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.
Starla — it’s standard conservative Christine propaganda — the pill will (in their minds) prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, and since the soul is present the moment sperm meets egg, that’s abortion, and abortion is murder, so taking the pill is murder. This BS generally goes hand in hand with the idea that anyone having sex outside marriage is a horrible vile promiscuous sinner who deserves to be punished, since they can’t exercise self-control and just give in to “the lusts of the flesh”. Oh and birth control, at all, is preventing god from giving you all the babies he wants to (may or may not be her belief, but is part of what’s behind putting unintended in quotes — having sex? Intend to make a zygote = embryo = fetus = baby)
In plain English — once you have sex outside marriage you’ll fuck anything you can, you’re bound to get pregnant since you’re having sex, and the pill is abortion. And since you aren’t making babies, but are having sex, you’re “effectively sterile”.
And this is why the not-an-ex and I joke that it’s a miracle I don’t burst into flames in church (pun utterly intended)
On the best of days, this sort is all “but honey, you’re preventing gods will by preventing those children from ever existing” and the rest of us nod and sile and back away slowly.
Aren’t US armed forces already in the business of population control?
@Kittehhelp
I’m left-handed, with my one aunt left-handed and my one uncle ambidextrous but very little other lefthandedness in the family. I just use right-handed scissors left-handed personally.
Only things I do right-handed are shotput, which I haven’t done in ages, and playing instruments. The handed instruments I play necessitate this to some extent – while I could put my hands on the bagpipe the other way around and throw it over the other shoulder a la Rufus Harley, it’d be trickier to learn from copying others and an absolute nuisance in a pipe band.
Left-handed guitars are expensive and tricky to find, and while it’s possible to just flip a right-handed guitar over (Dick Dale being the most famous player to do this) this fucks up most chords in standard tuning. Restringing a righty guitar upside-down works too, but nut carvings and cutaways and knobs and output jacks will all be in inconvenient places.
I do have a very fancy fife I inherited and barely learnt to play, which I guess I could just flip upside-down and learn, but it’s got some similarity in fingering to the bagpipe and my primary school recorder days so it’d be trickier.
I used to be able to eat with a knife and fork right-handed, but I’ve lost that ability through lack of practice. It’s probably poor form to switch your cutlery around in a formal setting but if I’m ever in one of those those around me can just deal with it.
@lowquacks, both my parents were right handers who ate left handed, so they raised my brother and I to eat left handed too. I just swap the cutlery around when I sit down. Occasionally I get someone say “oh, you eat left handed” but in the main nobody bats an eyelid. I also appreciate wait staff who notice this, then set later places for me as left handed.
I have also played around with chopsticks, and I think I am left handed for chopsticks also. That would explain the very hard time I had previously trying to eat them right-handed. As my RSI was right arm, I had put it down to loss of sensation, but as the damage dissipated and I still found chopsticks awkward, I think I have a strong left handed preference.
Don’t some large percentage of fertilised human eggs never plant birth control or no, anyway? Wouldn’t most pumping-out-babies true Good Married Christian Women have done that quite a few times?
That sounds lovely! Never had that happen; I’d say my own family only remember perhaps 4/5 of the time if someone else is setting the table. Funnily enough, drinks on the right don’t put me off at all and I’ll actually move mine there if it’s not there – drinks on the right and bread on the left’s a trickier one to switch around so I guess I’ve just had that one drilled into me.
I am also glad that I don’t have lead in my face paint.
Wait a minute…where’s my face paint?!
Oh right, I don’t have any. Thank goodness. I hear there’s lead in that stuff.
“Don’t some large percentage of fertilised human eggs never plant birth control or no, anyway? Wouldn’t most pumping-out-babies true Good Married Christian Women have done that quite a few times?”
Yeah but that’s gods plan you see, since humans aren’t interfering *bangs head off computer stand*
Re: hands — my mother and brother are lefties, and I’m just plain weird — I write rightie but can write passably well leftie, shoot guns rightie and bows leftie (do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent left handed bow?!) and the idea of trying to play violin the other way around is making my head hurt!
I can play this god’s (gods’) plan game too: if god(s) didn’t want birth control to be a thing, it would have prevented the invention. QED.
Sounds like you’re cross-dominant, Argenti (a term I rather like).
Women can already get birth control down range. Units just prefer that enough be brought with to last as long as possible as supplies are limited.
Kitteh — I’m not touching that right now, go see the abused women thread, I’ll get to that when my mind removes itself from the gutter!
Kiwi Girl — that’s pretty much my take on it, yeah.
I’m a 1990s baby……………….
Jealous. My own aunts/uncles forget I’m a vegetarian. I know I’ve only been a vegetarian for 8 years, but you think they would remember because of all the family events I go to.
My parents and myself are brunettes and my brother is blonde. Meanwhile, my brother and my parents both have more olive skin and I am super pale skinned. My parents both had brown eyes and my brother has green and I have blue. Both my parents are under 5’7”. My brother is 6’2” and I am 5’9”. Genes do odd things.
@melody I’m a strict vegetarian as well. I raise an eyebrow at these days for people who panic if I’m coming to lunch or dinner because they don’t know what to serve me. I laugh internally as it makes them sound like they’re carnivores. 🙂
The American anthropologist, Loren Eiseley, once wrote an essay about seeing a woman in modern time who had distinctly Neanderthal features. I once sat in college history class with such a woman – she even had a brow ridge. I would have estimated her IQ as around 140-150, too.
@kiwi girl
Truth. They seem to complicate serving a vegetarian.
Most people don’t eat entirely meat for a meal.
I once had a friend who thought I couldn’t eat spaghetti because of the meat sauce.I was like you don’t HAVE to put meat in the sauce……
Argenti, I see what you mean! 😀
And now I’m thinking of Inigo and Westley with their left-handed right-handed duel … hmmm. (Thing I like best about that scene is that they quote real Renaissance sword masters.)
@Kittehs
Read up on the cross-dominant thing and think that might be me. I’m definitely right-footed and favour my right eye. I’ve never shot a gun but couldn’t imagine firing a pistol with anything but my left hand, but the reverse for a rifle or any other gun with a stock.
My grandfather is Leftie Pride Man. He got very excited about discovering that my boyfriend is left-handed.
I have a weird relationship with my hand dominance. I am extremely right dominant to the extent of having an almost useless left hand (mostly gripping and hitting the shift key) but I keep trying to use right-handed stuff on my right hand but holding them in a way that would suit my left hand. I only realised I’d been doing this fairly recently when wrapping boyfriend’s birthday presents and wow does paper cut neater when you’re holding the scissors properly. 😛
The discussion of ‘redhead extinction’ reminds me of a photo I saw some time ago. I think it was of a group of Australian Aboriginies but I can’t exactly remember. They had flaming ginger hair. It was a really striking combination. There’s also the rare chance that if you get twins born to two mixed-race people (of the same or similar mix) then the children look like they’re from two different ethnicities. Human genetics are really interesting.
@kitteh
Sorry, I didn’t realize it was offensive.
@argenti
It’s funny how those very same people complain about all the starving children on welfare and such in the same breath. The fact that the idea that the pill is an abortion is so weird, considering a woman’s uterus naturally rejects fertilized eggs all the time with our without the pill. In fact, the uterus rejects LESS fertilized eggs when a woman is using the pill. I read it in an article on it a while back on a woman’s change of heart from pro-life to pro-choice that was very informative and inspiring but I don’t know where to find it now.
I meant to type it’s weird that the idea of birth control being an abortion is so prevalent. My bad
Okay, trying to remember basic biology from the science program in high school…. Skin colour is polygenetically inherited, which means that it does work a bit like “blending”. In a completely non-racist, non-discriminatory world where colour of skin had NO impact on one’s choice of mate (nowadays it has so at least indirectly – if you’re white, for instance, you’re more likely to meet lots of white people at school, work etc, which means you’re more likely to marry and have kids with someone white), most people would end up sort of medium-brown, and being really light-skinned or really dark-skinned would become very rare (although not non-existent).
Blue eyes would pop up regularly, although it would be rarer than today, since it’s caused by a single recessive gene. Get that gene from both mum and dad and you become blue-eyed. In this imaginary non-racist society blue eyes would be overall less common than it is today, but there would be more people who had the combination of brown skin and blue eyes (that’s very, very rare today, although it does exist). And the same would, I think, go for blonde and red hair, if the above comments are right, and they’re caused by recessive genes?
Although, as someone already said, IF it were the case that blonde hair and blue eyes went extinct – SO WHAT? If someone thinks it looks pretty, use coloured contacts and hair bleach.
Starla and all: “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?”
Yes, I am raising my hand. Ignorance, foolishness, stupidity maybe. No, not stupidity. More like wishful thinking or fantasy thinking. I don’t have the words to explain it but I’m “it”. It’s a bitch to get past and I make a complete fool and ass of myself more often than not. But I’m learning and it’s better than having my head in the clouds.
So, back in the 90’s when I was in college, feminists talked about how the Right was going to go after contraceptives next, after abortion. And they got laughed at for saying it, because how ridiculous is that — we’re going to argue about an issue that’s been settled for over forty years???
And here we are, in 20-fucking-12 (now ’13), talking about the morality of a medication that 95% of American women use. It’s mind-boggling. And I’m just waiting for the lawsuit that makes it up to the Supreme Court level and takes out Griswold v Connecticut, because you know that shit is coming.
Contraceptives to destroy future soldiers?
oops, I meant Contraceptives to destroy future soldiers?