A Voice for Men: we’ll support women in combat only if the proper percentage of women get killed.
Woman officially not in combat role.
As everyone reading this blog no doubt already knows, feminists have hailed the Pentagon’s decision to open combat jobs to women, which will allow women the same opportunities to serve as men. The decision is also a backhanded acknowledgement that, for all intents and purposes, women are serving in combat today already. (Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth lost both of her legs in combat in Iraq – but officially, what she was engaged in wasn’t combat.)
It seems inevitable that, as a result of this decision, young women will be required to sign up for selective service alongside men. While virtually all feminists I know oppose the draft, most agree that as long as registration is going to be required, it should be required for both men and women. Indeed, when selective service was reinstated in 1981, the National Organization for Women brought a lawsuit demanding this sort of equality.
Reaction amongst Men’s Rightsers to the Pentagon’s announcement has been mixed. Some have welcomed the change, as a “what’s good for the goose” acknowledgement of equal rights and responsibilities. Others, like most of the regulars on The Spearhead, predict catastrophe, as inherently unqualified women are sent to the front lines. Regular Spearhead commenter Uncle Elmer joked:
After this experiment runs its course, how many men will have died while bringing tampon supplies up to the front?
Can anyone tell me the additional garbage load from tampon-related issues on all-women submarines? Could a mission fail if some gal flushed her tampon down the toilet instead of following the proper mil-spec procedure?
But the most telling reaction has come from A Voice for Men, which in an editorial suggested that it would only support the move if women were required to die as often as men.
No, really. Here’s what the editorialist, presumably site founder Paul Elam, wrote:
AVFM supports the spirit of the new Pentagon Directive … However, any blanket approval of the new measure thus far would be premature. …
[T]he only way this new policy will have any meaning will be if it is mandatory that women face combat on the front lines. With 20% of the military being comprised of women, that means roughly 20% of combat related fatalities should be female. 1 in 5 of body bags being filled overseas should contain the bodies of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and girlfriends.
AVFM isn’t alone in hoping that one result of the Pentagon’s new policy will be increased injury and death for women. On his blog the self-designated “counter-feminist agent of change” Fidelbogen quoted – with a weird sort of semi-approval – one comment from an unknown person he says he found online:
I know this isn’t a laughing matter but this is pretty fucking sweet. Now those very same women who complain about how hard childbirth is get to experience real pain and misery by getting their arms blown off by enemy fire or their legs blown off by mines. Or getting infections when they have to stay at their post for days at a time without taking a bath. Those same women who say all men are rapists can now see what real rape is when they are taken as POW’s and gang-raped by foreign men at gun point and passed around like a piece of meat and then their heads blown off when they are done. This is real war ladies, are you ready for your cup of true equality?
In the comments on AVFM, meanwhile one Rick Westlake helped to make clearer the vindictive subtext of the AVFM’s editorial, suggesting that the Pentagon’s decision could be good for men if it served to
rub … some high-ratcheted, ‘entitled/empowered’ noses in the misandric, disposable-male double standard of the Selective Service system.
Our current society, including our military, makes mock of ‘equality’ by divorcing ‘opportunity’ from ‘consequences,’ ‘choices’ from ‘costs,’ and ‘benefits’ from ‘responsibility.’ Princesses are awarded all of the opportunities, choices and benefits and are excused from all the responsibility, costs and consequences. ‘Draft-pigs,’ meaning men, are made to shoulder all those dirty, nasty, dangerous and demeaning responsibilities, consequences and costs on behalf of the Entitled Empowered Princesses.
Putting women on the combat line would be disastrous for the military … But the fact remains, enough Princesses have clamored for the ‘opportunities and benefits’ of serving in the front line, heedless of the consequences and the costs.
By requiring Princesses to register for Selective Service, before they can claim the benefits that ‘draft-pigs’ can only receive if they’ve registered – and by declaring them liable for the same fines and penalties as the draft-pigs, if they don’t – we at least remind them that freedom isn’t free, that choices have costs, and that true equality includes responsibility and consequences.
I can already hear the thin, reedy screeches from the Princesses. Fine. Let them learn what it is to hump 35-pound fifty-cal ammo cans to feed Ma Deuce in a firefight. Or let them scuttle back to the home and the hearth, and give thanks for (and to) the Brave Men who will defend them.
Elam himself echoed this vindictive “let them eat equality” stance in a sneering comment posted under his own name suggesting that in the wake of the Pentagon’s new policy plenty of women won’t find the “aroma” of equality to
be so sweet … This is what feminism was always about, and now, after three waves, the chickens are going to come home to roost. Because feminism never was about anything but creating tax paying, laboring, consuming, bleeding and dying servants to the masters of corporatocracy.
They lured women in with visions of corner offices and autonomy, and now that they have fully taken the bait, the doors are going to be slammed behind them and locked. They will be left to languish in their “freedom” as corporate wage slaves, and when needed they will be forced to contribute to the rivers of blood required to keep it going.
NOW and others will likely succeed in keeping the last part “optional” for while, but it won’t last.
The grand daughters of today’s college woman is as fucked as any man in history.
To which every feminist I know would say: bring it on. Feminists are well aware that equality, along with its many benefits, brings certain costs. Putting more women into combat roles means, inevitably, that more women will be injured or killed. The feminists supporting the Pentagon’s decision are aware of this. Unlike many MRAs, though, they look at combat injuries and deaths as one of the sad but inevitable consequences of war — not as something to rub anyone’s face into.
Here’s a hint to any MRAs who think that either AVFM or the more blatantly sadistic commenter quoted by Fidelbogen has a point: Civil Rights activism is about uplifting everyone, not making others “pay.”
When the American civil rights movement took up the issue of voting rights, civil rights activists demanded that black people be allowed to vote without harassment or other obstacles like “literacy tests” standing in their way.
Civil rights activists didn’t demand that whites be kept from voting.
The Civil Rights movement called for historically all-white colleges to be opened up to blacks. It didn’t call for white people to be banned from these colleges too.
This is how you can tell that the Men’s Rights movement, as it stands today, is not a true civil rights movement. Because insofar as it is about anything other than complaining about (and sometimes harassing) feminists and women in general, it’s about tearing down rather than building up.
Instead of trying to build domestic violence shelters and other services for men, for example, the MRM is more interested in defunding shelters for women – even when their efforts in this area directly harm male victims.
It’s telling that when Father’s Rights activist Glenn Sacks had an issue with the advertisements being run by one DV shelter, he encouraged his followers to bombard the shelter’s donors with phone calls in order to cripple the shelter’s fundraising efforts – even though the shelter in question also provides services for men. It’s telling as well that MRAs rail endlessly against the Violence Against Women Act, and have celebrated Republican opposition to it – even though the act is officially gender neutral in everything but its name, and would provide funding for men’s shelters if MRAs got off their asses to build any.
Instead of fighting for the rights of male victims of rape, the Men’s Rights movement is more interested in downplaying the rape of women, wildly exaggerating the number of “false rape accusations,” and in endless discussions about whether or not having sex with women incapacitated with drinks or drugs is really rape. All of these things contribute to a “rape culture” that harms male victims of rape as well as female.
Not that most MRAs actually care about male victims of rape except as a debating point — perhaps because that would require acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of their rapists are other men. (MRAs do get outraged in the rare cases in which women are the culprits.) The group that does more than any other to fight for male rape victims is the anti-prison rape group Just Detention. Try to find even a mention of this group on any of the leading Men’s Rights sites. (The only mention of the group on AVFM is a comment in a post attacking a feminist writer noting that it isn’t part of the Men’s Rights movement.)
There are endless other examples, because this is in essence the way that the so-called “Men’s Rights” movement does business.
When you take a certain pleasure in the notion of women being “made to pay” or otherwise harmed when they seek equality, you’re about as much of a civil rights movement as the Klan.
Posted on January 26, 2013, in a voice for men, antifeminism, are these guys 12 years old?, douchebaggery, feminism, gloating, hate, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, paul elam, princesses, reactionary bullshit, taking pleasure in women's pain, the spearhead, women in combat and tagged a voice for men, antifeminism, men's rights, misogyny, women in combat. Bookmark the permalink. 1,143 Comments.
Lol, don’t tell my brother that, he’d totally do it. Actually, maybe I should tell him, always funny when he tries something like that and screams like he’s tries to shatter glass! (Never shoot yourself in the palm with an air gun with a new canister…that seems obvious huh?)
I’d say, “never shoot yourself,” and end it there.
All the people suggesting moon bridges may need to have a look at the size of my yard. (The pond will only be about 2’x3′, too small for koi anyway.)
Pfft, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to see him and my father have an air gun battle in the kitchen (remarkably, nothing was broken). As far as advice in general, yeah, probably best to just not shoot yourself with anything, well, unless you’re trying to kill yourself, in which case idfk.
katz — I’d go for just a fountain then, the self contained kind seem pretty easy to set up and maintain too.
@Katz
…Television Satellite bridge? They’re a bit less usable on account of the ariels though.
Oh, I thought the standard M16 magazine held 20 bullets, and the AK, 30.
US pot helmets have always looked humongous to me. The “soup plate” helmets look ineffective.
Thank you for your service, Pecunium. I know someone who was in the Air Force ROTC in college, and was deployed as a meteorologist; he got back safe and sound.
Someone else I knew in college was going join up and “do autopsies” in Hawaii. I haven’t heard from him since I took off my cap and gown, so I don’t know if he was deployed.
The closest I’ve come to the military is reading the gun nuts on the GURPS fora at sjgames.com argue about grains of powder and bullet and all that, and watching The Longest Day. I hope I haven’t offended (I suspect I’d hear about it if I had, though).
falconer: The M-16 was designed for 20 rd magazines, but they were converted to 30 in the middle seventies (and some SF/LRRP units were using 30 rd clips in VietNam).
It balances better with the extra weight, and means troops ea. have 270 rds ready to go, instead of 180. Ballistics wanking is silly.
The only time it matters is when one is taking tricky shots. To take real advantage of it requires some serious attention to detail. You have to know the ammo was all loaded the same; keep track of the lot, know the quirks of the rifle, and adjust the “dope” for the conditions. For a game… it’s bullshit.
A bog-standard cartridge will do the 90 percent of all jobs, 99 percent of the time. But everyone playing an RPG want’s to be special. In a modern game that means they “need” the “best” tech. But it’s silly, because you can just tell the GM, “I’m carrying a .30 cal rifle, scoped in, with match-grade boatails: Doped in, and logged”. Then the GM can take care of the rest.
Were I the GM, I’d expect you to ask me about weather, and wind, and range, and to tell me you were spotting the rounds, and keeping the rifle clean, and watching out for the scope.
Because the game mechanics ought to be about the role-play, not the hardware.
And no, I’m not offended. I like talking hardware. I was a unit armorer, among other things.
See, I was coming at it from a games-rules position. People can argue about load and powder and all that, but in GURPS it comes down to maybe getting a +1 to your Guns skill, which is big if your skill is modest and not so great if your skill is high. (In d20 system games every +1 increases the odds of success by a flat 5%, so I don’t see the point of trying to model finer than 5%.)
I guess it all boils down to, Just make the friggin’ attack roll already.
… I better stop making these threads all about RPGs.
Falconer: I come from an older school of GM. I use my dice, behind a screen, to deal with final effects. Why? Because shit happens, and it reduces the monty hall effect. The purpose of the rolls is to model final effects.
You can do all you like to make the “hit” happen, but what happens next?
You are better giving me generics than specifics, esp. with things like bullets.
Let’s take the “M-16″. If you tell me you have an M-4, and are using, “standard” ammo. I can assume you are informed, and that, given access to various stocks (from an armory which has to supply all the members of the family) for the situations you can expect.
So when you get into a firefight on an urban patrol, I’ll be generous and assume you took some A1 ammo, and the damage will be pretty good.
If you make a point that you took “green tipped A2″ ammo, you’ll be fine, up close, but if the target is more than 150m away the odds of a much less effective injury go up, because that ammo is designed for a longer barrel, and loses energy a lot faster than A1 (or even non-green tip A2) ammo. At 250m it’s likely to be a minor flesh wound.
Flip side. If you have an A2 and use green tip, it’s going to have a lot less immediate damage in close quarters (I won’t go into why, just trust me on this one, or look up cavitation), even when the injury is fatal. At longer ranges, however (200-350m) it will have a much more immediate (and even devastating) effect.
The M-4 is so-so against armor.
That’s because firearms are systems. No one part works better than any other, and putting the round on target is only one part of the equation.
And yeah, I still have a lot of dice with less than 20 sides.
I better stop making these threads all about RPGs.
So far you’re safe. We’re talking rifles, not Rocket Propelled Grenades.
:)
The first time I ran into the word RPG was in an RPG.
For the longest time, I thought it was just an in-joke.
Mostly I do fantasy RP (good old D&D), with the occasional sci fi RP (I had a Glitter Boy character once…).
If we were playing a modern game and you asked me what I had loaded in my M-4, I’d probably say, “Uh, bullets? In .223?”
If I was really on top of my game, I might give you the bullet’s dimensions in metric.(Ha! See? I wasn’t even aware that .223 and 5.56 NATO weren’t exactly identical until I looked .223 up. The upshot of this all is, I’m a piker, and I should shut up about guns.)I guess I’m more of a narrativist than a simulationist. (Yes there are philosophies of RPG design and play!)
The poor, lonely twelve-sider. But wait! Savage Worlds uses everything but 20-siders!
You’ve played Savage Worlds? Great game for a narrativist! I’m trying to get a campaign going now but I can’t find people.
Want to get into pedantry? .223 and 5.56 are different, by a smidgeon. You can use the former in weapons chambered for the latter, without any risk, but ought not do the reverse.
Same for .308 and 7.62.
I tend to be more narrativist, which is why I try to keep final control behind the screen.
katz: Yeah, the first time I encountered RPG I was confused. It was a military setting, and I immediately thought of gaming.
Oh oh oh, man, have I played Savage Worlds. You haven’t played Savage Worlds until you’ve played a Chi-ca-ga gangster fighting the thirty-foot-tall animated statue of an Amazonian alligator god with a Thompson (in .45 Colt Auto!) alongside the Rocketeer, Evie from the Mummy movies, and Rory the Plastic Roman.
It was an odd game.
I got a bennie for reminding the GM to use the alligator god’s bennies. It’s a bad habit I have of not keeping my mouth shut when I see the GM forgetting something when that forgetfulness works out to our favor. Maybe I just don’t feel like it’s a legitimate victory otherwise.
@Pecunium: Yeah, I like to fudge because “Save Or Die” isn’t particularly satisfying in every situation.
Although in my sci fi game right now there’s a player who’s ridiculously hard to hit, maybe I ought to fudge my attack rolls more. But that doesn’t seem fair to use it against the players.
Crud! My gangster had the tommy gun. The alligator didn’t have a tommy gun.
Grammar: The best friend of meaning.
I’m excited about bennies too; I got turned off of “fate point” mechanics because a friend’s homebrew system had a really shitty implementation of them, but they seem really handy.
I haven’t been able to think of a good name for my campaign yet, though. It’s set in post-apocalyptic Dubai. Anyone got any ideas?
Not sure if anyone posted this already, off the Jon Stewart show about women serving in combat, but here it is:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-28-2013/women-s-war-daily—military-brohesion
“Were I the GM, I’d expect you to ask me about weather, and wind, and range, and to tell me you were spotting the rounds, and keeping the rifle clean, and watching out for the scope.”
And this is where my preference for blades comes from!
“I guess it all boils down to, Just make the friggin’ attack roll already.”
And try not to be too stupid about it! Conjuring a ski-doo in a swear is the antithesis of helpful >.<
“The alligator didn’t have a tommy gun.”
You sure? It might need one when someone gets sick of it and makes gator kebab! (My ex-fiancé had a char with a giant [like, yard/meter sized] spider, I took a sword to that thing the first chance I got…he’d named it after my father too no less XD )
White wolf for me! Malkavian, because yes, I will turn over the whole apple cart to root out a few bad apples (a point completely lost on our anti-social troll)
See, the fundamental problem with “realistic” modeling and the reason I favor simpler systems is that, the longer you spend simulating each action, the less realistic it is. Spending three hours simulating a two-minute combat isn’t realistic at all!
katz: I agree. It also requires you to become an expert in everything the character might know. Tell me you’ve got a device, and trust me to have an idea of how well it works; since I did the work to build the game.
I has a bit of a sad. I’m not going to be able to get together with my group this Friday because I’m moving next week and I need to spend time packing. So they’re playing a pick-up Savage Worlds space marines vs zombies game.
Stupid adult life. *kicks pebble*
Of course it’s also not fun if the GM does all the rolling, especially behind the screen. Rolling is fun.
Yeah, rolling is fun, but some people are never satisfied.
In the last D&D game I played in, the player with the meat shield always thought he didn’t get to do “all the cool stuff” us players of casters did (I had a cleric), but by the end of the tale, we were all 12th level, he had 3 attacks a round, had AC 30+, and was routinely hitting AC 40.
He felt like his character couldn’t do anything. Having not spent any of his skill points for the last few levels didn’t help. I think maybe he felt straightjacketed by the concept of “class skills” and the higher DCs a lot of us were throwing around (the bard kept getting a 30+ on her bardic knowledge check) made him feel like he was no good.
Maybe he would have been better off in an earlier edition, where the lack of defined skills might not have made him feel hemmed-in.
katz: I suspect my theory of game play is shaped by the GMs who made good games for me. The brute force stuff, we rolled. The subtle, they added.
I
There’s lots a good GM can add to a game, I agree.
Or a bad one take out. Back in the late ’70s Larry Niven decided to look into D&D. The GM happened to be terrible; seems he like to kill off newbie players.
Larry decided this wasn’t his sort of amusement.
Wow, what a dick that GM was. Bet he laughed when he managed to get a newb, too.
“You should have seen that coming despite your complete unfamiliarity with the game!”
I believe the GM should give ample warning if the player’s about to do something stupid, but drop the hammer if zie persists.
As I recall the story, he not only liked it, he made a point to do it quickly, so that Larry was killed off in about 20 minutes.
He was lazy. Didn’t want to deal with people who didn’t know the rules of the game, so he killed them off, “to keep things moving, so it would be fun”.
That just doesn’t make sense. He wanted to keep the game fun … by ruining the fun of one of his players for the sake of the group.
Asshole.
I’m sorry Niven never tried it again, though.
me too, and a number of his friends. he’d have been good at it. Certainly Dream Park (and some influence in the rise of LARPing) imply that.
And it’s his sort of fun. I am sad, I’d have like to game with him.
I think I might get struck dumb to meet anyone who’s a celebrity, let alone play a game with them.
I’m awkward enough around people I’ve just met who aren’t famous.
I’m just getting back into being a GM after a very, very long break. We used to play a lot of the Palladium system, which has awesome scenarios but flawed mechanics. I’m used to improv… so trying to create an adventure path that can be loaded into d20 pro for the online games I play is an interesting challenge.
My very first game, the GM killed me twice on two successive sessions.
The second time, I declared that my character had seven identical younger siblings.
katz — who are being held hostage XD (don’t worry, they’re well cared for and you can get them out of in with diplomacy)
@katz– have you seen The Gamers: Dorkness Rising? Because if your character with the seven identical younger siblings was a bard…..
:D
@leftwingfox: The first campaign I played in was a Palladium FRPG. I was always morbidly amused by the frantic disclaimers in the front of the books that they were not endorsing or encouraged Satan worship. The Satanic Panic must have spooked them. Then again, I’m bashful about wearing my hobby on my sleeve in public, living as I do in the buckle of the Bible Belt.
I have fond memories of the Palladium FRPG, and some not-so-fond ones. The stats don’t do anything unless you’ve got a 16 or greater (and you never have a 16 because if you roll a 16 or more, you get to roll additional dice and add the result), the skills aren’t modified for the difficulty of the task, and combat takes forever.
One of the players was concerned with “maximizing [his] utility,” which meant doing as much in a combat action as the GM would let him. Once we fought an executioner, someone in a hood, and this guy wanted to use his telekinesis powers to both try to smother the guy with his hood and pull it around so the guy couldn’t see.
I think I sat out a session in a huff at the gaming table because they were all going to sneak in somewhere and they told me my knight’s clanking armor would give them all away. Guess that’s as good a reason as any for a tank to carry leather armor.
And then we played Rifts. Oh boy. It’s a wonderful world (the kitchen sink aspects get a bit of the ol’ shoehorn in places) but the mechanics are awful and there’s no way to balance a Glitter Boy character with any other character class.
So yes, would play again, but the headaches are awful.
I think there’s a lot of edition bashing in the D&D fandom because 3.5 and 4 are very rules-heavy, and that’s because WotC listened to the players’ questions and complaints. Why is THAC0 so complicated? Why does AC go down? My group lets every class get a Hit Die at every level. Why are there only 7 levels of divine spells?
And then there were the complaints about 3.5 characters, so for 4E they cut everyone down to doing half a dozen things, tops.
The worst thing about the grognards bashing newer editions, IMO, is that it can quickly escalate into bashing the players of newer editions as stupid or lazy or whiny.
Hey, can I ask a favor? Would those who have played Savage Worlds like to have a look at the rules for my setting and tell me if they seem reasonable? I’ve never played this system before and so I don’t have an intuitive sense if I’m Doing It Right.
Well, I’ve played it once, but lay it on me and I’ll look it over the next time I’m avoiding packing. (we just bought a house and we’re moving in on Tuesday.)
Whoop, hey, yeah, just like I said: Buckle of the Bible Belt.
I live near Knoxville, is what I should have continued on to say.
reminds me I need to arrange to get together next time I’m in Oak Ridge.
I’ve really loved this site so far (I’m new), and I’ve agreed with everything else in this article. However, I find it hard to understand how AVFM was saying that women should be required to die as much as men, when all they said was that 20% of military casualties should be women if 20% of people in the military are women, which doesn’t make too much sense either, but I don’t see how it’s at all saying that women should die as much as men. 20% isn’t anywhere near “as much” if I remember correctly, that said I still love this site and article! :)
Mar Ario — I know MRAs have specifically called for a 50/50 split of, um, draftees. With he above women as 20% of military, women as 20% of causalities, the implication is they want women dying at equal rates as men. I thought the comment might’ve been on the post the OP is about, but I got sidetracked by this:
Did she just say that drafting women is a terrible idea because women in combat just risk lives? (I’ll leave that for Pecunium, or just scroll up, he already addressed that)
More though, forced birth control and forced abortion?! What’s next, forced sterilization?
How about we just um, oh right, we already did away with the draft!
Sorry, judgybitch is really getting under my skin today apparently.
Argenti: it’s because JB is truly fucking horrible.
I just continue to be amazed how horrible. It’s one thing to claim that “those other girls” are obsessed with bath towels, quite another to encourage forced abortion for “those other girls” — it’s like she honestly can’t grasp that she could become one of ”those other girls”.
Also, I’ve been awake 30 hours. 30 hours, one tweet storm about Burma/Myanmar’s genocide of minorities, one twitter feed turned storify because of the biting truth of transphobia, two judgybitch comments…and a partridge in a pear tree.
Oh the focus on tampons… All I have to say is; menstrual cup.
Safer, more hygienic, won’t cause nasty infections if you can’t empty it every couple of hours… Not to mention emptying is simple and it can be cleaned with wipes or just rinsed with water.
Though ofc, I’ve heard of many, many army women simply using hormones to, you know, not have period at all.
A couple of things the article got wrong:
1. This has nothing to do with “sending women to combat.” It has to do with ‘Combat Arms Military Occupational Specialties (MOS)”
Previously, women could not enlist for a Combat Arms Specialty (11M, 11B, etc). Now they can. That’s it. Combat arms specialties are the worst in the military for promotions and careers, they’re the most physically and emotionally demanding and they represent the vast bulk of casualties. So – whoever tells you this was done to help women, well, if it’s a matter of career, safety, pay and opportunities, Combat Arms doesn’t offer any….
2. EXCEPT – As a former service member who served both as a 11b (infantryman) and in a more technical professional that women also held, I can tell you that when women come into a unit, they’re just put them into admin positions (97% of the time). They’ll end up getting the promotions, the guys will end up getting killed. They’re are plenty of admin positions in an infantry unit.
Dammit, where’s pecunium when we need him? *puts up pecuniumsignal in the digital sky*
RE: heyheyheyhey
So – whoever tells you this was done to help women, well, if it’s a matter of career, safety, pay and opportunities, Combat Arms doesn’t offer any….
Yes, but it offered women a CHOICE. To actually be in there in the first place. Just because you don’t see it as a pleasant choice doesn’t change that. I mean, I hope to never have to undergo an abortion, but I still believe that people should be able to make the choice for themselves if they need one. Savvy?
I’ll bear that in mind if anyone says that.
Meanwhile the post actually says that it was done for equality.
Which it was.
I’d like to see heyheyheyhey face up to the women I know who are Vietnam era vets that are a Navy Master Chief and Chief respectively. The went through the chief’s initiation where no punches were pulled because of gender.
Shit, is this Brandon trying to sock?
*Whines that women shouldn’t want equality because lack of benefits*
*whines that women allegedly get benefits* (please, citation needed).
Just, holy shit, what do you want? You’re whining when women get into the military, and you whine when they don’t and guys end up getting killed.
Apparently what heyheyheyhey took from this is that not enough women will die so it’s bad.
Any citations on women getting all the promotions?
The one woman army vet I know offhand has PTSD and is also physically disabled from being in Desert Storm. Don’t know what she was in, but it sure as hell wasn’t administration…
What were B’don’s tells, hellkell? (Apart from extreme tedium and a thing for illegally filming anyone unfortunate enough to be in his bedroom; I know about those.)
Kittehs: he also used to natter on about his Army experience, and guess who used to school him regularly?
Oh god, did he really? It shouldn’t surprise me, but…
Oooh, ahh, I know the name, don’t tell me, it’s on the tip of my tongue!
OMG… Women in combat. It already happened in WWII. There were many Russian women in combat and they were quite successful. They were good pilots – both bombers and fighters. There was rumors that women were better snipers than men were. I am not sure if that’s true, could be just a myth, but there were many women snipers. Most of combat medics were also women. I am not talking about nurses I am talking about combat medics.
Not to mention that nurses are hardly tucked away safely far from combat, either. Just ask the women who were captured by the Japanese during WWII what a cushy desk job that was.
How *fascinating* that the US military has so many people in it and so much money to burn* that women in trades don’t actually do their trade. Or are you adding in the civilian females as well? Or are you forgetting the paperwork that comes with supervisory positions and forgetting about the other trade duties associated with higher rank?
* some trades get paid higher than others for the same rank.
All necro’d women in combat threads must be used as excuses to discuss Aviation Group 122. So let it be written. So let it be done.
I was thinking along those lines, katz! :D
And there was that woman whom the press made a Damsel of in the Iraq War, crap I can’t remember her name, who was wounded when her column was attacked, and treated in a local hospital, and the US went in all Big Damn Heroes and there weren’t villains to shoot or evil doctors to save her from. Jessica something? Anyway, she wasn’t in a combat position but she was thrust into combat.
@katz: And Aviation Group 122 flew planes that seemed like the last survivors of the last war: canvas skin, wood structure, open cockpit… other aviation groups at least got something like a modern fighter. The Night Witches were just awesome, and every time I think about them I think about the maxim of how a woman has to work twice as hard as a man to earn half the praise.