Male or female, those of us who've been around for a while can recall clearly the objectives of the feminist movement as it geared up in the early 1970s. Workplace fairness was the goal.
A lot of manufactured indignation attended the feminist rising; e. g, who says we have to wear bras? Basically, nonetheless, what the rebels said they wanted was opportunity too long denied them by chauvinistic males. Opportunity they received from government, and in a larger sense, from the hand of a culture they prodded or embarrassed into agreement with most of what they said. Jobs opened up; power, avenues to self-determination, rights galore, culminating the other day in what I guess we might call the right to be blown to smithereens or take a burst of machine gun slugs in the abdomen.
The craziness of our present age is well recognized. The craziness of the new Pentagon policy opening combat duty to women is yet to be appreciated, least of all by the alleged beneficiaries.
Ambiguities peek through the text that lays out the new policy. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Officials are divided about whether women will ultimately serve as infantry troops or in elite special operations units. Some military officials, citing the difficulty of completing infantry training courses, believe that most women would be unable to meet the physical requirements."
Let us avoid putting much stock in momentary reservations about the propriety of imputing to women soldiers and pilots less capability than their male counterparts. Four decades ago, the aim of the very determined movement that brought us to this place was " women's liberation." We've now pushed beyond that -- to women's annihilation. Onward, ladies! Just what both sexes everywhere have yearned to see: female carcasses strewn around the field of battle. Really inspiring stuff. In certain circles.
To this we've come from the old equal pay brouhahas? Evidently so. Feminism never was long on appreciation of biological and chemical distinctions between the two sexes. In the age of equality, distinctions are arbitrary social constructs: lies and maneuvers meant to keep one group or another in "its place" while privileging another.
Male monopoly of the military professions is founded on several realities however blind to such we might have become in our era of political correctness.
Reality No. 1: War requires strength, even in the high-tech, push-button age. Men really are physically stronger than women. Generally this means they fight -- and kill -- better.
Reality No. 2: Women, not men, bear children -- a task central to the survival of civilization, not to say the human race. There's no taint or shame in the historic division of sexual labor -- women working to preserve and maintain and build and grow, men also deputed to build and grow but specializing when necessary in the job of destruction. If that's not how we're constituted, how come nobody ever noticed before?
Reality No. 3: A fundamental male instinct is to protect women at all costs, to keep them out of harm's way when possible, when not to take a bullet for them. The instinct is embedded in human nature as revealed by the testimony of centuries. No honorable, generous, decent civilization would want to remove such an instinct even if it understood the surgical means.
Reality No. 4: We don't maintain a military for "workplace opportunity" purposes. We maintain it to defend the country. Social goals take a backseat to the goal of walloping our enemies, through the deployment of those most qualified to wallop them.
Ideologues, as the 20th century surely taught us, love to substitute the imaginary for the real, calling down up and up down, in service of their goals. Well, here they go again, deploring history's implication in a male conspiracy against the women's annihilation movement. If only they'd come up with some proof, but I guess it's too late for that. They just won the war.