I went on Facebook and I saw the title of a stripes.com article which read: "House bill requires women to sign up for draft." I read the article and then shared it forthwith, accompaning it with my unmitigated gut reaction: "Pardon my French, but F THIS."
(Photo found here.)
Why? Because drafting women is a detriment to our ability to be intrinsically equal. "Equal", in the case of men and women, has never and WILL never be synonymous with "same." We are gloriously and equally different, and it is within our differentness that our might lies.
Facebook Had Something to Say:
Interestingly, a number of people agreed with my reaction. Most of the comments were satirical: I always marvel a little bit about how bitter men--even men my age--are about "feminism" as we know it today. They have a "well, that's what you get" attitude about a lot of the things that are biting women in the a** these days. Not everyone agreed with me, however, so I wrote a few responses. What follows are those slightly edited responses:
Hear Me Out: The fundamental problem with the modern "feminist" movement is that it proposes that women are supposed to be LIKE men. We are not. We are fundamentally different emotionally, physically, and mentally in many ways. The marines even produced research that showed that women, because of how we're different (not lesser) than men, will "bring down" the standards of the military. DUH! It's because we're NOT men!
While women SHOULD have the basic (no-brainer) rights of a fair wage and the right to vote (for example), we should not be forced to fight wars. It has always been considered the DUTY (no the right) of the MAN to DEFEND, and the DUTY (not the right) of the woman to nurture while he is away in a time of war. Yeah, in the workplace, we've seen gender role changes (there's a lot to be said about that in another blog post). But the military is ONE place where we should not being seeing it. "Rights" are not the only things that should determine the workings of society. Nature and duty are real factors too!
In other words, I absolutely do not agree with women being in combat, at all, ever.
Now, thanks to this false idea of "equality", women like me, who have no interest in being in the military, will be forced to fight wars. I thought this only happened in communist and Muslim countries. Or in countries in such desperate situations, nobody really has a choice! The floodgates have been opened, and this is turning into a nightmare that everyone has to deal with.
("Military service is mandatory in Israel with women accounting for one out of every three soldiers.")
In the past, when women would "sit at home" while men went to war, I believe (through my studies of WW2, especially) that women kept the country running while the men were gone, and without them raising the next generation and going to work in the absence of the men, we would have lost the war. It was just as necessary to have the women on the homefront as it was to have the men oversees.
(Photo found here.)
This is why, even as a kid, I've always disagreed with women being in the military. As stated in the article by stripes.com, it logically follows that, since the military is totally open to women, there should be nothing stopping the government from drafting us. I see the draft as an abject denial of my womanhood and the rights, duties, and needs that come with being a woman. I wonder, too, how complex this question would be in light of contraception. How easily does a woman live in war conditions without having to go to great measures to thwart her fertility cycle? She doesn't. According to NPR, "Rates of unintended pregnancy among women in the military are about 50 percent higher than those of women in the general population." Don't miss the last two paragraphs of the NPR article, by the way. They're facepalm-worthy.
Yeah, so, uh, let's just keep acting like fertility is a disease, rather than lessening the situations in which women find themselves scrambling for birth control and abortion.
(Photo was found here.)
There are times when I can barely function in the traditional workplace because of my emotions and physiology*, so I'm sure many women are already undergoing a variety of procedures, etc. to make sure they aren't "hindered" by their fertility while they're in the service. With every woman of child bearing years being drafted, I forsee catastrophic health results that I think could easily be avoided by the fact that women should not be drafted.
The Guy at the Bar Told Me To:
I was sitting at a bar not long after I wrote the above Facebook tretise, and I met a fellow some years older than myself. In the midsts of our conversation, I decided to ask him what he thought of women being drafted. He immediately said it was stupid and pointless and that women like me needed to open our mouths and say something about it. "It's just those selfish feminists ruining it for everybody else," he said.
That took me aback. Didn't expect that reaction from some random guy I met at a bar. But, he was right, and I encourage anyone else who sees the folly of drafting women to open up their mouths and bloody well say so!
*This isn't a weakness. Men and women handle work stress differently. The workplace isn't necessarily condusive to my strengths as a woman the way it is to a man's.
