[LMB] Sex, Contraception, and Catch-22 Now REALLY OT:

[Rebecca Bauer]

My husband often tells me stories of a "wimpified" army.  Now there are plenty of very good soldiers in the US army, trying to do their best in difficult circumstances of which the average civvie necessarily has the vaguest conception.  But like it or not, our vast edifice (veneer?) of civilization depends on the willingness of young men to fight the battle most of us shy away from.  Which I suppose is reasonable ... but must we also expect a certain political correctness of the part of those willing to do our dirty work?  My husband claims that a recruit trained with "timeout" cards to present his drill sergeant is no match for one steeled in the old school. Jerry Pournelle commented once (think it was he) that any nation that failed to honor its fighting man was doomed to disapper (not his exact words, and hardly his original thought). 
 I think what most bothers me is that those pushing for a "gender neutral" military are up against a biological imperative.  Young men will bond, fight and die together with little in the way of complaint when united in a common cause.  Throw young women into the mix, and the dynamic inalterably changes (at least that's what my husband claims).  Instead of a willingness to cultivate a toughness to fight and to die if necessary, they concern themselves with how they appear to women ... and (with only the slightest of exagerrations) staying alive to get laid once more.   Morale and unit cohesiveness suffer accordingly.  But those pushing for a politically correct army don't care about such matters- don't even believe they are necessary in an enlightened world.  Their own vision of what humanity should be is more important to them than either the mission for which young men sacrifice their lives, or the lives so sacrificed.  
Just to bring the discussion back on target, one of my favorite LMB morsels appeared, I believe, in "Cordelia's Honor", in which the author commented that civilization resides in our things, not in our .... our, what was it ... achievements?  To claim that, at root, we are somehow superior to the Cro Magnons is sheer hubris.
Rebecca  ... who hopes to present this world a soldier or a concert pianist in the next two weeks (a violinist also would suffice :)


----- Original Message ----
From: Kirsten Edwards <carbonelle at juno.com>
To: lois-bujold at lists.herald.co.uk
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 11:32:44 PM
Subject: Re: [LMB] Sex, Contraception, and Catch-22 Now REALLY OT:

Paal(?) writes a snappy screed about the discrimination in job opportunities she faced as a woman wanting to do various "off limits" jobs. I remember my own mother telling me the story of her rejection for the simultaneous translator whatsit (the chappies that work at the U.N.) program because of her sex. This to a woman cradle-fluent; a native speaker in Portuguese, German and English. Pfooie. So I have no beef with the Things Were Bad and We Don't Want to Bring THOSE days back..

That said, Our Correspondant also included a diatribe against a woman named Elaine Donnelly. The name was only vaguely famliar, I googled and discovered that she is the President of The Center for Military Readiness (their website: http://cmrlink.org/), an organization which appears to have been formed as a backlash against the "We'll never have to fight A Real Bad Scary war" again view of certain feminists/progressives, who perceived the U.S. armed forces merely as another playground for HappyFunSocialReform.

The which did a crashing disservice to all the woman in the services. One salient quote from the website:

"Every attempt since the 1970s to establish single standards for men and women, commensurate with the demands of actual combat, has been discontinued or rendered meaningless due to political pressures from feminists and allies who demand that standards be adjusted, or gender-normed, so that female trainees can “succeed.” In various types of training, “equal effort” is equated with “equal results,” and group evaluations substitute for individual achievement scores. In some forms of physical training events that are more difficult for women are dropped in order to make training more “fair.” The resulting regimen is described as “equal” between men and women, even though it is less demanding for the men."

To this day, I remain convinced that the debacle that was the handling of Abu Grahib (aside from using it as a holding ground for stockade cases) was largely due to  handing it off to one of "Clinton's women" - a female officer promoted far beyond her capacity in order to meet arbitrary quotas.

So perhaps Mrs. Donally's bona fides aren't as sterling as one would want (I'd prefer a combat veteran myself) but for some reason The Powers That Be were willing to listen to HER saying the above, when they ignored the realio-trulio vets saying the same thing. Go figure.

Politics, congresscritters...feh.

ObBujold: When the thread drifts wildly off the Lakewalkers and the Farmers and their social predicaments onto the likes of Mrs. Donnelly, we REALLY need the OT: marker. Otherwise you'll get posts like mine :-)

Kirsten "Mostly skimming the TSK posts just now" Edwards
"Infantem dormientem non movere"
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