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.
“As feminism is often defined as a movement that tries to achieve equality between men and women, feminists should be against the draft or conscription of males (or for the female draft). Of course they might think so, but they nearly never actively fought for equal treatment regarding the draft or conscription.”
1) NOW, the big bad Minas Morgul of MRA nightmares, has and for a long time has taken the position that the draft should either be unisex or should be abolished.
2) When have MRAs ever “actively fought for equal treatment regarding the draft”? Apparently all those poor mens being drafted, electing an almost all-male Congress, etc. are too incompetent to fight to either end the draft or include women in it, and so it’s all the fault of their big strong feminist sisters of this persists. That, or perhaps all those “conservative military readiness” groups oppose BOTH a draft for women AND women having a role in the military.
3) Nobody gives a shit largely because there isn’t a “draft” in effect. Men have to register for the Selective Service, but nobody is actually being *drafted*. If that happens you may confidently expect the political shit and the lawsuits to fly.
And as for the qualifications of females, again, the military indexes qualifications by age as well as sex. One would think that if a certain MOS requires a soldier to be able to do X pushups or run two miles in Y minutes, that is true regardless of the soldier’s age.
No katz, because the women soldiers all wear cocktail dresses.
Or according to NWO, no doubt a see-through top, micro-miniskirt, and no panties.
Ahhh!! That’s right how could I forget! XD
The cocktail dresses are so that the women soldiers can bully the the enemy armies into defeat by shouting “no means no” and “my ass is not an excuse for assault” at them. Naturally, women have such enormous control over men that the thought that they can’t have the women results in mass suicides.
Women have been serving in battlefields for many decades now. I did it, my grandmother and her sisters did it, my great grandmother did it. Nobody got sick from Vagina Death. If fact, our vaginas did the same thing they always do. They existed quietly under our clothes and didn’t bother us. Vaginas aren’t hard to take care of and women throughout the ages have figured out how to do it, even in the most dire circumstances.
It’s pretty obvious that these guys have little understanding of what a vagina is or how it works. I have a feeling that this is a maturity problem for a few select men, rather than a widespread vagina problem.
Lest I sound misandrist, all of the men that I served with for 2 years had no issues with me or with my vagina. They understood that I have a vagina and that I have periods, just like their mother, their grandmother, their sisters and their wives. We all slept in the same barracks, ate in the same mess tent, showered in the same showers and crammed into our sardine cans they call tanks for days on end. Nobody cared. Nobody made a huge deal out of it. We were more concerned about keeping our base secure than the status and health of my vagina. And that’s the way it should be.
Also, our sexist friends are aware that there are already women living in the desert, right? I used to live in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t say I noticed an epidemic of deaths due to vagina rot among bedouin women.
As an MRA I completely disagree with the article. I am in the middle of reading Warren Farrel’s book “The Myth of Male Power”. Dr. Farrell spends an entire chapter on the issue ofbeing drafted in the military and serving in combat. I believe as Dr. Farrell does that Women should be drafted in the military and allowed to serve in combat in a war, if necessary.
I disagree with the article stating some silly reasons women would not be good soldiers such as vaginal and pregnancy restrictions. That is nonsense. A woman can do anything a man can do. If a woman is trained to be in combat through boot camp, they will be as good a soldier as any man.
The current sytem of drafting only men in a war to me is sexist. True equality between genders would involve more that the current sytem mostly men dying in war for both men women and children but men and women sacrificing their lives for men women and children.
@ CassandraSays: Women are living in most combat zones and they manage. You’d think that, after cutting off supplies and utilities, that there would be this huge number of female civilian casualties from Vagina Death, but it still hasn’t happened. Even during the Seige of Leningrad, women were not dying because of their vaginas. Starvation and malnutrition, but not Vagina Death. To the contrary, women managed to get pregnant, shortly after the seige was over, so their vaginas held up just fine.
@Nova – why, it’s almost as if you were serving with men who actually had women in their lives and saw them as people!
@ Mythago: I know! They were so much more interested in my targeting accuracy, since I was their gunner, than what I had going on in my pants. They must have been a bunch of manginas, or something, because they didn’t care whatsoever about the fact that I have a vagina.
The only time the subject ever came up was when I bled through my pants. My CO asked me if I was injured and I said no. He said “Good” and that was the end of it.
This document here explains some of the issues with women in combat: http://www.hooah4health.com/deployment/docs/Female_Soldier_Readiness_Guide.pdf. It says though that women are responsible for taking care of their issues and recommends women carry extra things in their packs to deal with cleanliness and menstruation. Does that mean women have to carry heavier packs than men?
It also says women who are pregnant can still be productive members of their unit and details out how they deal with pregnancies.
I don’t see any special requirements that showers be dropped into combat zones, or that women can’t be functional without showers.
I think some guys think women need douches (those things are terrible) or scrub brushes and bleach to clean out their vaginas. It’s self cleaning. A person keeps the outside of their genitals clean with some basic water or wipes, not the inside by cramming stuff up there to squeegee it out. Besides, if one has a problem with infections, one little tube of medicine fixes it entirely. If one only has to be prepared for 30 days in the field with no facilities, then 1-2 small tubes of medicine is all that would be needed for the most infection-ridden woman.
Brandon: Also, the military does have a mechanism in place already and it says that women don’t meet the requirements for combat roles
You are incorrect.
The law prohibits women from being in combat roles. Chauvanists in the Army, when it looked as if women would able to attend Ranger School (it was a leadership course, until the mid-90’s) had it converted to a Combat Arms course, so that only men could be enrolled.
@Shora: The point is that Bagelsan is incorrect in how recruitment happens. The military doesn’t select your job, you do.
Also not competely true. There have been several recruiting scandals about limited options being given to people. I had a recruiter tell me (ca. 1985) that the only jobs open to me were 61M (heavy vehicle mechanic), 13X (random Artillery slot) and 11B (generic infantry).
I know of a 1SG in TRADOC who was convinced to retire (and so saving the embarrassment of a court martial) because he was culling the list of reclassification assignments to people who failed language school.
You have some choice, but it’s not absolute; The available slots, and the quirks of one’s recruiter are also part of the equation.
Speaking as a guy who was in a combat zone with women… he’s full of shit.
I’ve never heard of his AR about women getting preferential access to showers. Hygiene (for everyone) is a big deal. Per Regulation men have to shave, every day. Field Showers are to be provided, as possible; gender is immaterial.
Men in wet conditions, with poor hygiene, are prone to urethral yeast infections. Bathing matters, no matter who you are.
I went from March 27, to June 12, with nothing but baby wipes and bottle baths. Same for the women in my unit. Yeah, when I got back to Germany… I soaked in a shower for something like 45 minutes (that was on 23 June, IIRC, I am more clear about the shower the 1SG in Mosul had managed to rig for his troops, and I was allowed to use), but none of us was filthy, just grimy.
Brandon: From a death perspective, yes the Soviets died at a far larger rate than the US and the British but this was due to being overwhelmed by German technology and Soviet soldiers not having the proper equipment. Soviets died at a far greater rate due to malnutrition, disease, enemy fire and being a prisoner of war.
The Germans died by a far larger rate too, so it’s not that the USSR was somehow engaged in a different sort of combat.
The USSR had equipment which was comparable, or superior, to the Germans. The T-38, esp. the T-38/85 was, arguably, the best tank of the war (I’d say the Panther was, but that’s complicated by the rush to production, which meant teething problems were encountered on the front lines; which meant that any problems [and there were many; sort of like the 50 percent shorter life span of the M1-Abrams transmission when actually fielded, as opposed to what was expected from formal testing. Had those been discovered in comat, as opposed to excercises, it would have been very different], but the Panther was a lot more finicky than the T-38).
The Moisin-Nagant carbine was, in some ways, superior, as a combat arm; not a target rifle, to the K98. It was less prone to jamming, because of the blocking arm which kept the magazine spring from exerting any pressure on the round being put into battery. The safety was a little harder to engage/remove, but was more positive (it cannot be knocked out of safe) and was much easier to manage when wearing gloves.
The Ilyushin Shturmovik was, hands down, the best dedicated ground attack aircraft of the war.
The Werhmacht did a study of cold-weather gear, comparing theirs to the Russians (and recall, they, like the US in France, didn’t issue cold-weather gear until well into winter). They said the Russian was superior, esp. in terms of footwear (wraps, instead of socks, the felt boots (velenki) and stiched soles, instead of nailed, on leather boots.
In terms of tactics, the Red Army; after some initial setbacks (common to any peacetime army engaging in combat against an experienced opponent*, was adaptable. Their were supply problems, but they coped; managing to move their entire industrial capacity behind the Ural Mountains; while falling back behind the advancing Germans.
Was the pre-war purging of the Army a problem? Yes, and no. Because of the purge a lot of younger officers, who would have been shadowed by the men already in the ranks of General/Field Marshal,and holding the position of Army/Army Group/Front commander. But, contrary to the propaganda the US put out in the Cold War Years, the Soviet Army was flexible, adapatable and smartly fought. It wasn’t a case of, “throw thousands of men at machine guns until the run out of ammo,” but rather dealing with the situations on the battlefield, coping with the terrain and weather, and dealing with the enemy.
They were damned good at it.
Samuel, you won’t even carpool with a woman because of boners, but you’d serve in combat with her? WHAT ABOUT THE BONERS?
OMG Samuel’s back.
I’m sure he brought the lulz with him.
Do you think his claim to be a veteran holds up in general? Because I wouldn’t put it past one of these guys to show up here claiming to be ex-military because men MEN men, manly men, and frankly I’m surprised I haven’t seen it more often.
What a great thread. First Brandon refusing to believe we agreed with him, then Simon chiming in with “The Holocaust wasn’t *exactly* Hitler’s fault”, then Sammy comes back! Hi Sammy!
Nothing in particular to add here, other than OF COURSE vaginas can survive a couple weeks of minimal hygiene. Haven’t MRAs ever been camping?
Hellkell, off topic regarding my genitals responding to women
Basically I want to keep to this topic, which I have not done in the past and have been under moderation. I like Mr. Futrelle’s website.
Anyway., I would absolutely serve with a woman in combat. True equality between genders means women being drafted as well as men.
A woman should be allowed in Combat to fight with men. Having just men drafted to fight i n a war is sexist. NOMAS is against sexism of any kind.
A man should have the right to be an kindergarten teacher or a secretary just like a female has a right to be a plumber or sanitation worker or football player.
Clearly, having the current system hellkell of men only drafting for the military to die for both men and women is sexist. Women are great soldiers as well and have the right to be drafted and fight for our country and sacrifice their lives as many men do.
Well obviously they’ve never been camping with ladies. That would be all unmanly and shit.
Nova wrote Women have been serving in battlefields for many decades now. I did it, my grandmother and her sisters did it, my great grandmother did it. Nobody got sick from Vagina Death. If fact, our vaginas did the same thing they always do. They existed quietly under our clothes and didn’t bother us. Vaginas aren’t hard to take care of and women throughout the ages have figured out how to do it, even in the most dire circumstances.
There you go, firsthand proof that women should serve in the battlefield like men. Nova, what country you referring to? In The USA where I live we still have the sexist men only draft system. Moreover, many women who are in the USA military do not even see combat and work “behind the scenes”. That is wrong as well.
Hi Kristinmh been a long time since I been here
Toysoldier, you’re honestly accusing me of “intellectual dishonesty” for not taking completely seriously the argument of some random internet dude that women should be banned from combat because they have vaginas?
@Nova: My god! They were letting a female do their gunnery? Manginas, indeed!
@Pencunium and @Nova: Thanks for your service, by the way.
When I was growing up, in Russia, people, including women, bathed once a week. Water quality was far too poor in most places, supply was intermittent, and in winter, it was freezing cold inside those poorly insulated cement beehives. So, the idea of bathing daily would have struck people as fantastic at that time. Regular bathing was once a week, and people also washed their hair as needed (leaning over the bathtub and using a cooking pot) and availed themselves of a bidet, or a cup, or a bottle to clean their privates. In all my time there, I never heard of anyone dying of a raging case of unshowered vagina. Plus there was a period of hundreds of years when at least in Western Europe, people went without bathing for months and years, and that went double for the urban poor and the working class. And yet, somehow women at that time managed to survive and even reproduce. They probably didn’t exactly smell like roses, but believe it or not, a vagina-haver can go for a long, long time without showering and not suffer any debilitating ill effects.
I continue to be floored by some men’s belief that vaginas are such horrible, dangerous, deadly things that they necessitate industrial facilities and possibly containment crews, with maybe a strict quarantine, to ward off death — and I refuse to believe that people who hold such views are actually grown men. I really wish they’d stop embarrassing themselves already (or tell us that they have girlfriends).
Also, this whole complaint about women needing special accommodations? Not new. It was at one time used as a justification to deny women desirable employment (too much trouble to put in a ladies’ room in addition to the men’s room, especially since women pee in a horrible way that probably requires a separate plumbing system or something), and college admission (my own alma mater, although coed from its inception — the founder was an eccentric — went through decades of whining by a sizable proportion of male students to the effect that the university would have more money to spend on the academics if it didn’t have to provide women with “special treatment” in the form of housing and bathrooms). It astounds me that people can say these things and never realize the ridiculousness of it: that providing men with what men need, be it housing, bathrooms, or basic medical and hygienic supplies is just fine and dandy, but accommodating women, no matter how trivially (seriously, how much trouble is a plastic cup?) is “special treatment” and an onerous financial and logistical burden. Seriously, how come male-specific accommodations are never described as “special treatment”?