A Female Solider Fights a US Marine.

[Ashnard]

Edited December 27, 2013 by Ashnard

[Shauni]

fight the opresheun!

fight the potatoarchy!!!

proud strong womyn!!!

[Klokinator]

Get back in the kitchen.

Ashnard.

Wait why the fuck is this in serious discussion.

Edited December 27, 2013 by IM FAE OMG!!

[Original Alear]

When I opened this topic I thought it was gonna be a FE romhack with a marine sprite with guns and stuff hacked in.

[Esau of Isaac]

Get back in the kitchen.

Ashnard.

Wait why the fuck is this in serious discussion.

A more serious discussion would've involved women in combat roles, I guess?

On one hand, like most, I'd support allowing women into such positions that can actually fill the role. I do recall reading a well-written piece in which an Army veteren explained why the vastest majority of females would be unfit, however, and even those that did would present some problems in units (outside of the "THEY'RE WIBBEM AND MEN WILL IGNORE ORDERS TO SAVE DEM!", which may or may not have grounding)

[Rehab]

Do tell.

I haven't heard a good reason why anybody shouldn't be able to at least try out. More importantly, there are a lot of women who have already seen a lot of combat duty, and performed at least well enough to keep themselves and others alive, but haven't gotten "combat pay" to match. And I've heard another story on NPR from a general (IIRC) who was so struck by the performance of a turret gunner on a convoy transporting him (IIRC) that he asked them for their name, and that it was a woman who removed her headgear to answer him changed his opinion on the matter on the spot.

(I hope you'll forgive me for skipping watching something pol has any interest in, at least anything without another source to accompany it)

[Esau of Isaac]

Okay, I found the article I was thinking of:

I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream.

We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit. First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy.

I saw the male combat units when I was in Iraq. They go outside the wire for days at a time. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate in front of each other and often while on the move. There’s no potty break on the side of the road outside the wire. They urinate into bottles and defecate into MRE bags. I would like to hear a suggestion as to how a woman is going to urinate successfully into a bottle while cramped into a humvee wearing full body armor. And she gets to accomplish this feat with the male members of her combat unit twenty inches away. Volunteers to do that job? Do the men really want to see it? Should they be forced to?

Everyone wants to point to the IDF as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men?

Regarding physical limitations, not only will a tiny fraction of women be able to meet the male standard, the simple fact is that women tend to be shorter than men. I ran into situations when I was deployed where I simply could not reach something. I wasn’t tall enough. I had to ask a man to get it for me. I can’t train myself to be taller. Yes, there are small men…but not so nearly so many as small women. More, a military PFT doesn’t measure the ability to jump. Men, with more muscular legs and bones that carry more muscle mass than any woman can condition herself to carry, can jump higher and farther than women. That’s why we have a men’s standing jump and long jump event in the Olympics separate from women. When you’re going over a wall in Baghdad that’s ten feet high, you have to be able to be able to reach the top of it in full gear and haul yourself over. That’s not strength per se, that’s just height and the muscular explosive power to jump and reach the top. Having to get a boost from one of the men so you can get up and over could get that man killed.

Without pharmaceutical help, women just do not carry the muscle mass men do. That muscle mass is also a shock absorber. Whether it’s the concussion of a grenade going off, an IED, or just a punch in the face, a woman is more likely to go down because she can’t absorb the concussion as well as a man can. And I don’t care how the PC forces try to slice it, in hand-to-hand combat the average man is going to destroy the average woman because the average woman is smaller, period. Muscle equals force in any kind of strike you care to perform. That’s why we don’t let female boxers face male boxers.

Lastly, this country and our military are NOT prepared to see what the enemy will do to female POWs. The Taliban, AQ, insurgents, jihadis, whatever you want to call them, they don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions and treat women worse than livestock. Google Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca if you want to see what they do to our men (and don’t google it unless you have a strong stomach) and then imagine a woman in their hands. How is our 24/7 news cycle going to cover a captured, raped, mutilated woman? After the first one, how are the men in the military going to treat their female comrades? ONE Thomasina Tucker is going to mean the men in the military will move heaven and earth to protect women, never mind what it does to the mission. I present you with Exhibit A: Jessica Lynch. Male lives will be lost trying to protect their female comrades. And the people of the US are NOT, based on the Jessica Lynch episode, prepared to treat a female POW the same way they do a man.

I say again, I would have loved to be in the infantry. I think I could have done it physically, I could’ve met almost all the male standards (jumping aside), and I think I’m mentally tough enough to handle whatever came. But I would never do that to the men. I would never sacrifice the mission for my own desires. And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if someone died because of me.

- Sentry

I hadn't really considered the whole cramped peeing thing, though I suppose smaller things like that and bone density while tiny can add up over time.

[Rehab]

I'm afraid the first things that come to my mind in response to most of those points, assuming they are presented as evidence why women shouldn't be allowed to serve in combat roles, aren't so much "that's unambiguously valid," as much as either "they can test for that kind of physical ability" (for things like carrying capacity), "that doesn't honestly sound like anything that an attitude adjustment couldn't fix" (getting men to think of the women in their unit the same way they do men, being as comfortable with a woman urinating or defecating within in a cramped space), or "something like the news cycle sensationalizing a female soldier being captured and abused or killed (or killed in general), where they wouldn't with a male soldier, does not sound like a problem that can be solved by continuing to do nothing about it." (personally, the first answer that comes to my mind is to tell anybody who does sensationalize something like that to fuck off.)

The casualty rates of those integrated units is something I'm less inclined to brush off, but I haven't been exposed to much hard evidence for explanations calling them the results of intractable evolutionary hard-wiring, and their casualty rates being high doesn't by itself explain things like the conditions under which they occurred (and thus how often one can expect to see similar results) or whether any possible reforms to how they operate could be undertaken that might help to reduce the number of casualties.

It also still doesn't speak to how to deal with the women who have been in combat, acquitted themselves, and who would ask for equal combat pay.

[eclipse]

While it might have been a decent start for a discussion about women in combat roles, posting a YouTube video only is NOT how to kick it off in Serious Discussion.

[Esau of Isaac]

I'm afraid the first things that come to my mind in response to most of those points, assuming they are presented as evidence why women shouldn't be allowed to serve in combat roles, aren't so much "that's unambiguously valid," as much as either "they can test for that kind of physical ability" (for things like carrying capacity), "that doesn't honestly sound like anything that an attitude adjustment couldn't fix" (getting men to think of the women in their unit the same way they do men, being as comfortable with a woman urinating or defecating within in a cramped space), or "something like the news cycle sensationalizing a female soldier being captured and abused or killed (or killed in general), where they wouldn't with a male soldier, does not sound like a problem that can be solved by continuing to do nothing about it." (personally, the first answer that comes to my mind is to tell anybody who does sensationalize something like that to fuck off.)

Telling the news they can't sensationalize a story is like telling a car salesman he can't puff up his product, really. It's part of the product. They do it on any other news story, I don't see why they wouldn't do so here. I guess you could have men culturally deprogrammed, assuming protection of females is not an innate characteristic, but that would require quite a bit of effort over a long period of time. Women are viewed as the gentler sex for any number of reasons, and have been for several centuries. I don't think it's going to be any small task to change that, and I'm not sure it's ultimately for an equivalent good.

The casualty rates of those integrated units is something I'm less inclined to brush off, but I haven't been exposed to much hard evidence for explanations calling them the results of intractable evolutionary hard-wiring, and their casualty rates being high doesn't by itself explain things like the conditions under which they occurred (and thus how often one can expect to see similar results) or whether any possible reforms to how they operate could be undertaken that might help to reduce the number of casualties.

It also still doesn't speak to how to deal with the women who have been in combat, acquitted themselves, and who would ask for equal combat pay.

The casualty rates being high is not itself an indicator it's because of the women, but if the casualty rates are continuously high on account of the squad ignoring orders and dying to save females then it's plainly evident what the cause is, isn't it?

And I'm not really sure how to deal with those women with regard to arguments about dangers of including females in combat squads. If they can do the same job then they should receive the same pay. II think everyone would agree that women shouldn't receive lower pay if allowed to participate in combat.

[Rehab]

Most kinds of feminist opinions I can remember hearing on "women being viewed by societies as the gentler/weaker sex (and needing to be protected, esp. moreso than/by men)" see it as a patronizing form of misogyny, a way to deny women the ability to wield power. That as long as it's a de facto perception with enough support that it pervades dialogue on gender, as long as it's "the default" which must be argued against, people will always scorn the idea of giving women any form of power, and will resent the women who do have it. Accordingly, they don't care how hard anybody hangs onto the idea, they believe it must be torn down.

I wouldn't say the explanations for the higher casualty rates experienced or the behavior of those men is plain, or necessarily intractable and rooted in evolutionary psychology, no. The cause could also be, for example, that those men felt something they hadn't been trained to deal with in the same way they'd been trained to operate when a male comrade was in danger, and that reaction might be something they could be trained to not have. For all I've heard on the statistics (not very much, obviously), the assignments those soldiers were on may have seen higher casualties regardless, and/or those men might have gotten themselves killed in the exact same situations, but with a male comrade in perceived danger instead. Frankly speaking, for all we know, those men also may have all been somehow unusually sexist. I would say that until we can do something like monitor and interpret exactly what's going on in human brains in real time, we won't be able to ascribe a foolproof explanation for the behavior of those soldiers, and less so whether that behavior can't be changed+will indeed routinely and unavoidably lead to higher casualties.

Part of the reason I'm skeptical is that I assume militaries train people out of all kinds of behavior already. If, for example, one's view of some kind of person can be changed such that one can be depended on to kill them, I'm not sure I understand why the same person couldn't be trained to act differently than they're initially inclined to do around/towards women.

[Esau of Isaac]

But it's not patronizing. Women are by and large smaller and weaker than most males. In times past it was absolutely necessary to protect them and hoard females as a resource of sorts because they were far more valuable in the child-making process. Today it's a different landscape, but while the means by which combat has come to bear has changed the necessity for soldiers to be of sound body hasn't.

We're being told the casualty rate is higher than otherwise. That means that in the case in which this occurs with men the soldiers do not go out of their way to save these people. And the argument that it's sexist to go out of one's way to save a female is bizarre to say the least. In any event whether it is sexist or not is not wholly relevant, it's just an issue whether it's a problem. The military trains behaviors out of people, but it's not like everyone goes into a Clone Army room and has their memories and behavior wiped away by a machine. My brother is still a silly goof after being ground through the machine, he's just a silly goof that knows how to operate in an army unit.

Is this something that really needs to be changed? If what was needed to allow for a complete equality on the battlefield was a homogenization of gender back home, would that be preferable? I surely don't think so.