 pm
Everybody knows that on average, women tend not to be as strong as men so we take that into account in contests of strength and endurance.
The PGA tried a publicity stunt in 2003 – they invited Anika Sorenstam play in a men’s tournament. She didn’t finish dead last, only nearly so. The last pro male tennis player to lose to a woman was Bobby Riggs who threw his match with Billie Jean King to pay his mob debts. The fastest woman’s 100 meter time is 10.5 – men’s winners haven’t run that slowly since 1930.
Society knows it’s unfair to pit men and women against each other in golf, track, tennis, basketball, weight lifting, marathon running, triathlon, judo . . . but it’s fine in bayonet drills?
By putting women into front-line combat positions, we intentionally blind ourselves to the biological facts of life. We’re not putting our best troops on the line. We know it. They know it. Our enemies know it. Only our politicians refuse to admit the truth.
.
June 14th, 2014 at 11:35 am
When I took human biology, the instructor (a woman) told us that, in adulthood, all else being equal (age, height, weight), a man had 30% more muscle mass than a woman. This also meant that a man had higher bone density.
This means that (again, all else being equal), a fifty year old man has as much muscle mass as a twenty year old woman.
Does this matter in the modern military? It’s a less efficient use of resources to train a large group of people when you know ahead of time that a large percentage won’t complete the course. On the other hand, in WW2 they tried to find a fit for everyone. All in it together, that sort of thing.
Being a conservative, I believe that there is another dimension to this problem. Do we really want to train young women to kill some other woman’s child? Or train our men to kill enemy women? It seems wrong in a way that traditional, socially sanctioned male-on-male violence is not.
June 16th, 2014 at 11:14 am
Andrew, while I agree that physical qualifications should govern and “not just plumbing”, the trick is that “plumbing” is in general a really good hint as to whether someone should even get a look. As a rule, Olympic womens’ athletes compete at about the same level as good high school boys–at least if you take the contact out of contact sports like hockey.
Since our soldiers–infantry, calvalry, you name it–are taken from the ranks of kids who did our could have gotten varsity letters, this would suggest that the pool of women who could make it in combat is extremely limited, even in mechanized areas–because you’ve still got to be able to pull yourself out of a burning tank or truck to make sure four or five of your fellow soldiers don’t get incinerated, too.