Essay: "There's a difference between military's men and women"

It's about taking on risks as well as rewards. How can a female officer with no combat experience keep getting promoted over men who have it and because they have spent less time back in "The Palace" than her, while she has managed to get in good with their superiors who make the promotion decisions? Happens all the time.

Also, with regard to Selective Service, it is a matter of equal protection under the law as well as applying the notion of equality to a context in which it has been long-neglected. Women can hold swords and use them (and do-- ever been to a fencing contest?). They can hold knives and use them (and do-- just read the news) They can hold guns and use them (ditto). The only reason throughout human history that men have been shunted off to war and women not is the fear that if too many women are killed in battle, there won't be enough left to make more babies. Well, at 6 billion+ and counting, the human race no longer has such a concern, and given that in human history less than 2% of the population has been exposed to organized combat ("war"), there really never has been that much reason for concern anyway.

"Selective consideration for women" instead of "Selective Service for women" -- been that way for millenia. That needs to change.

make the women sign up and then draft 'em if it comes to that. they want equality? let'em have it!!

I do suggest, however, that "all women" platoons are created so that men will not be put at increased risk by having women included in their combat platoons.

this will also allow very clean statistics on performance.

oregon dad

One would surely expect Ms. Gandy to advocate forcefully for equality in this matter, and share her usual outrage that women are being denied their rights...

in this case, to be required to register for selective service as men's equals.

(Wait, wait, wait .... dead silence from N.O.W. on this topic.)

I am in fact against sending mixed gender combat teams into war theatre, because the Israelis studied the consequences in the 1980's and concluded that women in the frontlines were a total liability.

And, not because a few GI Janes couldn't perform.

It was due to the ancient code of CHIVALRY that they abandoned combat gender integration.

In a nutshell, the Israeli war experience showed that male soldiers will take extreme, foolish and mission-terminating risks just to protect female comrades.

So, if you put girls and boys together and tell them to go kill an enemy....

the boys have a double-burden that incapacitates their war abilities.

Recall the Jessica Lynch masquearade?

...I hope this wasn't put on this website with the idea that Lopez was defending men; she wasn't. Instead, she's reinforcing the double standard that argues that it's barbaric to send women off to fight and perhaps die in wars, but patriotic, heroic, and romantic to send MEN off to do the same.

I don't care if people oppose all war (such as the conflict in Iraq), or favor our intervening there; just don't give me this "half-sies" nonsense that says that one group of people should be protected from the battlefield, while another group of people is perfectly expendable.

"It was due to the ancient code of CHIVALRY that they abandoned combat gender integration. In a nutshell, the Israeli war experience showed that male soldiers will take extreme, foolish and mission-terminating risks just to protect female comrades."

Then that's what needs to be trained out of them. All soldiers, male or female, have the same duty toward all other soldiers, male and female.

B.G. --

Agreed.

One would think that 40-plus years of radical feminism would have "trained" (educated) men away from Chivalry.

Sadly, our male fellow-travellers-in-feminism continue to legislate anti-male intolerance like VAWA, refuse to conscript women as "equal" cannon fodder for imperialist wars, and relegate men to domestic indentured servitude via the Family Court shitstem.

You can't train a servile dog.

It is already trained upon birth.

Bred and then thoroughly conditioned to accept its voluntary slavery.

That is where most men are today....

Am I wrong?