Concerned Women of America are very concerned
by digby
Earlier this year, conservative groups led by Concerned Women for America tried unsuccessfully to stop the House from approving a plan to move forward on the building of the National Women’s History Museum, claiming that the museum would be a “shrine to liberal ideology, abortion, and liberal advocates.” Since then, that bill has been held up in the Senate by Republicans Tom Coburn and Mike Lee.
Now the coalition is resuming the fight after hearing that the new museum might be included in a public lands section of an upcoming defense budget. In a press release yesterday, CWA President Penny Nance claimed that the museum would “promote a skewed view of women on key issues like abortion, the free market, and feminism.” Nance also declared that the museum “would in fact be offensive to military members” by including exhibits mentioning people like feminist Bella Abzug, who advocated cuts in military spending.
In an op-ed for Brietbart News, Nance writes that she is against the “identity politics” of the museum in the first place, opposes it especially because she suspects (with no apparent evidence) that it would glorify “whiny” feminists instead of people like a female Peshmerga fighter who died fighting ISIS last month.
So the anti-feminist right loves women in combat these days. That’s quite a change of position. Here’s a litany of what they usually say when the subject comes up:
It is known that, by nature, women are weaker than men in regard to physical strenght and endurance. To hide this, military entry phyiscal requirements for women are greatly diminished in every country that allows women to serve. This of course means that, if a female soldier fights a male soldier in close quarters, she will inevitably succumb, just as a female martial arts practitioner tried to fight a male, equally trained, counterpart. While there are separate sport tournaments for women, this cannot be, obviously, replicated in war.
An official scientific study of the British Ministry of Defence, published in May 2002, stated that only the top 1% of the female soldiers match the strenght, endurance and military quality of the average male soldier. Furthermore, the study also noticed how mixed-sex units experienced a lesser level of espirt de corps and unit cohesion. Also, the Royal Armed Forces found out that women enrolled in co-ed basic training course suffered far more injuries – especially pelvis fractures – than men. An Army doctor was quoted as saying: “It is common sense that women are not as strong as men, and if you put them up against men they will suffer” and that “but if they are recruited to join the infantry and you put them into a combat situation they are obviously going to let the side down because they are not strong enough.” Women were eight times as likely as men to be discharged from basic training due to overuse injuries.
Women also anatomically have specifical hygienic needs that may not be met in war situations, thus leading to illnesses and distress on their part. These illnesses include, but are not limited to, urinary tract infections and gynecological disorders. US Army regulations explicitly advise female soldiers to wash more often and with more water than men.
Female soldiers may deliberately get pregnant in order to avoid hazardous duty. If a man tried to render himself medically unsuitable for combat, he would be subjected to punishment. Aside from being morally questionable, this frequently used-trick can severely harm a unit’s capability to operate by removing hardly replaceable skilled military personnel. For this reason, US Major General Anthony Cucolo, commander of the Northern Iraq zone, enacted in 2009 a policy prohibiting women from getting pregnant, allegedly with the threat of “court martial” and “jail time.” However, he was soon forced to back down when four Democrat Senators and the Natonal Organization of Women fiercely attacked him on political correctness grounds. The general reduced the penalty to a mere and symbolical “admonishment”.
Men’s instinct of protection towards women is ill-suited to war: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s famous book “On Killing” stated that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) banned women from combat for a tactical reason: when women got killed, wounded or anyway under danger, male soldiers would completely lose control over themselves in an uncontrollable, protective, instinctual aggression, severely degrading the unit’s combat effectiveness. In the same book, Lt. Col. Grossman also noticed that Islamic fighters rarely if ever surrender to female soldiers. The same happens in today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where civilians and fighters alike aren’t intimidated by women.
Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld published a paper named “The Great Illusion: Women in Combat” where he explains, among many other arguments against women in combat, how hardly any “true” war around the world has been fought by women and that even legendary accounts of Soviet female soldiers are greatly inflated.
An “elephant in the room” of the US Military is the – alleged – rape rate of female soldiers: more than 30% of them – nearly one third, one out of three – experience some form of sexual harassment.This further gets out of control overseas, where a woman is far more likely to be raped by fellow soldiers than to be killed by enemy fire.
But hey, maybe those women Peshmergas as super women who don’t have any of those “problems.” In any case, I’d guess that feminists are very happy to give those female soldiers all the credit they deserve. I would also guess that unless it fit their political agenda, none of those “Concerned Women” would be quite so complimentary.
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