Women bear more than their share of military sacrifice

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2013-09-05 19:45

Article here. Excerpt:

'The women's movement has struggled for equality for years, but when it comes to one aspect of serving in the military, women have, unfortunately, achieved more than their share.

A RAND Corp. study found predictable results when it tracked the marital status of more than 460,000 U.S. service members between 1999 and 2008. With each passing month that a spouse was away at war, the chance of divorce increased.

Especially vulnerable were couples who married before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, who didn't expect long deployments to be part of the equation.'

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Comments

... OK, I see the argument. Married to a man deployed away, yes, the marriage gets stressed. The article asks if men whose wives are in the service and deployed are "more likely to stray". Really, now. It's a perfectly acceptable question and probably more accurate to ask, "Is a woman whose husband is deployed more likely to stray under those conditions than if he were not?" Amazing how people never seem to ask this question about women when studies repeatedly show that infidelity is an equal-opportunity employer.

Now as for women bearing their share of military sacrifice (or more than, as the article claims), that is questionable. Do they get shot at? Bombed? Targeted in other ways, by people setting up roadside bombs? Do they risk getting swept off ships and into the sea, not to be noticed absent perhaps for hours? No, not unless they are actually themselves in the service and deployed in or near a dangerous situation. And there are not nearly as many women in that position as men.

I have heard through the years that wives of men in the service bear "the same" burdens or "more of the burden" than their husbands. To this do I call BULLSHIT. It simply isn't true. And if you don't want to deal with being married to a man who might get called into combat service, and you are not married to him yet, then for Godssakes, don't marry him. It's up to you.

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2013-09-06 01:10

I See a lot of claims about how women have it worst, supported by the stats regarding women... but not the comparable stats regarding men. Just because it happens to women, doesn't make it worst than when it happens to men, or more frequent.

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Submitted by Kratch on Fri, 2013-09-06 14:49