Well, that didn't take long

It's been less than three years since the Australian military decided to open up combat roles to women (for my protest see here).

It was never the case that the Australian military would stay the same but with female troops. Once the decision was made to fill the ranks with women, then fundamental changes would come about.

I was reminded of this by a recruitment advertisement that ran on Australian TV tonight. The advert has images of both young men and women in the military, though the women seem to feature more than the men. But what was most interesting were the graphics on display. As we saw the images of the soldiers, the first graphic said "warriors" but it was soon followed by another which said "nurturers".

Maybe someone thought that the first word "warriors" might not appeal to women as much as men, so the second word "nurturers" was added.

But is trying to recruit nurturing types to the army really such a good idea? If you are under fire, do you really want the person next to you to have nurturing qualities or fighting qualities?

Shouldn't the army stick to recruiting warriors?

Changing the military for what purpose?

Three years ago, the Gillard Government announced that women would be able to serve as combat troops in the Australian military. So how many of the 3100 women in the armed services have taken up that offer?

So far not a single woman has joined the infantry in the regular army; and just two women have signed up for the infantry in the Army Reserve. The numbers are slightly higher for the artillery and engineering: 15 have signed up for these roles in the regular army.

That's despite a lot of advertising promoting women in the armed services.

The changes to the army are not being made because many thousands of women are having their dreams shattered by not being able to charge out of foxholes. It's clear that at the moment there is hardly any female interest at all in combat roles.

One of the consequences for the average woman in all this is that if it becomes accepted that women are suitable for combat roles, then the next time there is conscription it will be difficult to avoid the call for women to be conscripted alongside men.

I read an opinion piece discussing this issue recently. The author, a feminist woman named Sara Erkel, believes that women should be able to choose to sign up for combat roles but should not be drafted.

She has the following arguments:

• women are less physically strong than men so that a country not drafting women would have a battlefield advantage over the country that did
• women prisoners of war would risk sexual assault
• women are needed to have babies
• women don't earn as much as men and therefore shouldn't be required to make the same sacrifices for their country

The problem with the first three arguments is that they not only apply to women drafted into combat roles, but also to women who volunteer for them. A woman who volunteers and is taken prisoner is just as much at risk of sexual assault as a woman who is drafted. A country loses the fertility of the women who volunteer and are killed just as much as the women who are drafted. And it is likely that there will be a reduction in physical strength requirements for women who volunteer, so the unequal playing field argument partly holds there as well.

As for the last argument, if military service is tied to income and job status, that would mean that feminist professors ought to be drafted well ahead of male janitors.

Anyway, once the idea takes hold that there are no principled reasons why women should not serve in combat, then it's likely that none of the specific arguments made by Sara Erkel will hold ground.

At cross purposes: women, combat and violence

The Elusive Wapiti wasn't too impressed with a column on women in combat by Paula Bolyard. But I thought that at least there were some good things in it. She writes, for instance, about raising her boys that:

The goal was always to turn out men. Not some feminized, politically correct, egalitarian version of manhood, but in keeping with their genetically driven impulses and God-given natures, we determined to encourage them to defy current societal pressures and become real, masculine men.
 

And she makes an argument about women in combat that has crossed my mind repeatedly but that I've never publicly made. Are men not being given mixed messages about women and violence? In ordinary civilian life, men are told that women are different and should be shielded from all violence and that our culture is too accepting of violence against women. But men are also being presented with a lot of imagery of violent warrior women, and this imagery is likely to desensitise men when it comes to women and violence.

And the problem will only intensify if men are expected to fight in the military alongside and against women. If a man has to be trained to shoot or bayonet a woman, will he still be able to carry that masculine sense of honour of never directing violence toward women? Paula Bolyard puts it this way:

Through all of this, we clearly taught our boys that they were never, ever to play roughly with girls. We knew a time would come that they would be bigger and stronger than the girls and they needed to know that they were to never lay a hand on a girl.

In this day and age of political correctness and federally mandated gender equity, this may sound “unfair” or antiquated, but the inconvenient truth is that the process of civilizing young men involves taming their aggressive instincts. If we want them to learn to treat a woman with respect, they must be taught that overpowering her with their physical strength is never acceptable.

At the same time, they must learn that their physical size and strength are gifts that can and should be used to protect their families and property in the event of danger. Controlled strength is a sign of maturity and integrity.

As we find ourselves on the cusp of women on the front lines of combat, we must ask some important questions about how we will raise boys in the future in light of this decision.

Back in 1992, when cries for women in combat were sounding on the heels of the Gulf War, John Luddy wrote about the implications of such a decision in the Los Angeles Times:

All killing on the battlefield is not accomplished by precision-guided munitions; men must still drive cold steel into other men’s guts. Parents, picture a platoon of soldiers, your daughter among them, wielding bayonets in what we infantrymen delicately call close combat. Some are doing the sticking; some are being stuck. Therein lies the second problem with placing women in combat units. As a society, do we want to have women doing this? If so, what would be wrong with a man punching a woman under the same circumstances in which he might punch a man? One is no “better” than the other, but we react differently, don’t we?  

If we as a country insist on pushing through this barrier and throwing our women at the enemy by placing them on the front lines in combat, some important cultural and sociological changes will need to occur. We will need to raise a new generation of men who will be willing to stand by and watch women being shot, stabbed, tortured, raped and battered. They will need to be desensitized to the realities of harm befalling women. Additionally, once the United States crosses the barrier of women in combat, other countries will likely follow, so our men will need to learn to stand face to face with a woman, look her in the eye, and kill her in hand-to-hand combat.

Finally, I thought the following comment from a Vietnam veteran worth highlighting, It shows the reality of going on tour in a combat situation:

I was also a Marine grunt and the training we went through was totally brutal. I was glad I had it, because when I got to Vietnam it made me able to cope with what we did there. On operations, especially in the mountains, we walked with flak jackets, helmets, packs, rifles, grenades, machine guns, rocket launchers, sometimes mortars, carried extra rounds for the mortars and the machine guns, and were virtual pack mules.

When we ran into the enemy we could not drop the gear and leave it, because we had to attack and we did not know where the attack would end. We would run forward carrying all this gear and still fight our asses off. This might be after walking from daylight until late in the afternoon. At night we dug our fighting holes and stood watch. One man on for an hour and a half and one man asleep for an hour and a half. Just before day light we went on full alert. That meant we usually got four to five hours sleep a night. This went on day after day after day. Our clothes rotted off of us, grime was so deeply ingrained into our skin that we could pull it off with our finger nails, and we ate two meals a day and drank whatever water we could find. Sometimes we had lots of water. Other times we had four quart sized canteens and they had to last us for two or three days. We lost weight, we became walking zombies who functioned on instinct, but we functioned. Maybe one in one hundred women could do this, but she would not fit in and the men would try to protect her. It is completely stupid and asinine to put women in a situation like this.

The reality of women in combat

There is a campaign underway to open up infantry combat positions to women in the American armed services. The campaign has encountered an interesting opponent - a woman by the name of Katie Petronio who has five years' experience as a combat engineer in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why does Katie Petronio think female combat infantry to be a bad idea? Because despite all her training, her body wasn't able to stand the rigours of combat as much as her male peers:

I was a star ice hockey player at Bowdoin College, a small elite college in Maine, with a major in government and law. At 5 feet 3 inches I was squatting 200 pounds and benching 145 pounds when I graduated in 2007. I completed Officer Candidates School (OCS) ranked 4 of 52 candidates, graduated 48 of 261 from TBS, and finished second at MOS school. I also repeatedly scored far above average in all female-based physical fitness tests (for example, earning a 292 out of 300 on the Marine physical fitness test). Five years later, I am physically not the woman I once was...

I was a motivated, resilient second lieutenant when I deployed to Iraq for 10 months, traveling across the Marine area of operations (AO) and participating in numerous combat operations. Yet, due to the excessive amount of time I spent in full combat load, I was diagnosed with a severe case of restless leg syndrome. My spine had compressed on nerves in my lower back causing neuropathy which compounded the symptoms of restless leg syndrome.

While this injury has certainly not been enjoyable, Iraq was a pleasant experience compared to the experiences I endured during my deployment to Afghanistan...By the fifth month into the deployment, I had muscle atrophy in my thighs that was causing me to constantly trip and my legs to buckle with the slightest grade change. My agility during firefights and mobility on and off vehicles and perimeter walls was seriously hindering my response time and overall capability. It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions. At the end of the 7-month deployment, and the construction of 18 PBs later, I had lost 17 pounds and was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (which personally resulted in infertility, but is not a genetic trend in my family), which was brought on by the chemical and physical changes endured during deployment.

She didn't even deploy as often as her male peers and yet her body packed it in. That's not surprising given that the female body is not there for combat purposes.

A reply to a reader on female combat troops

One reader didn't like my post The body has meaning. He wrote the following comment:

The original post astonishes me. When I was 12 or so, I thought, "Men are this, and women are that." Then I grew up and realized the world is more complex than that.

The world is not made up of G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls. You seem to suggest that it should be.

Your idea seems to be that men and women each have a distinct, intrinsic nature, from which their proper roles in society can be inferred, en masse. But isn't it reasonable to expect a person to act on the basis of their own nature? If someone wants to do something, such as join the army, then joining the army seems to be in the nature of this person. You would say to them, "But that's not in your nature." I think they should reply, "Clearly it is in my nature, for it is what I want to do." How do you reply to this?

It's a reasonable question to ask. The answer is that masculinity is not only an aspect of the nature of men, but it exists as well as an essence in the sense of it being a quality that has intrinsic value and meaning.

So a man will not only have a sense of his own masculine identity, he will also recognise the existence of a masculine ideal to develop toward, one which brings purpose and fulfilment.

Ordinary preferences and wants do not have this same potential. They certainly do not define our nature as men; if anything, they are to be brought into line (i.e. ordered) according to our efforts to cultivate masculine character.

And the same goes for femininity & women. Women obviously have a feminine nature in the sense that their bodies are more fitted for motherhood than warfare, that women are in general more emotional than men and so on.

But that's not the end of it. Women have the chance to embody the feminine principle in life (to put this another way: to express a feminine essence).

They cannot do this in the role of a combat soldier. It just isn't possible to develop along feminine lines in such a role.

And so a woman who thinks she wants to be a combat soldier has some serious thinking to do. Even if she is at the more mannish end of the female spectrum, and so is drawn more than other women to masculine pursuits, she is choosing a pathway that cannot lead her to an admirable womanhood, i.e. to a womanhood that embodies or expresses that feminine principle of life.

The body has meaning

As regular readers will know, I'm not a supporter of the idea of women in combat. It's not something that women were made for, and proof of this is in the body itself - in the distinct physicality of men and women.

Below is a picture of an Australian soldier, Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, who stormed a machine-gun position in Afghanistan in 2010 and was later awarded a Victoria Cross for his act of valour. His body is angular and muscular and he has the facial features and expression that you would expect of a warrior:

Compare his picture with that of New Zealand singer Hayley Westenra:

She is smaller, her limbs are slender and elegant, her body is softer and her face radiates warmth and emotion. She wasn't made for the battlefield but for something more feminine.

There is a meaning written into our physical, embodied selves. Our bodies tell us something about our purposes as men and women. Liberals won't like to hear this, as it means that some of our choices aren't entirely self-determined.

But what's the alternative? If you were to argue that our bodies shouldn't matter, then how could you pursue life as an integrated being, i.e. how could you develop as a person who had achieved a unity of body, mind and spirit?

It isn't right to throw away the body as an identifying aspect of self.

A female soldier's story

Why do women sign up for the military? How do they experience military life? One woman's answer to these questions is given in a recent Salon article.

Bethany Saros signed up as a very young woman:

I’d joined the Army right out of high school. The life had seemed so glamorous, and my recruiter swore up and down that I would be a world traveler.

Glamorous? Part of becoming a soldier is learning to kill. And part of it is agreeing to subordinate yourself to the commands of your superiors. Unsurprisingly, Bethany Saros did not enjoy her military training:

But as an innocent, home-schooled girl from the suburbs of the Midwest, I was unprepared for military life. I sobbed my way through basic training. As a child, my tears had been a way to pacify an overly strict father, so whenever my 4-foot-11 [?] male drill sergeant got in my face, I dissolved into waterworks.

She found it difficult to compete as a soldier even against other women:

One day, we were learning to use pugil sticks (which were basically giant Q-Tips we used to beat each other to a pulp) and I was going up against a tall, frail-looking girl everybody thought I could take. But she came at me so mercilessly I never even had the chance to raise my stick before I was on the ground wondering what in the hell just happened. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” the female drill sergeant screeched at me. “YOU DIDN’T EVEN FIGHT BACK!” (Cue crying.) This scenario seemed to be a metaphor for the rest of my military career.

After five years in the army her life was a mess. But she was pleased to be posted to Iraq because she thought she might find spiritual peace in the desert (what about the mission?):

By the time my boots hit the sand in Iraq, I was tired. I had spent the last five years getting pummeled by life in the Army — an abusive marriage, a nasty divorce, an unsuccessful relationship, getting raped by a co-worker, and an alcohol problem that had only added fuel to an already roaring fire. Though I was on the road to recovery with six months of sobriety under my belt, I was mentally and spiritually exhausted. Truth be told, I was looking forward to a year in the desert. As a child in Sunday school, I’d heard stories about saints who went to the desert looking for spiritual peace — the very desert where I now found myself.

Instead of spiritual peace she found a fellow soldier to have an affair with. The likelihood is that she embarked on this affair in order to get pregnant and be shipped back home. But she doesn't present the narrative this way. Her rationalisation hamster runs very fast to present an alternative grand narrative.

a) She denies embarking on the hookup to get pregnant:

When I met J., I wasn’t looking for a relationship. But Iraq had turned out to be more alienating that I’d originally thought. I was disconnected from everything familiar, surrounded by people who did not understand my sobriety or my sudden need for spirituality, and I felt more alone than I ever had in my life. J. was fresh out of a relationship where he’d been cheated on and was feeling rejected and hurt. After a month of friendship, we sought solace in each other’s arms. We thought we were in love...

b) She denies knowing that she could get pregnant from having sex for a period of six weeks:

That couldn’t happen to me. I had been married for two years without getting pregnant. I’d been in a year-long relationship without getting pregnant. It was impossible that I’d get pregnant in a relationship that had barely been alive for six weeks.

c) She portrays herself as the victim of the male soldier who deceived her as to his real intentions, despite the likelihood that she also deceived him about her real intentions:

That night, I finally was able to get in touch with J. “Are you really pregnant?” he asked in disbelief.

“Yes. I went to the doctor this morning,” I said.

“Listen,” he said. “I cannot think of a worse time to tell you this but …”

I knew what was coming. “You’re getting back together with K., aren’t you.” It was more of a statement than a question.

The conversation that followed consisted of the usual phrases that go through breakup dialogue — you lied to me, how could you, etc. Except I couldn’t slam down the phone and write him off as a jerk for the rest of my life. We had created a child together. We had decisions to make. Decisions that I was in no condition to make but had to be made anyway, fast.

“Are you going to keep it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I can’t do an abortion. I just can’t.”

“OK,” he said. “I am going to be there for you and the baby. We will work this out. No matter what, I will be there for you.”

Strong words spoken in the heat of the moment, just like everything else about our relationship.

She continues on with the same rationalisations:

I thought of J. and how he was in Iraq, consequence-free, at least for the time being. I had no way of knowing that his promise to be there for me and the baby would be meaningless, that I would eventually have to go after him for child support...

She had no way of knowing that a tour of duty fling wasn't likely to lead to a commitment? Again, it's likely that the guy got played, but she doesn't want to present it that way.

In the end it's clear that Bethany Saros was made to be a mother not a warrior:

But I wasn’t going to let the little person snuggled up in my belly down. One day, my son would be old enough to ask me questions, and I wanted to be able to tell him that I gave him the best life I possibly could. At the end of the day, my son was the only person I would have to explain myself to.

But what a wasteful and circuitous route to motherhood. If what was really important to her was the maternal instinct to protect her future children, then what was she doing in the army in the first place? She needed training not in the military, but in selecting a suitable father for her future children.

Sheridan's surprise

It turns out that I was not the only voice criticising the decision to allow women into combat roles in the Australian military.

A reader pointed me to a column by Greg Sheridan. It is an excellent piece and one that is highly unusual in the Australian mass media as it is intelligently and unapologetically traditionalist. I read it with surprise as Greg Sheridan is not known for traditionalist views.

It's difficult for me to post highlights as the entire column is worth reading.  It begins like this:

A nation that sends its women into front-line combat, into close infantry, hand-to-hand fighting and killing, is a nation that either doesn't take combat seriously or doesn't take respect for women seriously. This wretched decision to make all combat roles in the Australian military available to women moves Australia closer to both outcomes. It will make our military less effective, and less respected, and it will make women less respected as well.

It is a decision born of a postmodern fantasy, a kind of derangement of nature contrived by ideology against reason, common sense, military professionalism and all human experience. It is almost certainly a sign that the Gillard government has more or less stopped taking defence seriously.

Sheridan is not only attacking the left in writing this. He criticises Liberal leader Tony Abbott as well:

The fact the opposition acceded to this move indicates its political ruthlessness and its increasing hollowness when it comes to values.

Sheridan makes this important point:

If you're going to make the SAS unisex, you're either going to massively reduce physical standards, in order to get a significant number of women in, or you're going to have unisex in principle, but no women in practice. Indeed, that latter outcome, gender neutral in principle but no women present in reality, is the only semi-respectable outcome this foolish policy could produce.

If feminists really want equality in the sense of there being equal numbers of men and women serving in combat leading to equal numbers of men and women in the officer class, then physical standards are going to have to be lowered. (In reality there is bound to be the inequality of affirmative action, in which physical standards will be lowered and in which female soldiers will be promoted ahead of men in order to balance up the numbers in the officer class.)

Sheridan also makes the argument that we wouldn't throw young women into the middle of the most violent of sports, so why would we throw them into something much worse?:

Do we want women to participate in unisex, professional boxing matches with men? If not, why not? Professional boxing is much less demanding, and much less violent, than fighting the Taliban. Do we want women to play in this weekend's National Rugby League grand final and to be tackled at full strength by Brent Kite or Manu Vatuvei? If not, why not? The NRL is a stroll in the park compared with combat missions for the SAS.

I'll add to this argument. What would it say about us as a society if we really did put women into the ring to fight against Mike Tyson? Would that show that we as a society had a growing regard for women? Or a growing indifference?

Sheridan goes on to insist that there are real and significant differences between men and women:

Here we come to one of the most bitter arguments postmodern orthodoxy has with human nature: its idea that there is absolutely no spiritual or moral difference between men and women. It's like the scene in Life of Brian where one of the men demands his civic right to give birth to a baby.

This is a kind of war on all tradition and all accumulated wisdom, that while everyone accepts that men and women are equal, we must also now accept the manifest nonsense that they are exactly the same.

One of these sex differences is that men feel that they have a masculine role in physically protecting the women in their lives:

But is there a single decent husband who does not feel this way towards his wife and his daughters? If your family is assaulted will you send your wife out first to meet the assailants?

Finally, Greg Sheridan notes that Australia cannot afford to sacrifice its military for ideological reasons. We're not like Canada which is shielded by the US. We rely on military alliances which then commits us to overseas engagements:

The countries that practise the greatest gender equity, so-called, in military matters are the countries that don't take their militaries seriously because they don't face military threats.

Australia does not enjoy that luxury. This is a really profoundly stupid decision, all headline and no substance, but in so far as it has meaning, bad for our soldiers and bad for us.

I congratulate Greg Sheridan for writing this piece. He has done his best to argue on principle, which has led him to articulate a traditionalist position. It's impressive to see this happen in the mass media.

Australian women to serve in combat for which profound reason?

As expected it has been announced that women will now serve in combat roles in the Australian armed services.

What has really struck me about the change is the way that it has been discussed in the media. Here is a good example from the Melbourne Age newspaper:

OPENING up combat roles to women in the Australian Defence Force should provide the impetus for more women to be promoted to the highest military ranks, according to Defence Minister Stephen Smith.

The comment came after yesterday's historic announcement that all military roles - up to and including those in elite special forces units - will be open to women within five years.

Currently, women make up 18.5 per cent of the Defence Force, but only 4.5 of the senior ranks in all three services. The highest ranked woman in the force is Air Vice-Marshal Margaret Staib, the commander in charge of logistics.

Mr Smith also said he hoped the changes would lead to women being better represented at senior ranks - including the chiefs of the three services and the chief of the Defence Force.

The thinking of liberal moderns is remarkably atrophied. Here we have a truly significant change in society and the only thing that truly interests our liberal moderns is career advancement and non-discrimination. It's particularly striking in this case because what is at stake is something that concerns life and death - both of individual soldiers and of a nation - which you might think would broaden the outlook of liberals in deciding the matter, but that doesn't seem to register with them at all. The only thing they can see is some brass stars on a uniform that a woman might be denied and that is held to decide the issue no matter what. It is a kind of ideological tunnel vision.

Anyway, I will register my protest at this site, no matter how futile my protest might be. It is ultimately a masculine duty to protect and a woman's to embody gentler virtues. When I see my wife's body, I do not see a warrior design. She is soft with fine, delicate limbs. She is emotionally sensitive. In comparison I am angular and muscular and stern. It seems perverse to me to suggest that my wife should go out to fight a war whilst I stay at home. That is not what is written in our natures, which is why women have not generally been in the front line of combat throughout human history.

No doubt there are exceptions to the rule: tough, nuggety women who really do want to experience combat rather than just eyeing off an officer's position. But it's not reasonable to demoralise the male instinct to protect just to placate such women.

What will happen if there is ever a serious threat to Australia? The message being sent to men is this: there is nothing masculine about fighting to defend your country. You have no particular reason as men to sign up. You are not the protectors of the women and children of your society - the women can defend themselves.

And if men don't sign up and there is conscription? Then how will the liberal state manage to run a double standard and conscript only men to fight? Isn't the liberal state committing itself, in principle, to conscripting young women? But how will that go down? Would fathers really passively allow their daughters to be conscripted to die violently in combat?

If there are answers to such issues they won't come from liberals. Liberals won't even have considered the problems in any serious way. The little prism through which liberals see the world is too narrow for that. All that liberals can see when it comes to this issue is how things affect female careerism. Doesn't matter to them how young women die, or if children are left motherless, or if men are less inclined to serve. That just isn't thought to be what matters.

Australian women to be placed in combat roles

Australian women will now be permitted to serve as frontline combat troops:

Women will be allowed to serve in frontline combat roles after the Gillard government ordered the Australian Defence Force to bring forward the removal of bans that have stopped women from applying for the most dangerous and demanding military jobs.

Given that liberalism is the state ideology this is not an unexpected development. According to liberalism, we are human because we are self determining. We do not determine our own sex; therefore, our sex must be made not to matter when it comes to life choices.

So, if you accept liberal first principles, the decision to allow women to serve in combat will seem moral and just. It will be thought sexist and discriminatory to maintain the combat ban.

The liberal position was described well enough in an editorial in the Brisbane Courier Mail some years ago. The editorialist considered a number of objections to women serving in combat roles but concluded:

Yet all of these objections, however practical and well-meaning, represent a denial of the right of women to choose for themselves what roles they will fill in time of war.

The highest good, according to the editorialist, is that women self-determine their own role in life. So much so, that he thinks it progressive and liberating for women to be exposed to combat:

Yes, this issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral, but the irrefutable fact is that society has changed since the dark days of WWII.

Women have chosen to throw off the limitations imposed on them, even those limitations intended for their own protection.

It isn't difficult to predict where the state ideology will take society. But for those of us who don't see autonomy as the sole, overriding good in society, the decision to put women into combat will appear to be wrong in principle.

Why? Those who oppose women in combat often limit themselves to practical objections. They argue that women don't have the physical strength for combat roles, or that the presence of women will disrupt male esprit de corps, or that the protective instincts of men means that men will interrupt their combat missions to help wounded female soldiers.

These are all good arguments. We should, however, be arguing at the level of principle. Why do we really think it wrong for women to serve in combat? Isn't it because we perceive that women embody an important feminine principle in life, one that is oriented to the nurturing of new life, which is physically more vulnerable, and ideally gentler?

Training women to kill in combat and placing them on the front line in wartime denies the feminine principle as a significant good in life. It sends the message that men and women are essentially interchangeable. Which means too that it will be more difficult for young men to look on military life as a distinctly masculine service to society.

If you think that manhood and womanhood are meaningful to human life, and that men and women are created to live in a complementary relationship with each other, then you are likely to be dismayed by the decision to place women in combat roles.

What happens if liberals don't like our choices?

Here's another example of how liberalism doesn't work coherently. Liberals argue that they are going to create a free, autonomous, self-determining individual, who is not impeded in his individual choice.

But this attempt to maximise individual autonomy means that the individual must not be limited by what he hasn't chosen for himself - such as his gender and ethnicity. So liberals then set out to make gender and ethnicity not matter in an individual's life choices.

But this then means that liberals cannot accept what individuals choose for themselves. They cannot, for instance, accept men and women choosing different career paths or choosing to socialise at times in single-sex clubs. If they did it would mean admitting that gender does matter.

So liberals end up restricting individual choice or working to overcome it. There was a strikingly clear case of this back in November. A young woman, Erin Maitland, noticed that her female friends did not want to go on overseas tours because of the "boozy, bed-hopping" culture of these mixed-sex tours. So she set up a travel company to organise tours for groups of women.

This seems reasonable enough. And, anyway, if a group of women want to travel together rather than with men then that's their right, isn't it?

Not any more. Erin's tour company was disallowed by Judge Marilyn Harbison under the Equal Opportunities Act as a violation of human rights (I kid you not):

Her application was opposed by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which said it could conflict with Victoria's Charter of Human Rights.

Judge Harbison said that her application stereotyped men's behaviour.

"The exemption ... cannot be justified on human rights principles".

I can't help but think of this as an intrusive, unnecessary limitation on what we are allowed to choose to do.  And yet I'm supposed to accept it as a defence of my human rights, equal opportunities and as an anti-discrimination measure.

Here's another recent example of liberal principles at work. There are more men than women who choose to join the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This would not come as a great shock to most people. Men and women are not the same in their natures; men are generally more inclined (from early boyhood onwards) to an interest in soldiering.

But the fact that men and women choose differently when it comes to military service is now thought of as a problem that must be overcome. Gender must be made not to matter:

The Defence Force has completed 18 months of intensive research to find out why women are reluctant to join the military...

Minister for Defence Personnel Greg Combet said that while women made up 35.4 per cent of the Australian workforce, they comprised only 13.4 per cent of the 50,000 defence personnel and that had to change.

So how is it to be done? In part by reorganising the armed forces so that it's an attractive occupation for mothers with children:

Childcare and generous maternity leave will be offered, along with job sharing and part-time work when women return after having a baby ... Under the plan, policies will be overhauled to ensure that pregnant women are not discriminated against. (Herald Sun, 20/11/09)

Those in charge are willing to make "systemic" changes to the ADF to get the results they want:

Defence Personnel Minister Greg Combet said cultural change was at the heart of the new action plan. "We need to overcome some of the systemic, cultural, attitudinal and behavioural obstacles with the ADF," Mr Combet said.

Whether all this is actually good for the armed forces is not even considered. Again, the emphasis is on working to overcome a discrepancy in choice made by men and women. Liberals can't accept the choices that people actually do make and so work hard to "overcome" the "obstacles" of culture, attitude and behaviour that lead to the "wrong outcomes" in the way people choose to live.

So liberalism ends up restricting individual choice - the very opposite of what it claimed it would achieve. This isn't because liberals have strayed from the true liberal path, but because they have tried to push their way further along it. The more they insist on individual autonomy and self-determination as a sole, overriding good, the more they have to repress and overcome choices which reflect our given natures as men and women, as members of distinct communities and so on.

Sweden - not merely odd

The Lego toy company is in trouble in Sweden for breaching equality guidelines:

Sweden’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK) singled out images in a recent Lego catalog which featured a little girl playing in a pink room with ponies, a princess, and a palace accompanied by a caption reading, “Everything a princess could wish for…”

On the opposite side of the page, a little boy can be seen in a blue room playing with a fire station, fire trucks, a police station, and an airplane. The caption beneath reads, “Tons of blocks for slightly older boys.”

In its findings, the ERK singled out the images for preserving traditional and anachronistic views on gender roles, according to the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper.

Furthermore, said ERK, the pictures constituted a form of stereotyping which was degrading to both men and women.

When I googled the story I found it listed on several websites dedicated to odd, humorous or bizarre news. On one site, for instance, it was listed alongside an item titled "Man charged for catching, cooking squirrel" and another titled "Rabbit scares off burglar".

It's a mistake, though, to dismiss the story as a harmlessly eccentric aspect of Swedish life.

First, the Swedes are serious about creating a genderless society. The Swedes have adopted patriarchy theory as a state policy. This means that they consider the traditional male role to be the normal human one; the traditional female role they consider a social construct created by men to oppress women; therefore, it is state policy to deconstruct sex differences to create "equality" between men and women.

That's why Lego got in trouble in Sweden for distinguishing between girls and boys in its advertising - the distinction is now considered illegitimate.

Second, Sweden is not the only country to have followed this path. For example, Lego also got in trouble in Ireland. The Irish equality watchdog critised Lego for having a TV advert aimed at boys with the slogan "Who will win the battle?", whereas adverts for Barbie dolls for girls had the slogan "She's so soft and pretty".

Ireland's Equality Authority also complained that:

Blues and pinks were used to differentiate between toys directed at boys and girls ... Toy store owners were also found to be at fault for segregating toys into boys’ and girls’ aisles.

The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland code states that sex stereotyping should be avoided but the researchers say this may not be sufficient, pointing out that in Sweden, no advertising aimed at children under 12 is allowed.

Chief executive of the Equality Authority Niall Crowley said ...“An advertising process is needed that challenges gender stereotypes rather than communicating and reinforcing them.”

Nor is the US immune to this belief that equality requires the abolition of sex distinctions. Barack Obama said last year that women should be required to register for military service and he has now also declared that he would consider opening combat roles to women.

Here is how he put the case for requiring women to register:

... he did say women should be expected to register with the Selective Service, comparing the role of women to black soldiers and airmen who served during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated.

"There was a time when African-Americans weren't allowed to serve in combat," Mr. Obama said. "And yet, when they did, not only did they perform brilliantly, but what also happened is they helped to change America, and they helped to underscore that we're equal."

So Obama not only believes that women are equally able to serve as soldiers, he thinks they should do so in order to "underscore that we're equal".

The modernist mindset is especially striking here. What seems to matter to Obama is that society be regulated without regard to sex distinctions between men and women.

This means overlooking a lot of things. The young women I know have developed in a distinctive way toward an attractive womanhood. It seems like a slap in the face to who they are to suggest that they should be sent into combat. It is like declaring that what they are, distinctly, as women is seen by society as redundant. In old-fashioned terms, it is a dishonouring of their womanhood.

In the Obama mindset there is no essential masculinity or femininity. I find it difficult to believe, though, that the average man has never beheld a woman and recognised something essentially feminine in her. Isn't there in heterosexuality a sense of appreciation, and love for, what is essentially masculine or feminine in the opposite sex?

If we take what is essentially feminine from women, then where does that leave men? Imagine looking on women and not having a sense of their femininity. Does that not undercut our own masculine responsiveness to women? Doesn't it deplete important aspects of our own identity as men?

If there really were no essences, then heterosexuality itself becomes unreasonable and arbitrary. Why would men fall in love with women, if there were no real essence to either category. It would then make more sense for what modernists say about sexuality to be true - that sexual attraction is spread evenly along a continuum.

And if there does exist an essential masculinity and femininity? Then we have a definite nature to develop as best we can in order to "self-actualise" - as do all living things. If this is so, then it makes little sense to regulate society without any regard to sex distinctions. By doing so we only hinder the self-expression and self-development of individuals.

We should let boys be boys and girls and be girls - and value what is best in both sexes. The Swedish project is not oddly humourous - it's an intrusive aspect of modernism to be seriously resisted.

Who would send mothers to war?

Liberals believe that we should determine for ourselves who we are and what we do. Therefore, they don't like the idea that an unchosen thing like the sex we are born into should limit our ability to "choose in any direction".

But it's not easy in practice to abide by this belief - even for liberals. Take the case of women in combat. A principled liberal will nearly always support the idea of women fighting on the front line. This is because liberals don't want women to be limited in what they choose to do by their inherited sex.

Nonetheless, even liberals feel a revulsion against women being exposed to physical danger on the battlefield, just as conservatives do. For instance, Peggy Drexler, a researcher at Stanford University, wrote an article last year on the topic of "mothers in combat".

She began the article, titled Accepting a mother's work - in any form, by noting that,

Before the American invasion of Iraq, a friend and I watched a TV interview with a new mother about to be called up for war duty and whose husband was already in Iraq.

My friend was horrified: "How can she go to Iraq when she just had a little baby?"

I admit, the question wasn't far from my mind either.

Peggy Drexler then explains in the article, quite reasonably, why we feel this horror at the thought of women leaving their babies to fight in a war. She observes that although we are used to fathers leaving their families in times of war,

the departure of a mother - the great resilient nurturer who offers the milk of herself to her child, no matter the cost - unsettles us more deeply.

In the same vein, she notes that,

We think it's a tragedy when a child loses a father, but when a child loses a mother, it feels like a tragedy of a higher order. But when the death results from the mother's willingness to take risks still not typically assumed by women - such as flying into space or going to war - we can feel that some order of nature has been violated.

This leaves Peggy Drexler, as a principled liberal, feeling conflicted. She confesses that,

It is clear that American mothers have taken on the mortal career risks long associated with men. But we're torn by this progress in women's advancement. Most of us applaud the risks such women take. And in the next breath, we ask how, in good conscience, a mother could leave her kids and deliberately put herself in harm's way: What are they thinking? They're mothers!

Which then leads us to a crucial question. How does Peggy Drexler, as a principled liberal, resolve this dilemma?

Does she decide that we should follow our natural feeling against placing mothers in harm's way? Or does she follow her intellectual principle and support the idea of women in combat?

The answer is instructive. Peggy Drexler does what most liberals do in such a situation. She overrides any personal feeling of revulsion in order to follow an intellectual principle.

In fact, not only does she decide firmly in favour of allowing women into combat roles, she dresses up her decision in terms of high ideals. She insists that,

It is the right of all women - mothers or not - to leave home and take risks. Only when we accept that the mothers can keep the home fires burning and fight oil fires in Iraq will we truly honor motherhood. Only at that point will we accept servicewomen - mothers included - in their rightful roles in combat ...

...a mother has a duty to herself, her country, and, yes, her children, to fly as high as she can ...

This, then, is how society declines: because enough liberals are willing to repress their better instincts in order to follow misguided political principles.

We don't reach the situation of women in combat because liberals like Peggy Drexler are unfeeling or heartless or even denatured. It's because she is too principled in following a misconceived ideology.

It's this commitment to abstract principle which explains why Peggy Drexler can arrive at her extraordinary conclusions, that we can only truly honour mothers if we send them off to be killed on the battlefield, or that mothers actually have a duty to abandon their children by exposing themselves to battlefield violence.

We conservatives have the disadvantage in modern society of not having the same power as liberals to shape the course of developments. But we do, at least, have one advantage. We aren't forced by faulty intellectual principles to go against what we feel, in conscience, to be right.

True conservatives don't believe in the liberal idea that we become fully human only when we create ourselves entirely from our own will and reason. This means that conservatives don't have to, as a matter of principle, overthrow the influence on us of our inherited manhood and womanhood.

Conservatives are therefore free to act, as we think is right, as men and women. We are not forced to reject important distinctions between the sexes, including the different responsibilities that men and women have in times of war.

The liberal drive to make men and women interchangeable is a product of the underlying beliefs that all liberals share. The challenge for conservatives is therefore to understand and oppose these fundamental beliefs of liberals, so that the Western intellectual class is no longer locked into the attempt to deconstruct traditional understandings of manhood and womanhood.

(First published at Conservative Central, 22/08/2004)

Liberating women for war?

Derryn Hinch is a right-wing talkback radio host here in Melbourne – but he is no conservative.

I was listening to his programme a week or so ago and he introduced the topic of women in combat. First Hinch told us of a female friend who had argued against placing women in the firing line:

My friend said that women were inherently different to men ... That men can kill more easily than women. That women are protective. And if you have a female soldier alongside you then you are at risk because she said a woman is less likely to shoot. It’s in her nature.

This is roughly the conservative position: that men and women are different in their natures and are not interchangeable in all things.

How did Hinch respond to his female friend’s observations about the nature of women? He ignored them. He simply announced his support for placing women in combat on the following basis:

If women want to be soldiers then there should be no restrictions on what they can or can’t do.

So all that matters for Hinch is that we are not impeded in our individual will. This principle is so paramount for Hinch that he doesn’t even bother to deal with other considerations, such as how men and women in their real natures are likely to act in combat situations, or the real instincts and expectations men and women have toward the opposite sex. Hinch does not even bother to realistically consider the physical capabilities of women compared to men.

This is not surprising for a liberal. After all, liberals believe that we are made human because we can create who we are and what we do through our own individual will and reason. So for liberals like Hinch, it’s a threat to someone’s humanity to deny them their will. Unrestricted individual choice becomes everything, even when this is destructive of the framework of a society or of an institution.

Yesterday, there was an interesting sequel to this story. The Herald Sun carried an article in which the first woman to pass an Australian SAS training course spoke out against placing women in combat roles. Jane Cunningham, reputedly one of the physically toughest women in the Australian Defence Force, said of such roles,

Women will never have the personal strength and are not designed to carry the loads required ... in my view women just shouldn’t be out there.

Liberalism as a secular religion

This issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral...

Liberals sometimes act as if they are following a kind of secular religion, rather than a political ideology.

I was reminded of this when reading an editorial from the Brisbane Courier Mail (15/5/2001). The topic was whether women should be accepted into the frontline as combat troops.

The editor did a reasonable job in listing the possible objections to such a move. He asked,

Are women indeed physically up to the task of lugging around a 30kg pack for weeks on end? Will their presence in the frontline ranks prove a distraction to the male soldiers whose protective instincts towards them might undermine unit efficiency? Or, conversely, might they be exposed to widespread sexual harassment?

Might women, too, undermine that fierce, tightly knit loyalty and interdependence on which military morale is built? Might they even, perversely, be responsible for higher casualty rates in battle...

And so on.

However, having taken the trouble to raise these objections, he then dismisses them out of hand by writing,

Yet all of these objections, however practical and well-meaning, represent a denial of the right of women to choose for themselves what roles they will fill in time of war.

Think about this. The editor will not consider objections "however practical and well-meaning" if this conflicts with the liberal principle of individualism: the idea of individuals being free to create themselves in any direction.

The principle of individualism is to be preferred, even if it potentially weakens the armed forces, and therefore the continued existence of the liberal society itself.

This is not a very pragmatic approach to politics. The editor seems to be aware of this as he goes on to admit that,

Yes, this issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral, but the irrefutable fact is that society has changed since the dark days of WWII.

Women have chosen to throw off the limitations imposed on them, even those limitations intended for their own protection.

The editor recognises that his beliefs may be considered immoral, and that they might leave women unprotected. His response?

He invokes something he considers to be of greater importance: the progress of society toward an individualism in which we "throw off the limitations imposed" on us (ie we deconstruct those aspects of society that we did not choose for ourselves).

It's important that we try to understand the liberal mind so that we know what we're up against. The views presented by the Courier Mail editor make it clear that liberals don't always follow a pragmatic self-interest.

They do have first principles which they treat almost as "articles of faith" and are willing to follow through to the end. This is the sense in which liberalism can be seen as a kind of secular religion.

(First published at Conservative Central, 27/05/2002)

Should women fight?

It's not only men who dislike the idea of female combat troops. Here's an article on the issue by an American writer, Kathleen Parker.

Her argument against female soldiers is that men and women aren't equal in all things, with men having greater physical strength and endurance than women. This is a good argument, but too limited. A liberal could reply that women could serve as soldiers in areas where technology has done away with the need for physical strength.

What Kathleen Parker needed to do was to go on to talk in greater depth about the differences between men and women. That, for instance, most societies value women for upholding gentler feminine qualities of love, kindness, forgiveness, empathy, charity and physical grace and charm. And that men who see the goodness in these qualities respond protectively, so that societies value qualities in men appropriate to the protector role, such as courage, strength, perserverance, honour, loyalty and so on.

We instinctively feel it to be wrong when women are trained for combat, firstly because we feel that it's central to masculine life to want to protect women from harm on the battelfield, and secondly because we don't want the gentler and finer qualities of women to be brutalised by battlefield conditions.

It is a kind of outrage to our self-identity as men and women to deliberately send women to either kill or be killed in warfare.

Disturbing picture

In the Herald Sun yesterday was another of those photos from the Abu Graib prison in Iraq. I found this photo the most disturbing so far, because it shows a picture of Sabrina Harman, a quite pretty and feminine looking young woman, smiling and giving a thumbs up over the corpse of an Iraqi prisoner.

My immediate reaction was that the two features of the photo simply don't belong together. Young, beautiful womanhood doesn't go together with such a callous insensitivity.

Is it worse that it's a woman rather than a man behaving this way? I think it is. A woman in normal circumstances will generally be more emotionally sensitive or responsive than a man. It's more likely that she will feel emotional hurt, both for herself and others. So to see an attractive young woman behave with a brutal disregard for human life is particularly disturbing.

It only confirms for me my general opposition to women serving in war zones. (I have previously written the following two articles on why liberals are so keen for women to serve in the military.)

Liberalism as a secular religion

Women in combat

A model Mum?

The Melbourne Age newspaper decided to highlight in its Mother's Day edition a woman called Donna Muller.

Donna Muller is an officer in the Australian Navy. This year she is serving in the Solomon Islands, though she is based in Cairns. Her young daughter lives thousands of kilometres away in Canberra.

You wouldn't think this was the ideal arrangement for a mother and her young child. But Donna Muller and the Age reporter are quite upbeat about the situation. We are told that,

Commander Muller says visits to Cairns, where she is based, every few months, frequent phone calls back home and email correspondence have kept the disturbances to family life to a minimum" and that "Her maternal instincts have been put to use elsewhere, in charge of the crew aboard the HMAS Labuan" and that "Commander Muller says she is a good example to other women that it is possible to be a mother and hold a highly demanding job.

I don't buy this. For a young child to only visit her mother every few months is not a minimum disturbance to family life; running a ship is not putting maternal instincts to use at all; and Donna Muller's situation is not a good example of successfully combining motherhood and a career.

Donna Muller says her daughter is resilient, and you can only hope that this is so.

Female conscripts

Less than a year ago I predicted that women might one day face military conscription. That day might come sooner than I thought. The chief of the U.S. Selective Service System has proposed registering women for the military draft.

I guess this wasn't a difficult prediction to make. In order to justify putting women into combat, liberals have argued that there is nothing about womanhood which prevents women taking up combat roles. Logically, though, this means also that there is no reason why women shouldn't be conscripted into the army alongside men.

When I have raised this possibility with ordinary, feminine, non-feminist women I have met with either an unwillingness to even register the possibility ("I'm not even going to think about this, it could never happen to me") or else, especially from younger women, a laughing "it's a man's role to do this, not a woman's, they would never make us do that".

Tragically, I think that they might. That is unless rank and file conservative men retain enough of a protective instinct toward their wives and daughters to fight this aspect of liberalism. We'll have to see.

(Item via Jim Kalb)