As a man living in Eastern Europe looking at the huge debate in the United States after the Pentagon’s announcement of gradually lifting the ban on women who seek to serve in the military, I just cannot restrain myself from laughing loudly.
Now don’t get me wrong, in my opinion there are only two legitimate solutions in this problem: either make all people eligible for the draft and register to selective service, or make no-one. Any other option is just unfair. As simple as that.
The only state that is close to having that is Israel, albeit the Zionist state still exempts women from non-Jewish communities (but not men!) and married women (but not men!). There are some other countries (such as China or Peru) that also have laws that ensure full equality when it comes to conscription and compulsory military service, although China has never enforced the law since the establishment of People’s Republic of China because there are already more than enough people (male and female) that volunteer for a career in the military.
So, basically, with the notable exception of Israel, all the other nations and countries in the world can be divided into two big categories: those that don’t conscript anybody (this includes countries like China that have the laws but don’t enforce them) and those that actively enforce male disposability.
In the patriarchal Iran, men that don’t go through military service cannot leave the country and are prohibited from getting a driver’s license, whilst there are no such restrictions for women. Oh, and Iran has the highest ratio of female undergraduates in the world[1].
But do we ever hear about that? Of course we don’t.
In Eastern Europe, we’ve seen Marxist regimes first hand and we’ve seen the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война) which is basically the Soviet winning part of the World War II. These events have provided us a perspective that the general public in the USA has no idea of.
During the communist years, schools from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc. etc. never stopped talking to us about the bravery of women like Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya[2] and Zinaida Portnova[3] who volunteered to help “the anti-fascist and anti-Hitlerist Soviet Union” and whose combined efforts killed hundreds of Nazi soldiers (all of them men that have been forcibly conscripted) and ended up being killed when they were around the age of 18.
There were 800,000 women in total that served in the Soviet army during WWII[4] and 89 of them were decorated with the highest distinction of the Soviet state. Even today there are still some gender ideologues that have the nerve to state that it was the ‘grrrl power’ that helped the Soviets eventually to win the war. And the same gender ideologues claim that it was “post-war patriarchal oppression” that prevented women to seek full equality into the Russian military after the war. And they claim these with little to no consideration to the actual facts.
And the actual facts are as follows: The overwhelming majority of those 800,000 women enrolled voluntarily and left the military (also voluntarily) once the war ended. Oh… and most of them survived.
I’ve heard a feminist claiming that the Russian women’s suffering from WWII was “comparable as a class” to the one of men. Again, let’s stick to the facts.
The Wikipedia page about the Red Army[5] says the following about the WWII:
During the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army conscripted 29,574,900 men in addition to the 4,826,907 in service at the beginning of the war. Of this total of 34,401,807 it lost 6,329,600 KIA, 555,400 deaths by disease and 4,559,000 MIA (most captured). Of these 11,444,000, however, 939,700 rejoined the ranks in the subsequently liberated Soviet territory, and a further 1,836,000 returned from German captivity. Thus the grand total of losses amounted to 8,668,300. This is the official total dead, but other estimates give the number of total dead up to almost 11 million men, including 7.7 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million POW dead (out of 5.2 million total POWs), plus 400,000 paramilitary and Soviet partisan losses.
So, there were 10 times more men that died than women that served overall. On what planet is this “comparable”?
The reason I’m going with this history lesson is because my great-grandfather did not survive the war (whilst my great-grandmother got to live up to the age of 88) and my paternal grandfather did survive the war but came back with huge distress and with a permanently damaged lung that gave him breathing problems throughout his life (whilst my grandmother got to live up to the age of 80).
Another reason I am giving the facts of the much praised “equality” in the military is because my mother went through compulsory military service. She went to the University in a STEM field (which was difficult for anyone during the Communist era due to the harsh exams and the highly limited number people that could be admitted). Because she was a student, the schedule was a bit more relaxed. She had to go one day per week in a military facility for 6 hours and go through military training and during the summer vacation, she had to go for three weeks and stay only in the military facility like any other conscripted individual and live by the military oriented way of life.
Of course, during the same years, there was a huge propaganda as to how we must provide more affirmative action and more entitlements in order to have absolute equality of outcome. But at least the Marxist regime was honest all the way through and sought absolute equality of outcome (and made no secret from that) including in the hard labor areas.
Immediately after the fall of the Communist regime, the new government signed two decrees: lifting the ban on abortion and abolishing the female compulsory military service. The male compulsory military service remained in place until October 2006, almost 17 years after the female obligation was dropped.
So, the moment they had the possibility to abolish the equality in this respect, women’s groups had no problem to do so.
So let’s see how “gender equality” works in the militarized institutions in Romania (firefighters, police personal, correctional fighters, etc.).
On the official page of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Police Academy from Bucharest[6][7] we learn that in order to go through an entrance exam for this school in order to become a firefighter, a guard in a prison or a police officer, one must be fluent in Romanian, have no prior convictions of any kind and:
Have a minimum height of 1.70 meters (5 feet and 7 inches) if the candidate is a man and a minimum height of 1.65 meters (5 feet and 5 inches) if the candidate is a woman
The same specification is made for any department of this military school. So this basically means that a 1.65 meter woman is tougher than a 1.69 man. I am sorry, but it’s hard for me to believe this is actually true, but the lawmakers seem to believe that.
Moreover, besides from admitting shorter people than the minimum requirement simply because they’re women, the physical tests are also easier for women.
From the minimum requirements sheet on the same academy’s website[8] we find out that men need to run for 50 meters in 7.2 seconds (preferably even faster), whilst it’s enough for women to run the same distance in 8.1 seconds. Also, the 1000 meters marathon (resistance running) must be covered by men in 3 minutes and 45 seconds, whilst women have to do the same thing in 4 minutes and 10 seconds. Now, excuse me, but I was walking (indeed, walking fast, but not running) 5,500 meters in 14 minutes when I was 12 years old and was selling newspapers on the street. And I have never been a sportive person. The physical standards for women are a joke.
The only “equal” physical requirement is when the candidates need to throw a medical ball 7 meters away. But again – women throw a 2 kg (4.4 pounds) ball whilst men throw a 4 kg (8.8 pounds) ball.
So here’s your military “equality”. Men do up to two times more heavy lifting (literally) but end up being paid the same as their female colleagues who get to be subjected to lower standards than 12 year old boys.
When the chief of the General County Inspectorate of Police (IPJ) from Vâlcea stated that the female police officers under this establishment are generally useless[9], he was rendered as a misogynistic bigot. But was he?
Let’s not be hypocrites. Under this law, female officers run slower, have slower strength, lower resistance, are generally shorter and tend to go more often on parental leave. These are the facts – whether the feminists like it or not.
But in spite of these facts, the websites of most military academies are filled with pictures of females, as if they were truly the equal of their male counterparts and as if they were as many as their male counterparts. Most militarized institutions have a small limited number of students they welcome and it’s usually 40 males, 5 females and 3 minorities. And by “minority” the Romanian law understands gypsies, Hungarians, women, Ukrainians and other minorities except for the citizens from Republic of Moldova which usually have a separate category. But often times not even those 5 places for women aren’t filled, in spite of the commercials, the physical standards comparable to 12 year old boys and non-formal female favoring promotions that are now in place throughout militarized institutions. Could it be because women don’t actually want anything to do with this?
To sum up, there is little to no doubt that this will happen in the USA in the following years (unless it’s already happening). The NCFM appeal[10] does a good job but it doesn’t go far enough. Not only USA must either end military conscription altogether or extend the Selective Service registration requirement to women, including penalties for failing to register, but what USA must also do is not to lower the standards for women. By doing so, USA will end up like the “egalitarian” Europe with its mostly useless (but highly consuming of taxpayers’ money) military structures. When the conflict in Libya started, France deployed mainly personnel from Légion étrangère[11]. Why? Because it’s the only military service wing from the French army that still works as an army, where skills are more important than misleading understandings of “equality.”
Having a taxpayers’ funded huge army is controversial enough. But having a useless taxpayers’ funded huge army is plain stupidity.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_gir_to_boy_rat_pri_lev_enr-boys-ratio-primary-level-enrolment
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoya_Kosmodemyanskaya
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Portnova
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army#The_Great_Patriotic_War
[6] http://www.academiadepolitie.ro/root/studii/admitere/2012/documente/admitere2012_conditii_adm_politie_pompieri.pdf
[7] http://www.academiadepolitie.ro/root/studii/admitere/2012/documente/admitere2012_conditii_adm_penitenciare.pdf
[8] http://www.academiadepolitie.ro/root/studii/admitere/2012/documente/admitere2012_probe_sportive.pdf
[9] http://www.realitatea.net/seful-ipj-valcea-nu-mai-vrea-femei-in-politie-vezi-aici-motivul_861740.html
[10] http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/ncfm-calls-for-equality-in-selective-service/
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Foreign_Legion
