MRAs often complain bitterly that men have to register for the draft and women don’t. Ironically, many MRAs – sometimes the very same people – also think that women shouldn’t be allowed in the armed forces at all, or at the very least should be barred from direct combat.
One MRA who’s staunchly against women in combat is a Redditor calling himself Demonspawn. In a recent comment he sets forth “four huge reasons” why. The first is a doozy:
The vagina. You can’t keep it clean in battlefield conditions. Military regulations state that women on extended training exercises must have access to garrison or equivalent facilities for hygiene at least once every X number of days (usually 7). Why? Because otherwise you run a very high risk of a vaginal infection and can die from it. Those facilities cannot be guaranteed on the battlefield and therefore it is an even greater risk to women’s lives to use them as battlefield troops.
I’m surprised he forgot to mention the chronic problem of centipedes in the vagina.
The rest of his reasons are equally stupid, if not quite as amusing. Number two:
Public Relations. … Have you not read the articles when women soldiers die and it’s a big deal, while more dead male soldiers is just business as usual? Public support for war cannot be sustained in the face of massive female soldier casualties.
And three:
Men get themselves killed overprotecting women. This is the #1 reason Israel deintegrated their troops.
Yeah, it’s a terrible thing when soldiers try to protect one another.
His final reason returns us once again to the whole vagina thing:
Women tend to “get pregnant” when leaving for overseas trips… That destroys unit cohesion. Research the “pregnant navy” syndrome. One ship had over 40% of it’s female sailors suddenly become pregnant before an overseas trip.
I did a Google search for “pregnant navy.” In 2007, according to one article I found, roughly 11 percent of female soldiers had to be shifted to shore because they were pregnant; it’s usually less than that.
Women: trouble when their vaginas are infected, trouble when they’re clean. Why do we even let them leave the house?
Thanks to MuForceShoelace for posting the link to Demonspawn’s comment on the AgainstMensRights subreddit.
EDIT: I misread an article I originally cited about female crew members on a supply ship getting pregnant during the Gulf war. The percentage who got pregnant was 10%, not more than half. (In my defense, the article was badly worded.) I’ve removed the erroneous material.
Eh? When did I say “without any input from you”? If we somehow got into another total war scenario and had to mobilize everyone with a pulse then that might happen (right after the entire crust of the Earth gets nuked, but slightly before pigs start flying) but I certainly didn’t think that happened in our volunteer military…
I think he’s focusing on the least important part of your comment, bagelsan, in which you said that the military assigns roles.
Soviets placed most if not all of their troops on the eastern front while the Americans were split between the Western front and the pacific theater. Thus I see it as comparing apples and oranges.
Except for the part where I said, at the beginning of this whole thing,
and then you said
so who did what against Imperial Japan is only tangentially related to who does more Nazi-ass-kicking, since Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did not coordinate their strategy except for a few cases and didn’t communicate as much as they should have.
actually, I looked back. What you actually said was;
Which, as far as I understand, is exactly what happens
For the love of god, brandyn, we are agreeing with you!
I’m not!
Not to mention that the USSR wasn’t the only military with girls in, nor the only instance of military/war contributions from women. Like the female resistance fighters; maybe they were not technically in their respective armies but trying to distinguish military vs. non-military when your country is full of Nazis is kind of semantics. :p So I think the point that “ladies can kick Nazi ass too” stands regardless of Japan’s (stupid stupid) US-related decisions.
@Bagelsan: The military does have standards.
The military caters to women to a certain extent (see: special treatment for physical training requirements).
The military has loads of jobs that don’t require you to run around with heavy equipment and those jobs are mostly already open to women.
Combat jobs would be a good fit for women that can be held to the same physical standards the men in the same job do.
You were saying that the military just chooses for you the best job THEY think you are suited for. You dismissed the idea that you select the job and not them. So there is no scenario what the military just says “we think you are best suited to be a fighter pilot, so that is what you are going to do” or “you are a brawny guy so we think you are best suited for infantry”
So if all jobs are open to women and a woman selects being in a mortar squad, then I expect her to be able to move, aim and fire mortars and any other requirement of that job without her saying “but the men can lift more and are stronger than me so they should carry the mortar boxes”.
The only times when the military chooses your job is 1) during a draft and 2) when you allow the service branch to assign you a job they want you to do (i.e not signing a jobs contract…which is stupid IMO)
@Voip: You have succeeded in making yourself look like an academic snob. Congrats.
Meh, I’ve been in college for the past ten years, my quals are coming up, I’ve got an overdue paper, and my advisor has me reading German newspapers 20 hours a week for $14.75/hour. I take my pleasures where I can find them.
Nope nope. And nope. (As for the rest, I believe you are violently agreeing with me.) Better luck reading for content next time!
You can do it! Piece of cake! You are smart and knowledgeable and awesome! Rah rah rah!!! Look those quals in their beady qual eyes and ask if they feel lucky, punk, well do they??? (Hint: THEY DON’T. They gonna get pwned. BY YOU.)
(Next year when I’m facing quals I will expect the same back from you, please. ^^)
For some unfathomable reason, we’ve skipped right past the bit about bears, but I have to bring up the real reason we can’t have women in combat: If you were ever fighting bears, they would be attracted to the menstruation!
@ Bagelsan: You know, they never did. I heard that they were going to agree to leave the wimmenz alone, because Dworkin threatened to kick their asses, but they couldn’t find a notary public in time and there was this big offensive planned and they couldn’t be late.
Besides, it’s not like you can tell a missle or mustard gas to just kill the men.
Also, on the topic of the USSR, the news of the Nazi invasion spread fast and, once people found out what the Nazi’s were doing to civilians… they turned civilians into enemy combatants really fast. I’ve heard numerous stories of civilians bombarding Nazi troops with rocks, shoes, pots and pans, as well as rushing at them with farming tools or using hunting rifles to try to defend themselves. It was better than being taken alive and being sent to a death camp, a research facility or being executed.
Next year when I’m facing quals I will expect the same back from you, please. ^^
You’re going to be fine. I believe in you. Your department thought well enough of you to admit you, didn’t they? Out of hundreds of applicants for where you are right now, they chose you. You. they wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t think you were AWESOMESAUCE. Which you are.
Any feminist (of either sex) worth her salt knows full well that the military is a treehouse with the words “NO GIRLS ALLOWED!” scrawled on the door. Those mean boys won’t let her join in and play too!
Say! How many of you here are blogging from Wall Street to protest those mean old rich guys not ponying up to continue your entitlements in the wake of the federal budget crisis?
Student loan debt up the wazoo and no make-work government job in your field of wimminz menstrating vagina art monologue studeeez waiting for you when you graduate from your place of higher indoctrination? lol
BTW I was up on that balcony drinking champaign and laughing.
Well… At least in spirit at any rate.
yea I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re protesting, evilwhitemaleempire. And it’s not like there are any men protesting there either *eyeroll*
typical MRA ignorance. The fact that you’re laughing at people who are actually trying to make a difference proves how you are not oppressed in the least. Enjoy the champagne, I think I’ll grab a glass while I read more MRA stupidity 🙂
ah missed the “in spirit” comment. Oh well, I’ll grab that glass anyway hehe
1) The federal budget is not the problem, revenue is the problem. After 10 years of the Bush tax cuts NOT creating jobs, can we admit that they never will and finally let them expire? Oh no, rich guys have to pay 3% more taxes, how will they ever survive?????
2) You want to talk entitlements, let’s start talking about the $35 billion of our tax dollars that the oil industry sucks up every year even while they report record profits, and the billions of tax dollars that Big Agra gets, and the $60 billion in waste and fraud stolen by private contractors in Iraq. And oh yeah, about that war. How many trillions of dollars have we thrown into the toilet on that one?
3) Income disparity is at the highest rate it’s been since 1930. I feel like something big happened on Wall Street around that time but I can’t quite put my finger on it. And after we had to bail their asses out in 2008, big banks used the money to line their own warchests, buy out smaller banks, and grow even bigger. That’s quite a reward for nearly causing a global financial meltdown, isn’t it? Think that might be something to get angry about?
4) The idea that the unemployed is completely made up of entitled college kids is also laughable. Our manufacturing industry is gone. The only blue collar factory jobs are in the food and agricultural industry, and they hire undocumented workers so they can pay them nothing to pick produce all day or to blast pig brains out of skulls at the SPAM factory. The housing bubble managed to keep our skilled laborers afloat for awhile, but now that’s gone too. And the Republicans are arguing against the very infrastructure projects that would put a lot of them back to work again, earning a paycheck and stimulating the economy.
Keep those blinders on, jackass. You will never be in the top 1%. They do not give a rat’s ass about your life or your death. Divide and conquer is part of the plan.
Sand in the vagina? When I read comments like that, I become convinced that MRA’s are all ten-year-old boys with but the vaguest notion of the female anatomy, who are still horrified by the idea that there is a cavity there opening to the outside, OMG!! Freakshow!!. And of course, no hint of analytical follow-through: How come male soldiers don’t get sand up in their rectums? After all, the rectum is a much more spacious cavity than the vagina.
But if that MRA is not, in fact, a ten-year-old boy but a grown man who joined the “movement” as a result of a bitter divorce — well, the fact that he has so little familiarity with the female anatomy tells us everything we need to know about why she left.
Cue the unnecessary mansplanation.
Brandon, it’s clear you never actually tastefully arranged finger-sandwiches on doilies. Let me explain that to you …
@Bagelsan: You wrote:
“The women who would be assigned to combat positions would presumably be the women who can handle them, just like how it works with men. :p”
Seems like you did. Otherwise you have another definition for “assigned”. It also doesn’t work like that with men. You don’t get assigned…you get screened for jobs. There is a difference.
@AACC: No I never did arrange finger sandwiches on doilies. But if this thread was about that and I wanted to know more about it, I would defer to you since you know more about them. It isn’t mansplaining , it’s called opening your ears and learning from someone that has experience regarding something you do not. I know jack shit about catering so if you did catering for a living I would actually, you know, listen to you because you have more experience.
Futrelle, I do love your intellectual dishonesty, especially since Glen Beck went off the air.
Vaginal infections are a real problem women face while on tour. The problem is not as dire as Demonspawn claimed, but he has a point that the facilities or the necessary treatment might not be available in combat situations. Likewise, there is evidence that cultural biases that favor men protecting women do impact how men react. You may not see an issue with this, but in a combat situation it could cause a soldier to worry more about the woman in the group than the person who is actually more at risk or injured. The article you link to concerning pregnancy in the Navy states, “When pregnant sailors are reassigned, shipmates must shoulder their workload until a replacement arrives, often months later. Inevitably, sailors grumble about women getting pregnant to avoid deploying.” Again, while it may not be the major problem Demonspawn claimed, it is still a valid concern.
If you are going to pick a fight, at least check what the person says before you tell them off.
Toysoldier: There is precisely one mention of vaginal infection in that document. It is mentioned only as a possible problem, easily solvable with proper attention to hygiene. Do you ever read your own damn links? Or do you just assume that because it has ‘women’ in the title it must just be a litany of the woes we cause?
@ToySoldier: I would be perfectly happy with male soldiers not overprotecting female soldiers. There is a difference between looking out for your fellow soldiers and placing yourself in more danger to protect someone who’s only difference is that they are female.
@KarhleenB: The point is that you can’t always pay “proper attention to hygiene” in the battlefield. That is why even when soldiers were changing their socks and trying to keep their feet clean and dry…they still got trench foot.
And trench foot gets you a visit to the docs. Same as a vaginal infection would. Same, for that matter, as a skin infection on the penis. We have these things called antibiotics, they’re really wonderful. you should look into them.