The Weakest Link

When she was good,
She was very good indeed, 
But when she was bad she was horrid 
--There Was a Little Girl, 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of 
--19th cen. nursery rhyme 

She may be weary, women do get weary,
wearing the same shabby dress
And when she's weary,
try a little tenderness.
--Try a Little Tenderness, 
Frank Sinatra

~I think ugly girls should be
shot at birth by their parents.
It's bad enough being born a girl...but ugly and clever...
~fancy you're clever, do you?
  ~I rather hope so. I'm done for if I'm not! 
--My Brilliant Career (1979)
 ___________________

Myth, media and reality: Tough Grrrls

The Marines recently pushed back the requirement that female recruits successfully accomplish 3 pull ups as more than 50% could not manage that feat, "delaying the prerequisite as it tries to integrate thousands of women into combat roles by 2016, the Associated Press reports."

The myths surrounding female vigor have shifted over time. There were the fabled Amazons who possessed physical prowess and goddesses who wielded the power to command others to do their killing. There was Boudica and Joan of Arc, and the rare women throughout history who went to war under cloak of male's clothing.

Patriarchy emphasized female reliance upon the male's brawn, and diminished her further through representations of the hysterical woman at once enslaved to her hormones and therefore a threat to the male's surety of his lineage, while at once ensuring the male's place as the satisfier of her wanton lusts.

Freud introduced us to the male's fear of engulfment and the vagina dentata, and the ever-receding possibility of sexual parity issuing not only from the inherent structural differences between the sexes but also our own particular neurosis and psychoses. It would seem the sexes would be forever consigned to opposite sides of the cave, cowering, glowering and licking their chops. The agreement allowing for one-on-one cohabitation was the marriage contract, a prospect based upon the distribution but not equalization of labor.

The 20th century ushered in film, actors, computer graphics and a social ethos which says, "Free to Be ... You and Me." In a generation we went from female cops like "Cagney and Lacey" -- of indeterminate sexual orientation -- to sexy killers like Ziva David on the popular television series NCIS. The boys can play with dolls, and girls can watch G. I. Jane and Lara Croft Tomb Raider. It's all good.

Fast forward 30 years and the new tough females are borderline or straight-out psychotic killing machines, like the female characters on the t.v. series Person of Interest. Forget bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan -- she does not care about making you feel like a man, because she's too busy co-opting your positions. Or so the media would have you believe.

The press hypes the new aggressive Alpha female and most accept the idea of women in combat and the death of the draft. But Ranger's position has remained steadfast: women should not be in the combat arms or maneuver or deployable units.

He does not hold this position because he is a misogynist or a dinosaur, but because the facts bear out his position. He is sorry to stomp on the parade of those who maintain the happy thoughts like "anyone can grow up to be President." 

The Army teaches that a unit is as strong as its weakest link. Soldiers train hard to achieve a strong chain that can pull a heavy load. Individual training strengthens the individual, and these single units are integrated into unit training after which they become deployable assets. This is the basis of all combat effectiveness and unit cohesion.

Combat is neither glamorous nor does it have redemptive value. In training, men frequently lose weight and get beaten down hard. It is doubtful that women could perform on the brute physical level of men like Medal of Honor recipients Staff Sergeant Jon Caviani and SSG Roy Benavides, who killed enemy in close quarters combat with their fighting knives after having suffered grievous wounds (Caviani put his knife in a man's brain and was forced to leave it as it became bone welded and would not extract.)

SSG Fred Zabitowsky broke his back and ribs but managed to pull three men out of a downed helo and drag them to an extraction area. He was burned, broken and gunshot, yet he hefted soldiers onto his back. Like so many MOH recipients, Zabitowsky accepted the award on behalf of his fellows, whom he credited with operating at the same level of heroism. (We have written about Ranger associate Paul Longgrear, who led his men out of the Battle of Lang Vei with a broken ankle and head wound.)

These acts are those of the fighting male operating full bore. Unlike Title IX in women's sports, the battlefield may not be arrayed so that women fight only their physical peers. The fact is, most men who qualify for military participation can physically dominate most women in a fight scenario. This is why most Olympics sports are segregated by gender -- it is not to give them the disadvantage, but rather to offer them parity in competition. This "separate but equal" is fair.

Ranger anticipates objections that these are extreme scenarios, but this is what the military's "chain" concept is all about. 

Twenty-four Medals of Honor were recently belatedly awarded to men who had been denied their awards due to racial or religious prejudice. Ranger challenges anyone to read these MOH citations and image a female performing the same deeds. It does not come down to bravery or patriotism alone, it comes down to sheer physical capabilities.

So what's the solution? Put women on 155, 8 inch, 4.2 mortars? Will they pull motor stables with the mechanized and Armor? Will they carry a Barrett 50 or a GPMG? Will women hump ammo as assistant gunners? Can they throw a grenade and fight with men in close quarters combat? Endure the filth and privations of the battlefield?

Ranger does not believe combat effectiveness should be compromised in the name of raising the glass ceiling.

 [cross-posted @ MilPub.]

A Room of Her Own

 --"Safety Last!" (1923)

 It's physical
Only logical
You must try to ignore
That it means more than that 
--What's Love Got to Do with It?
 Tina Turner 

I don't know what you think I am
I'm not no magician I tell you no I ain't
Maybe I can open your pants  
But big fucking deal 
--I'm a Boy, I'm a Girl,  Johnny Thunders 
________________ 

When blogwriting, one has the tendency to expostulate, to grandstand and even proselytize (though we're neither Mormons nor Seventh Day Adventists), and Ranger was perhaps not fully exploring every aspect of the issue in a recent presentation, "Sex and Violence"; we may charitably chalk that up to a sin of omission rather than commission.

Comments to the piece @ sister site Milpub have provoked some dialog amongst the principles here at RAW. Friend FDChief is correct: our analogy does not quite hold. Moreover, he states the observation that a member of a democracy only obtains full citizenship when he or she may participate in every aspect of maintaining that democracy, which may mean full participation in the military, if not in the porn industry (though women's role there is guaranteed.)

The result will be several days of looking at the issue through different eyes -- both mine and Rangers -- seeking to clarify the problem, shore up the analogy and to explore any possible resolutions. No one installment will be complete, so we what follows will be a series of posts looking at different facets of the issue.

So let's define the topics and what porn and war share as far as opportunities, causal effects and requirements (of all players).

Since at least the Venus of Willendorf 20,000 years BCE, men have enjoyed viewing representations of the female body (head not always needed, thanks). Humans enjoy gaping at protuberances, the more grotesque, perhaps, the more fascinating. Ranger is amongst the crowd of his fellows who has enjoyed the same. However, he also recognizes the necessary objectification and frequent degradation often involved in these depictions; this is an acknowledged tension for perhaps many viewers.

His thoughts actually stemmed from what he sees as the evolution of porn from fairly innocuous early 20th-century blue movies to the more violent representations of recent decades. Crush films -- the brutal murder of animals -- is but one perverse incarnation in an industry that has few bounds on its impositions upon the human body. They, along with "snuff films" -- the human equivalent -- have ostensibly been banned, and represent probably the outermost limit of what has been achieved in this genre. What remains is often not pretty. 

(As an aside to the crush films, a Florida Representative even proposed a ban on the cruel practice of "cow-tipping" in 2004 [it did not pass], yet we may do the same and worse to our women, fat or otherwise, any day of the week. But that is a topic for another day.)

We know what is cruel and what is exploitative, but that does not slake our taste for such things. Most pornography, besides the actuality of the sexual representation, is an exercise in power, both that imposed by the viewer and the producer/exploiter (film industry; actors, etc.)

When commenter "ael" writes @ milpub, "This ability to empathize makes pornography inevitable. Watching people have fun is also fun", he is showing himself a man of compassion, but perhaps not recognizing the darker impulse behind porn. Is "fun" truly the thing sought? Perhaps in the way that self-gratification is "fun" to the narcissist (and with that comes the additional destructive resentment of his need for porn, but that again is another topic.)

A recent piece, "The Conspiracy of Pornography Exposed", indicts porn consumption as a narcissistic retreat from reality and a controlling experience of a simulacrum representation. As such, it cannot move beyond a physical response to the impersonal yet universal carnality spooling out before him. Viewing porn is a release into the libidinal free from the superego (unless mom breaks into your room, or your mind.) 

So porn is basically an avenue for self gratification, at the expense of having to actually engage with the sex partner up close and personal. It does not extinguish the libido of course; it is merely a temporary physical release. The partner used to achieve that end is obviously a projected objectification, a facsmilie of a woman who is used to self-gratify. 

But along with man's desire to own and expropriate the feminine is his strong drive for protection of the female, something which often fuels his lust to fight, presumably for his society's protection (as explained in books like What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II.") In fact, this is one of the main arguments against having women on the front line, namely, that man's protective instinct will kick in and he will act on those intrinsic impulses, ignoring good soldiering and endangering himself and his fellows in the process. 

Ranger spoke with a combat medic yesterday who said his biggest fear is that he would treat a less severely-wounded female soldier before he would a male, thereby violating his triage training. This favoritism on the basis of gender is a very real and indwelling impulse. 

Women seek parity with men when they seek equal pay -- Senator Elizabeth Warren is fighting now for a Paycheck Fairness Act (how many decades after the Equal Rights Amendment Failed?) -- and this is rightly so when one is thinking equal pay for equal work. But what about those domains in which men cut women a break due to their lesser physical capabilities, a reality for most women in strenuous, physically demanding work environment -- an environment like being an Infantryman on the front line of a fight. How would this play out on the battlefront?

When Ranger worked in a machine shop as a young man, he watched as the male workers lift heavy buckets of material for the female workers -- something which was the women's job -- even as this was in violation of union agreements. It's just the way it is. 

So let us summate the truths we have: Men watch porn, a media which is by necessity an objectification of women. Men also have an innate protective feeling toward actual women in their lives. Men are competitive, and excel in certain physical arenas against most women. 

Add into this mix Equal Opportunity measures which force the entrance of women into previously all-male domains (the first female SEAL is expected soon, for instance.) Many men, including Ranger, have enjoyed the combat arms as being the last bastion of male camaraderie; this will be gone once women enter their ranks. The time-honored protective impulse will be challenged, and the possible fall-back if uniformity in ranks is to be maintained will be for men to change women into the unfortunate object, a position which they themselves occupy in war.)

The conundrum: How to allow women to escalate through the military ranks sans combat or Special Forces experience, the traditional means of gaining respect in that world, but jobs in which they will not necessarily perform well, and perhaps not even due to their own shortcomings? Their success seems doomed from the outset, and there is no reality game simulator which will be able to definitively represent the actions of the players on the ground once actual fighting starts. 

Just because something can be done, should it? It asks the question, "Where is a woman's place?" The feminists say, "Anyplace she wants to be." 

Maybe, but stand on L street SE in Washington, D.C. at night and even G. I. Jane would be at risk.

More to come ...

--Lisa and Jim

No Human Resources on the Battlefield

 Your screens and publications are full 
of prescribed smiles and raised glasses.
What is the joy about? 
--Alesandr Solzhenitsyn 

By educating the young along the right lines,
the People's State will have to see that a generation
of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat
that will decide the destinies of the world
--Adolf Hitler
 ______________________

[Women in combat arms, cont.]

Aside from the obvious physical disparity between the sexes is the obvious psychological divide.

Yes, the feminists and Marxists will dismiss the concern with a flourish: "It is just a social construct ... smash the confines of the construct!"  How's that working out for you?  Jung's archetypes are in full swing, and even the most liberal among us watch helplessly as their sensitive boys play at death in video games, and their enlightened girls yammer for all the acouterments of the the latest girlie heroines.

WE will address two of the obvious and perhaps more dire psychiological consequences of placing women in combat units on the front line; Ranger voices the first; I, the second

[1] Vulnerability

Men can be weak around other men; they cannot be weak around women.  In order to counter this taboo feeling of vulnerability around females, they will be prone to taking larger risks, exposing them to greater casualties.

Male camaraderie is built around the idea of vulnerability.  When men work in a combat team, one's mates observe and learn each man's weakness, and in response, will come to his aid.  Men assist their fellows in different, sometimes socially not politically-correct, ways. Tough-guy joking may a part of the response, but solidarity follows, and one lends a hand to help the team member compensate for his vulnerability.

Men are raised for much of their early lives by women, and prove their manhood via their individuation and differentiation from women, an often psychically challenging and sometimes even violent process.  The break must occur in order to not be women, themselves. When the chips are down, in combat, and they are trying to hold together the pieces that define their manhood, they do not need the threat of psychic disintegration via the presence of a female.

Combat is not a socially-sanctioned environment.  Military combat requires the limning down of the individual to his most basic self.  There is no place on the field of combat for a Human Resources officer to make sure sexual harassment does not occur, and yet we would not think of denying that most basic civil human consideration in the average general work environment today.  Combat is anything but an average unertaking.

We submit that combat is not just "another job".  The combat arms requires a man to function in a way that is not socially acceptable.  It is bad enough men must do it, but why would we want to complicate and endanger that most fraught task by bringing women into the fray?

When you are wound tighter than the girdle of a baptist minister's wife at an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast, you need your bother in arms.  You might still emerge somewhat effed up or dead, but a woman cannot provide the fuel needed on the battlefield.

 

[2] Brotherhood

An extension of Ranger's idea is the unique brotherhood forged outside of the ordinary social construct.  My simple thought is that the presence of women -- even be she an XXY woman -- is emblematic of all women, and the female essence is one of softness and comfort, things totally at odds with the imminent project at hand.  Killing of people, possibly women and children as well as men, is counter to all normal human impulses, yet is a necessary part of the job of the combat arms.

It is well enough to say a woman may be able to overcome her nurturing instincts, but we are concerned here with the effect of their presence upon men.  I believe that even the most masculine of women will, in a dire environment, remind him of the female presence in his life, and every man possesses this image.  It has long been the sustenance of a fighting man to remember his (mother/sister/girlfriend/daughter/etc.), but absent her actual presence, he may turn that off when the time comes.  Ditto the computer screen or the Skype; it is just shut down.

Every man has his trouble and concerns, and Jim mentions the ability of men to be vulnerable with each other.  So it is even in the civilian world.  If a man gets a "dear John" letter, his buddies are there to console him.  When appropriate (if she's a cheat, let's say), he may even get told what a "c*nt" she is, and that a better version will come along on the next bus.  This is one way we begin to feel better, but that innate response would not be allowable in mixed company.

Jim does not like my reasoning, but I feel it is sound.  If our readers wish to add to the topic, we are willing listeners.