Unsurprisingly, our old friend “The Thinking Housewife” is aghast at the notion of women serving in combat. What is a little surprising is why. In one of her many recent posts on the subject she offers this unique take on the subject:
There are so many unexamined consequences of the full integration of women into the military that one barely knows where to start, but one of the obvious places is with the fact that the Armed Forces will be increasingly in the business of population control.
Yes, that’s right: women in combat means women using birth control. The horror!
You see, women who are nine momths pregnant can’t exactly serve on the front lines. So that means the military is going to have to get in the business of helping its women soldiers avoid becoming pregnant.
In addition to providing rations and equipment, troops in combat will need ample supplies of contraceptives — and under this mentality, it will be the military’s responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Given that pregnancies can be, even in the best of circumstances, “unintended,” a woman who becomes pregnant on tour after her unit runs out of birth control pills or condoms will now have cause to blame the military for her offspring’s existence. We will almost certainly see women suing the Army for damages after “unintended” pregnancy. And as a consequence, the military will need to become more and more involved in the effective sterilization of their female troops.
Um, what? Sterilization? When women stop using birth control, they can become pregnant. Heck, they can become pregnant while still using birth control. Calling female birth control “sterilization” is a bit like calling a condom a vasectomy.
She ends her piece with this doozy:
As I said before, women don’t join the military as equals of men in order to defend their country. They join it to destroy their country. An egalitarian military must embrace socially destructive ideals. What can be more emblematic of our times than a military unit equipped with guns to destroy the enemy and contraceptives to destroy future soldiers? We have lost both the will to fight and the will to live.
Time to pull out the Don Draper “what?” gif again.
Actually, I don’t think that will be adequate to convey the sheer WTFery of that conclusion. I’m pulling out the big guns this time.
Is Obama a leftie? I never noticed! *shame*
I don’t think I’m that much younger than you, Kitteh’s. My experiences are from the 1970’s.
@shigekuni
I think it probably has something to do with birth control.
Sounds like we’re much of an age, eli! I started school about 1970. I bet our schools were a bit backward with that sort of thing. I’m not sure how long before that it was that kids were still being stopped from writing left-handed, but at least I never copped any of that nonsense.
Yeah, Obama’s a leftie, I just double checked! 🙂
shigekuni – some of the regular trolls like Pell and Mr Al were banned (though Al sockpuppeted under various names, mostly as Steele, for months). NWOslave disappeared after the US elections; Creative Writing Student guessed he’s probably sitting on a deckchair in front of the White House shouting at the President from afar. (I really like that image.) Not sure if Meller got banned or not. Boring Schitck got limited to three posts a day and gave up. None of the great trolls of yore still seem to hang around; there are drive-bys and seriously boring ones (see above with Cassie the Terminally Stupid) but they don’t have the great frothing rants in ’em like the old ones.
I can’t be assed to look up if TTH is a Catholic, but Catholics actually do regard everyone who isn’t pro-life as part of a “death culture.” If you aren’t actively risking making new people at all times, that’s embracing death. I guess.
(Pecunium excepted, of course.)
Hey Kitteh’s, I was never stopped. Slightly younger. I had an older cousin, now deceased, who had the lefty drummed out of him. My parents said they tried a few times to switch the spoon, but I insisted so they gave up. I’ve been lurking lots and not contributing a lot, but how many manboozians are lefties? Totally OT, but heh, there you are.
I can’t be assed to look up if TTH is a Catholic, but Catholics actually do regard everyone who isn’t pro-life as part of a “death culture.” If you aren’t actively risking making new people at all times, that’s embracing death. I guess.
Yup. Katz is right, they do. And see evangelical christians as their allies.
OT is on topic here! 😀
C’mon you lefties, wave those hands!
Every time I think of someone who was forced to write right-handed I’m reminded of what George VI went through with that, among other things. 🙁
Thanks, Kitteh,
I’m off to bed. My friend is not so happy. I offer you an old link from Echidne: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7085/273/1600/Murphyinbed.jpg
I don’t know how this will post. He’s not doing so well. He’s just old. He has compression fractures in his upper vertebrae and he’s a lot grayer now than he was in this pic.
He’s 13+ right now. He has a lot of pain his neck. He wants to sleep in bed with me (even has an accordian case to get there) but he fidgets too much and I have to kick him out, because I need sleep too.
What a lovely boy, eli! Poor lad – it’s horrible seeing them go through old age and all the crap that comes with it. 🙁
@katz, the funniest thing to me on that “blonde extinction” debunking on Snopes is how the 2002 article postulates that men prefer bottle blondes to natural blondes, the 1961 article confidently declares natural blondes “the kind gentlemen prefer most”, and the 1890 article states that men prefer brunettes. At least the 1865 article traces their take on male preference (blondes, apparently either natural or artificial) to an arbitrary edict from Parisian fashion houses.
Just goes to show how patently ridiculous these declarations about what “everyone” “naturally” considers beautiful really are.
Yes, you’d think fashion was not a thing at all, wouldn’t you? ::rolls eyes::
Wasn’t red hair a fad, to dangerous levels, when Queen Elizabeth I reigned? I want to say the dye used to fake it was lead based or something equally dangerous.
Point here is that red hair was definitely a favorite for at least one time and place.
@eli such a lovely boy. Hugs for you too.
Not a leftie (though dating one!), but the stories about the left-handed scissors remind me of my favorite leftie story.
I was out at summer camp with my conservationist youth group. The first night, as we get ready to make dinner in the kitchen tent, we realize that our camp cooking kit did not contain a vegetable peeler. All the campers dug through their personal stuff, and behold, one person had brought a peeler! That person being the only leftie in our camp. And he had brought a left-handed peeler.
So we all look at his peeler and tell him “huh, looks like veggie peeling duty will be your job for the rest of the two weeks.” And he replies: “Ooooh no. We will assign veggie peeling duty around just like we normally do, and I will pull up a chair and point and laugh while I watch as you, for once, have to fight your way through a job with tools that were not designed for you.”
…And he did. Which, we all had to admit, was only fair. (We righties all survived, with most of our fingers attached.)
Elizabeth was herself a natural redhead – witness this lovely pic of her aged 13 – and she wore wigs in later life. I don’t know what was used for red hair colour then, but there was lead aplenty in cosmetics generally. At one stage (possibly later than this, when brunette was in fashion rather than blonde/red) lead combs were used. Certainly during her time the red and white face paint was heavily lead based, which may iirc be partly why her teeth went black.
Neurite, love that story! 😀
Kitteh — yeah I knew she was a natural redhead, and people tried to imitate it, what I can’t remember was wtf they used to dye their hair (cuz it wasn’t henna, that’d have been sensible, but probably not known in that place and time)
Ironically, at a guess, that painting is so red because of cadmium. Another one you don’t want to eat! (I paint with it, it’s expensive, but safe enough and an absolutely wonderful shade of red)
That was a fairly reddish reproduction, I didn’t take the time to look for a better one. Her skin’s very pale and the dress a pinky-red in the original.
Blonde was a big fashion thing in the 16th century. I’ve seen an Italian engraving of a woman wearing a sort of crownless broad-brimmed hat to bleach her hair without getting her face burned – the hair’s pulled up through the crown and spread over the brim. Can’t see it working too well in England’s climate, though …
There was some sort of face paint used in the nineteenth century (they did use ’em, just pretended even harder than we do that the “natural” look isn’t achieved with makeup) that turned the cheeks from pink to black if you sat too near the fire. Can’t for the life of me remember what it was, alas!
Pink to black? Whatever it was it doesn’t sound like anything you should put on your face! That’d be the same time period as all the attempts to fake visible veins huh? (Veins = pale skin = rich enough to not have to be exposed to the sun, ever)
No, this was mid-nineteenth century; the painted veins were late in Elizabeth’s time and probably early in James I’s, when court dresses had really plunging necklines and the white lead paint went pretty well all the way down the breasts.
But yeah, totally not something that should have gone on the skin in either case. There was also some sort of waxy stuff used in the 19th century that stayed put as long as you kept your face still; try to show much expression and it’d crack, giving you that lovely dried-fresco look. 😛
Why’d I think the veins were recent-ish? Whoops!
But hey, as silly as a human fresco would look, at least most wax is safe (guess it depends wtf is used to color it, but beeswax = completely safe…assuming you aren’t allergic to bees? o.O?)
(Biology student here): What you could do to make “blondes” much rarer than they are today is for random mating to take over–there would be the sample percentage of blonde alleles in the population, but since most of the world’s population doesn’t carry it, they would not meet up very often. Currently, people usually have children with someone of the same ethnicity, which means that alleles that are more common in one meet up more often than under true random mating.
But… umm… so what?
(Also: genetic diversity != diverse appearances. Africans as a whole are way more diverse genetically than everyone else because of the founder effect–basically, the whole rest of the world only got a sample of the diversity that existed in Africa at the time that humans emigrated out for the first time.)
Incidentally, that may be what have happened to the neanderthals–recent genetic evidence indicates that they interbred with humans considerably and over a wide geographic area, so one theory is that they didn’t go extinct, they just ceased to exist as a identifiable subspecies.There were just many more anatomically modern humans, and so that what humans today take after.
Also, I’m glad I don’t have lead in my face paint.
I read in (?) Scientific American recently that our genetic diversity might be miniscule anyway, at least in that we seem to come from one small group of African hominids who survived a huge drying-out of the continent during one of the Ice Ages.
I’m not trying to be narrow-minded, but I can’t believe this chick is a woman…is it possible to be fully matured and not have a damn clue how your own body works? I’m willing to bet, she’s either a v-card carrier or sterile, given her obvious ignorance of how birth control works.
Perfectly possible, Starla, sadly – and do us a favour, could you not call women “chicks”? It’s a real put-down.