Women and Children first! Oh, wait...

[skull_bearer]

Recently, Australia decided that all people being equal and capable of making their own decisions, they would relax the prohibition against women serving actively on the battlefield, and make all branches of the military equal in terms of gender. I applaud their decision, and hope it's implimented everywhere.

And then I saw that some feminist groups are 'torn' on the subject, citing concerns about how women are more 'sensitive' and 'physically weaker' than men, and thus shouldn't be in active roles on the battlefield.

I cannot tell you how pig-biting mad this makes me.

Here we are, the feminists, the ones who are supposed to be tearing down the destructive, miserable, restrictive world of the patriachy, and these idiotic morons are propping it up! This statement that women should be restricted in their roles in active service, is as good as telling us that women can't be relied upon to make informed decisions about their lives and what they are capable of, and thus should be descriminated against for their own good.

Sound familiar?

Oh yeah, really damn familiar, I think we've heard this line something like ten million times where women's rights are concerned.

There will be limits on who can serve actively on the battlefield, of course there will be. You will have to be mentally stable, physically fit, be able to withstand the rigours of combat, to carry equipment and use it, etc. What it won't have is 'and you have to be a guy'. Yes, it will be harder for women to fulfill these criteria, our bodies do put us at a disadvantage. But we can do it, and if we want to do it, we should be able to.

This, really comes back to the unfair advantages given by the patriarchy. And yes, women do have them. Not as many as men do, but they do do exist. Just ask Fathers 4 Justice. I knew a guy who was a member, and he was only allowed to see his children once a year for a few days. When my parents divorced, my mother could have made sure we never saw our father again (she didn't, but that was here choice). But some feminist branches are curously silent on that front, because in this the patriarchy has given us an advantage. 'Women's roles are to be mothers', it trumpets, which given women who want to be mothers an advantage.

Look people, this isn't fair. Our aim is to make things fair, but that means we have to throw off our golden chains as well as our iron ones. If we want women to have equal representation in the workplace, we have to let women be free to choose where that workplace can be, even if it puts them in danger. If we want the option of have fullfilling careers, we have to give up the automatic custody of our children. If we want to be taken seriously as equals, then 'women and children first' will have to become just 'children first'.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

My response to this idiocy is "yes, I am a pacificist, but as someone excluded from war do you think they take me seriously?" One has to be liable to all requirements of citizenship in order to actively and plausibly protest those requirements.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Feminists?

Oh aye. No doubt the same ones who think there might be 'something to be said' for the burqa, despise working class women and tell me I'm a man...............

Sigh :o(

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It certainly does seem an instance of wanting to have one's cake and eat it too.

[kirby-crow.livejournal.com]

I think one of the unsung problems of feminism is that no one wants to talk about the fact that not all women are of the same mind about what feminism means, or - more relevantly perhaps - about what they want it to mean. One group of women may be very much in favor of equal pay in the workplace, but adamantly opposed to any legal curtailing of their motherhood rights. One group may be in favor of equal parental rights, but be dead-set against their daughters being subject to the draft. We have this problem because feminism at its core is about women being able to make choices, not having it dictated to us about what our choices should be or what being a woman means. Ergo, you have a great percentage of our gender insisting that their choice is that feminism is only about thisthing or only about thatthing but never thatotherthing, because that's what feminism means to them.


It's a tangle. I don't think we can call out women who are opposed to women serving mandatory military tours as not being feminists, but I still can't find any reason that anyone would oppose women serving in voluntary combat service. That's just strange.

[linguini17.livejournal.com]

I wrote a comment earlier, but it apparently got eaten, so apologies if you see this twice.

I completely agree about women in combat. The answer to that "problem" is standards. One set of standards that has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with being able to do the job.

Re: burkas, I would be all for letting women wear them iff (and that's a big iff) it was a personal choice, an expression of how they viewed their religious texts/beliefs, kind of like Jewish women who choose to shave their heads.

As a means of subjugating women and attempting to marginalize/erase them from society? Not a fan.

I will say, from personal experience, that wearing a burka is no guarantee that the woman will act submissively to anyone/everyone. I can't tell you the number of times a woman in a burka walked directly into where I was standing in a show of arrogance/power/money. It was kind of a "I have more money than you could ever dream of and I would rather lick something off the bottom of my shoe than even pretend that you're in the same room as me." It wasn't shunning because I don't follow that religion, but more class-based, and completely unexpected.

/$.02