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by Anonymous User on Thursday September 20, @07:29PM EST (#1)
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I think it's due to biology and breeding. If 15 men have sex with one woman, only one pregnancy will result. Conversely, one man can impregnate 15 women. How does this relate to the topic? Well, governments wanted the population to keep breeding. Say you have a town with 100 men and 100 women. The women are sent to war, and only five of them come back. Only five pregnancies can result the year after they return. If the genders are reversed, five men could impregnate 100 women within the first year after their return. Plus, the government wanted to keep the kids around, otherwise there was no point in having the women breed them.
If you do some research and look into captive breeding programs for endangered animals, you'll learn that the best scenario is to have very skewed ratio of females to males, with the females in the lead. One male panda can impregnate countless female pandas, and he can impregnate them anytime, but the female pandas can only get pregnant once a year. It's not that the breeders hate male pandas, they want to produce as many pandas as they can.
I think the "innocent women and children" had nothing to do with chivalry, and everything to do with making sure the population continued to propagate. The government has always wanted the most effective breeding population around. The women were kept alive for only one reason, and that was to have more babies.
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That may be true. However, we no longer have a population crisis. If we continue to say "woman and children first" and mean it, it must now have a different meaning. Likely to be one like the author points out.
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I wonder whether biology isn't part of this (much as I dislike the idea :-). It seems to me that there is indeed a built-in protective instinct towards women and children in men. With regard to 'survival of the species', that would make sense. Even if there is, however, it need not and should not IMO shape our destiny, and most of all, not make us 'expendable'.
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I concede to your points, but I think that chivalry does play a role in this. Preservation of the species may be the root cause of protecting women at the expense of men, but, over eons of evolution, I believe "chivalry" has developed as an emotional justification which further reinforces practicality. For example, even if it were shown that we could sacrifice young women's bodies at an equal ratio of young men's bodies with no significant loss to the population, I still think that we would prefer not to send women to war with men - because chivalry will take over where practicality leaves off. The two reinforce each other sturdily and reliably on this issue.
That's why I don't believe, in my heart, that women will ever be drafted into war, nor will female soldiers be deployed as combat troops. We will always find a good reason not to do it.
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I agree, Hawth. Chivalry plays a role. All we need to do is look at the inequal sentencing in the U.S. justice system to see that. Male judges, in particular, tend to sentence male offenders more harshly than female.
Feminists will contend there's a biological reason for that as well (that women are nurturers of children and should therefore remain free). The argument doesn't hold up, though, because even women who do not have children are given lighter or no punishment for the same crimes committed by men, who then do hard time.
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