Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: General Battuta on December 14, 2009, 01:51:31 pm
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This is why prototyping is bad: people simply don't remember that women are soldiers too. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_female_veterans_finding_a_place)
Some of this stuff is pretty disgusting: statements like 'she rode along with convoys' being interpreted as 'she sat in the back seat', rather than 'she provided overwatch from a Mark 19'.
Putting a few examples out there helps correct our availability heuristic back towards calibration. If we were on target, one out of every five soldier prototypes we generated would be female.
Good article. Make sure you raise a beer for the female vets too.
(And I don't want to hear any comments along the lines of 'women should stop *****ing and just act like the men,' please. The female soldiers say that's why they don't report their problems when they really should.)
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Women of any profession don't generally see the same appreciation as men in the same profession.
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Women of any profession don't generally see the same appreciation as men in the same profession.
strippers?
I should come up with an example that isnt degrading...
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Women of any profession don't generally see the same appreciation as men in the same profession.
strippers?
:lol:
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guess i should have said respect instead of appreciation, then, for clarity.
i forgot you lot are mostly self-absorbed assholes
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guess i should have said respect instead of appreciation, then, for clarity.
i forgot you lot are mostly self-absorbed assholes
This is the internet after all. Being self-centered is a requirement for posting on forums.
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bull****.
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Perhaps I should have added a smiley to it to get my sarcasm across.
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Women of any profession don't generally see the same appreciation as men in the same profession.
Nurses?
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Women of any profession don't generally see the same appreciation as men in the same profession.
The voice of teenage experience.
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guess i should have said respect instead of appreciation, then, for clarity.
i forgot you lot are mostly self-absorbed assholes
face it, all humans are self absorbed assholes and i doubt youre any different. the idea that there are selfless individuals in the world fades quickly once you leave your communist run education system and start actually participating in society.
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Minors are even more oppressed than women...
The sad thing is that most minors don't really care, and they ruin it for the few that do. Age certainly seems an arbitrary way to make these laws based off of...
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Thing is, minor status will go away on its own.
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Minors are even more oppressed than women...
Now that's just silly.
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The thing is, it's not a concious effort on the part of the people in the towns, it's a much harder hurdle, which is the assumption that soldiers are men, it's been ground into people since birth, from movies like Commando and Rambo to toys like GI Joe and Action man, I would be interested to find the percentage of people who actually realise that females play more than a support role nowadays. This is similar, in some ways, to the fact that people like Douglas Bader and the 633 Squadron are remembered during WW2, and yet people like Nancy Wake are probably unknowns to many people.
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Minors are even more oppressed than women...
Now that's just silly.
Really? As a 17 year old with a job, I'm a US citizen and a taxpayer. But I'm not protected by the bill of rights, and I can't vote. If this isn't oppression, then I don't know what is.
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. But I'm not protected by the bill of rights
Yes you are.
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. But I'm not protected by the bill of rights
Yes you are.
If I'm charged with a crime. Even then, not all of them. Even if it were permanent and all of them, I still wouldn't be able to vote, which is an equally important part of our democracy.
edit: http://books.google.com/books?id=WI_z8MFuJsYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=do+minors+have+rights&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
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. But I'm not protected by the bill of rights
Yes you are.
If I'm charged with a felony. Even then, not all of them. Even if it were permanent and all of them, I still wouldn't be able to vote, which is an equally important part of our democracy.
For christs sake, just have some patience and wait till your 18. The only reason the cutoff age is set at 18 is because most of the psychos have been weeded out at that point and we can be reasonably sure that a majority of 18 year olds can at least wipe their own ass. It would be completely infeasible to have a cutoff that was based off something that needed to be measured per individual and would just make a giant mess of things. Before saying you are oppressed by unreasonable restrictions, think about why they are there. You'll turn 18 and vote in your first election and then realize that absolutely nothing else has changed. There are people in my college dorm as old as you, in the first year of college just like me, and I'm 19.
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For christs sake, just have some patience and wait till your 18. The only reason the cutoff age is set at 18 is because most of the psychos have been weeded out at that point and we can be reasonably sure that a majority of 18 year olds can at least wipe their own ass. It would be completely infeasible to have a cutoff that was based off something that needed to be measured per individual and would just make a giant mess of things. Before saying you are oppressed by unreasonable restrictions, think about why they are there. You'll turn 18 and vote in your first election and then realize that absolutely nothing else has changed. There are people in my college dorm as old as you, in the first year of college just like me, and I'm 19.
So you disagree with the statement that minors magically become well informed, responsible adults when they turn 18? Would you agree that some legal adults are actually not responsible enough to vote properly? Would you agree that some minors are more responsible in this regards than legal adults? If you said no to either of the latter two questions, then your answer to the first must be no. And it would be more feasible to have some kind of test or essay requirement to vote than it would be to, say, have a test to get a driver's license.
Even if just one minor was more responsible in this regards than someone that's allowed to vote, then something should be done to get him/her to vote. Unless you guys aren't keen on protecting the rights of the minority. And seeing as how everyone really stops caring when they turn 18, that's true in this case.
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So you disagree with the statement that minors magically become well informed, responsible adults when they turn 18? Would you agree that some legal adults are actually not responsible enough to vote properly? Would you agree that some minors are more responsible in this regards than legal adults? If you said no to either of the latter two questions, then your answer to the first must be no. And it would be more feasible to have some kind of test or essay requirement to vote than it would be to, say, have a test to get a driver's license.
Even if just one minor was more responsible in this regards than someone that's allowed to vote, then something should be done to get him/her to vote. Unless you guys aren't keen on protecting the rights of the minority. And seeing as how everyone really stops caring when they turn 18, that's true in this case.
Propose a practicable alternative to the current age-based cutoff and your argument may be taken more seriously.
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Propose a practicable alternative to the current age-based cutoff and your argument may be taken more seriously.
And it would be more feasible to have some kind of test or essay requirement to vote than it would be to, say, have a test to get a driver's license.
Just to reinforce, tests for driver's licenses are a practical (and widely used) alternative to getting the magical ability to drive a car at age 16 (or whatever age it is where you live).
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So you disagree with the statement that minors magically become well informed, responsible adults when they turn 18? Would you agree that some legal adults are actually not responsible enough to vote properly? Would you agree that some minors are more responsible in this regards than legal adults? If you said no to either of the latter two questions, then your answer to the first must be no. And it would be more feasible to have some kind of test or essay requirement to vote than it would be to, say, have a test to get a driver's license.
Even if just one minor was more responsible in this regards than someone that's allowed to vote, then something should be done to get him/her to vote. Unless you guys aren't keen on protecting the rights of the minority. And seeing as how everyone really stops caring when they turn 18, that's true in this case.
Propose a practicable alternative to the current age-based cutoff and your argument may be taken more seriously.
Have people write an essay during registration about what influences their political views (not what their views are). It will become pretty obvious who's prepared to vote and who's not.
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That just exacerbates class and race discrimination and makes the problem worse. It also disenfranchises people and removes the fundamental rights of democracy.
While it's a bit silly to have an arbitrary cutoff I don't see any better alternative.
Besides, most of your argument is about how you (at 17) can't do things you'll be able to do once 18.
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Consider this: in less than a year, you will be entitled to the full rights and responsibilities of an adult, barring a few outliers (drinking, running for president.)
Your female peers? Will have the same legal rights, but in practice they’ll probably still be treated like children. Passed up for positions of responsibility at work, paid less, and (back on topic!) assumed to be the wives or girlfriends of soldiers rather than soldiers in their own right.
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That just exacerbates class and race discrimination and makes the problem worse. It also disenfranchises people and removes the fundamental rights of democracy.
It disenfranchises them just as much as people being too poor to buy a car they just earned a license to use. What you propose here is a case against the current unequal system of education and bias in essay prompt and review, not a case against this essay as a method to determine whether or not someone cares about voting.
While it's a bit silly to have an arbitrary cutoff I don't see any better alternative.
Which doesn't mean that there isn't one (momentarily ignoring the afore mentioned idea for sake of argument), and it isn't an excuse to not look for one. Granted, I don't honestly expect you to go around thinking about this all the time, but just acknowledge that there's probably a better way. Besides, I'd rather having voting rights be distributed in a manner that discriminates based on interest in subject as opposed to discriminating on age.
Besides, most of your argument is about how you (at 17) can't do things you'll be able to do once 18.
My argument isn't about me individually. Blackhole was right, I can just wait the five months until I turn 18. It's not really that big of a deal; there aren't even any major elections from here on out. But there are people that this would affect. And heck, I might not be qualified to vote myself. But denying my point simply because I'm turning 18 in April simply shows you ignoring the millions of other minors in America, and the unknown quantity that should be allowed to vote.
Consider this: in less than a year, you will be entitled to the full rights and responsibilities of an adult, barring a few outliers (drinking, running for president.)
Your female peers? Will have the same legal rights, but in practice they’ll probably still be treated like children. Passed up for positions of responsibility at work, paid less, and (back on topic!) assumed to be the wives or girlfriends of soldiers rather than soldiers in their own right.
That's quite an eloquent way of putting this thread back on topic. :nervous:
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Some of this stuff is pretty disgusting: statements like 'she rode along with convoys' being interpreted as 'she sat in the back seat', rather than 'she provided overwatch from a Mark 19'.
Because we are back on topic...
"It would say like, 'the patient rode along on convoys,' like I was just a passenger in the back seat," McNeill said.
Whatever she originally said wasn't mentioned, it was interpreted as "the patient rode along on convoys".
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That is indeed a factual statement.
And yet she clearly implies that she did not sit in the back seat.
Furthermore, women are explicitly said to serve as gunners on convoys in the article.
We have no reason to believe she was a gunner on a convoy. However, it seems likely.
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And yet she clearly implies that she did not sit in the back seat.
Who claimed that she sat in the backseat except herself? Where?
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Don't misunderstand that "except herself" - she said, that it sounded like it was that way, those words don't come from anyone else.
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And yet she clearly implies that she did not sit in the back seat.
Who claimed that she sat in the backseat except herself? Where?
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Don't misunderstand that "except herself" - she said, that it sounded like it was that way, those words don't come from anyone else.
There is a lot more to conversation then what is explicitly said. She's probably perceptive enough to pick up the cues from body language, tone, infection etc, it's not always whats said but how its said. I suppose she could be paranoid, but I'm willing to bet her intuition is correct, especially since the article indicates this is a systemic problem not just some random case.
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My criticism wasn't whether she was right or wrong, my critcism is that no one misinterpreted "the patient rode along with convoys" as "she sat in the back seat" (again, except maybe herself), like GB said in his first post.
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Perhaps it's just me, but I sort of assume you were either driving or in a gunner posistion if you were with a convoy consistantly. There just isn't room to be a regular ridealong. Not to mention you'd be crazy to be a ridealong for the hell of it. The VA people would be aware of these things from their other patients. So I don't see how the "rode along with the convoys" statement, in the particular context it was made, is remotely disrespectful.
Without comparison to statements about a male in a similar situation, none of that particular complaint carries any meaning. The rest of the article supports its assertions well, however.
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My criticism wasn't whether she was right or wrong, my critcism is that no one misinterpreted "the patient rode along with convoys" as "she sat in the back seat" (again, except maybe herself), like GB said in his first post.
"It would say like, 'the patient rode along on convoys,' like I was just a passenger in the back seat," McNeill said.
There is a lot more to conversation then what is explicitly said. She's probably perceptive enough to pick up the cues from body language, tone, infection etc, it's not always whats said but how its said. I suppose she could be paranoid, but I'm willing to bet her intuition is correct, especially since the article indicates this is a systemic problem not just some random case.
Either you agree with StarSlayer or you suggest it's all in her head. Go ahead, suggest that.
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Whenever people notice my mum's USMC stuff they go "so your husband is a marine?"
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Already done, Battuta. :nervous:
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for the record, i think soldier chicks are hawt, and they like to be on top
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Already done, Battuta. :nervous:
I'm giving him the chance to redeem himself.
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I'm giving him the chance to redeem himself.
*cough* He's just going to fall back on my analysis, double or nothing.
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My criticism wasn't whether she was right or wrong, my critcism is that no one misinterpreted "the patient rode along with convoys" as "she sat in the back seat" (again, except maybe herself), like GB said in his first post.
"It would say like, 'the patient rode along on convoys,' like I was just a passenger in the back seat," McNeill said.
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Grow a pair and say what you're implying.
Seriously, I have this little patience for people who perpetuate issues like this. Doubly so because you're, so far as I know, a civilian, and impugning the word of a combat-tested veteran.
If you think it's all in her head, go ahead. Tell me that your close reading of one sentence from the article suggests she's making it all up. Got no grounds for complaint. That she was never dismissed as a convoy noncombatant.
It's your shaky analysis against her first-hand analysis and she had a hell of a lot more at stake. The best reason you have to mistrust her is if you think she has an agenda. If you want to divorce yourself from that belief, you should do so now.
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Just to clarify my problem with what you're implying:
"It would say like, 'the patient rode along on convoys,' like I was just a passenger in the back seat," McNeill said.
In the context of an article about the assumption that female vets did not participate in combat.
In a passage presenting problems that McNeill faced with a VA sergeant who treated her as if she was a noncombatant.
(None of which you have disputed in the slightest.)
You want to make the claim that she is imagining this noncombatant assumption in this particular case, when the soldier in question is clearly implying that she was assumed to be a noncombatant or a passenger? And you simultaneously do not dispute all the other claims in the article that women are treated as noncombatants by civilians and fellow military alike?
Meanwhile, let me present my interpretation of what she's saying: statements like 'she rode along with convoys' were interpreted as 'she sat in the back seat', rather than 'she provided overwatch from a Mark 19'.
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Probably you are talking about me...
I am implying that you read part of the article wrong.
Your statement, a little translated:
She said "rode along on convoys", someone else interpreted as "was just a passenger in the back seat"
The articles version:
She said "x" (unknown)
Someone else interpreted it as "rode along on convoys"
She said it sounded like "was just a passenger in the back seat"
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That's clearly not what happened in the article.
However I do believe her reaction to the statement "rode along with the convoys" was unwarrented, considering the source and its presumable knowledge of the situation.
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That's not what I said. The VA paperwork said 'she rode along on convoys', which she suggested implied to us meant 'as a passenger'.
The statement up for interpretation here is what was on the VA paperwork. The people who wrote the statement apparently interpreted it as "passenger in the back seat" when they wrote it. She interpreted it the same way.
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Possibly 'part of the Convoy Escort' would be not only less ambiguous, but also more accurate?
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So, NGTM-1R disagrees with my understanding of the article, and General Battuta disagrees with my understanding of his statements?
To prevent further misunderstandings, do you agree with my representation of what General Battuta said in his first post, NGTM-1R?
Do you agree with my representation of the meaning of the article, General Battuta?
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I have no idea what your representation is.
If the representation is "McNeill was treated as a noncombatant or a lesser contributor by VA administration paperwork", then yes.
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Probably you are talking about me...
I am implying that you read part of the article wrong.
Your statement, a little translated:
She said "rode along on convoys", someone else interpreted as "was just a passenger in the back seat"
The articles version:
She said "x" (unknown)
Someone else interpreted it as "rode along on convoys"
She said it sounded like "was just a passenger in the back seat"
I meant that one under "The articles version"
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Sure, but that's not in conflict with anything I said, as far back as the first post of the article.
Again, to quote myself, the VA people wrote "rode along on convoys" to mean "was a passenger", when it should have meant "was an active combatant."
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The niggling over semantics in light of the overall content of the article makes me sad :(
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Seriously. *sigh*
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Some of this stuff is pretty disgusting: statements like 'she rode along with convoys' being interpreted as 'she sat in the back seat', rather than 'she provided overwatch from a Mark 19'.
So, I think we are pretty close to a solution now :>
I'm assuming I misunderstood what you meant with this quote, but I find no interpretation that fits what you said in your last few posts.
It says, if someone reads "she rode along with convoys" and interprets it as "she sat in the back seat" instead of the probably more accurate "she provided overwatch from a Mark 19" it is disgusting (and I would probably agree)
But this situation isn't mentioned in the article.
And it is introduced with "statements like..."
So, I see 3 possibilities:
a)I don't understand what is written there
b)You didn't write, what you intended to write
c)You did write what you intended to write, but have changed your opinion what the article says somewhere after that sentence.
I don't want to rule out a, you can always be wrong, but...
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Again:
The statement in McNeill's VA forms, "she rode along with convoys".
Was written with the intent to convey "she sat in the back seat", i.e. she was a noncombatant. Was interpreted in this way by those who wrote it, and by others who are cited in the article - bartenders, friends, ordinary civilians, etcetera.
Should have instead implied (as it might have with a male soldier) 'she provided overwatch from a Mark 19'.
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Again:
The statement in McNeill's VA forms, "she rode along with convoys".
Was written with the intent to convey "she sat in the back seat", i.e. she was a noncombatant. Was interpreted in this way by those who wrote it, and by others who are cited in the article - bartenders, friends, ordinary civilians, etcetera.
I don't see any evidence for that. The article quotes the person in question who is in turn quoting from a VA document that at no point in the article is there anything to indicate anyone but her and the VA saw. Without knowing how the VA writes it up regarding a male we have no evidence anything untoward occured; we only have the word of the person in question, who also doesn't know how the VA would have written it up if she were male and for that matter appears to be drawing her conclusions solely from how it was written up as opposed to any kind of personal interaction! The rest of the article is quite solid I agree, but this particular instance is not.
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To go off on a tangent...
Putting a few examples out there helps correct our availability heuristic back towards calibration. If we were on target, one out of every five soldier prototypes we generated would be female.
Could you rephrase that in a non-Spockian manner? :p
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Again:
The statement in McNeill's VA forms, "she rode along with convoys".
Was written with the intent to convey "she sat in the back seat", i.e. she was a noncombatant. Was interpreted in this way by those who wrote it, and by others who are cited in the article - bartenders, friends, ordinary civilians, etcetera.
I don't see any evidence for that. The article quotes the person in question who is in turn quoting from a VA document that at no point in the article is there anything to indicate anyone but her and the VA saw. Without knowing how the VA writes it up regarding a male we have no evidence anything untoward occured; we only have the word of the person in question, who also doesn't know how the VA would have written it up if she were male and for that matter appears to be drawing her conclusions solely from how it was written up as opposed to any kind of personal interaction! The rest of the article is quite solid I agree, but this particular instance is not.
I'm willing to take her at her word. She has better information than us. She may in fact know how similar situations were written up for others.
To go off on a tangent...
Putting a few examples out there helps correct our availability heuristic back towards calibration. If we were on target, one out of every five soldier prototypes we generated would be female.
Could you rephrase that in a non-Spockian manner? :p
These veterans are having trouble because people don't know women are often combat soldiers. Helping people learn that women are combat soldiers will ease this problem.
We use prototypes, rather than rules, to define groups. Take this old chestnut:
A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into a terrible accident. The man is killed instantly. The boy is knocked unconscious, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate. This is my son."
Most people will not solve this instantly the first time they are exposed, though the problem is less severe these days than it used to be. It's an example of prototyping. Exposing people to exemplars of the solution helps counter the effect. (It is also an example of a different order of priming effect which somewhat conflates the results, but it is a useful illustration nonetheless.)
In this case our prototypical soldier is male, which is an experientially derived trait (and not an invalid one.) But we do need to take into account that some soldiers are not male.
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These veterans are having trouble because people don't know women are often combat soldiers. Helping people learn that women are combat soldiers will ease this problem.
What you really need to do, is quietly educate the public through your ever famous, "Army Strong" ads and the like. When people see a woman on the gun of a Humvee, or returning fire with the boys, you can break the stereotype that every woman in the military is sexually immoral Logistics NCO.
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Yep. I actually think they do a pretty good job of that already. Progress progress.
And Iron Man had a good one too. They had the balls to kill her off like any other red shirt, too.
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A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into a terrible accident. The man is killed instantly. The boy is knocked unconscious, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate. This is my son."
My version did not have that part, so I never assumed the mother actually existed at all. If the highlighted part was included, I think it would be very easy to solve that puzzle...
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My version did not have that part, so I never assumed the mother actually existed at all.
wat
Generally children have mothers.
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Even without that part the mother is still the obvious conclusion.
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Not that obvious. I remember that being among a bunch of different problems we were asked to solve in fifth grade one day. Nobody got it.
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My version did not have that part, so I never assumed the mother actually existed at all.
wat
Generally children have mothers.
Well, actually the parents could be gay and the child adopted! Haha your logic bomb just got more complex!
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I'd never even heard that statement until it was used in a discussion like this to prove its own point, so I never got the chance to find out how I would have reacted to it. :p
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My version did not have that part, so I never assumed the mother actually existed at all.
wat
Generally children have mothers.
Well, actually the parents could be gay and the child adopted! Haha your logic bomb just got more complex!
o****, out-21st-centuried!
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Man, we would have got popped one in the mouth if we suggested that as the answer back in elementary...
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Propose a practicable alternative to the current age-based cutoff and your argument may be taken more seriously.
"Service guarantees citizenship!"
I'm only half-joking... there's actually a lot to be said for the idea that citizenship must be earned in some sort of service to the country.
Not that obvious. I remember that being among a bunch of different problems we were asked to solve in fifth grade one day. Nobody got it.
Sadly, this did take me far too long to figure out. I was treating it as a logic puzzle and probably thinking too hard, even though the context of the conversation should have pointed directly to the answer. Blasted prototypes. :p I actually thought of the "Gay couple" possibility before the "the doctor is Mom" occurred to me. :doubt:
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Nothing to be ashamed of. A whole table of enlightened U of C undergrads stared at me for some time before anybody figured it out.
These gender prototypes are really powerful, and this is kind of an illustration of it. It doesn't make anybody who misses the puzzle a bad sexist person.
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Take 500 people and let them do this test
A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into an accident. The boy is severiously injured, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate. This is my son."
How can this be possible when the man was involved in the accident?
This was my version. As you can see, the status of the father is not mentioned, which was quite confusing as I considered that he had not been harmed, but that was stupid because his mental state would not allow him to do anything at all at that point... Anyway... Let the other 500 people do the following test:
A woman and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into an accident. The boy is severiously injured, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate. This is my son."
How can this be possible when the woman was involved in the accident?
And see what the differences are, if there are huge differences, then you've got a problem...
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Your version of the test is inferior. It increases the ambiguity of the riddle by rendering the status of the father unclear. This reduces the diagnostic validity of the construct.
Even given the two versions you supplied, you would probably see significant differences in reaction time, though the second one is likely to draw blank stares and reactions like "What do you mean, how is it possible? The surgeon is the dad, just like the riddle says."
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Yep. I actually think they do a pretty good job of that already. Progress progress.
And Iron Man had a good one too. They had the balls to kill her off like any other red shirt, too.
Not to mention the real SF airman who was killed in Iraq. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Jacobson) Convoy duty.
Or Jessica Lynch's lesser-known fellow solider Shoshana Johnson, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lynch) who was shot several times before being captured.
Just become women aren't supposed to be combat soldiers, doesn't mean circumstances can dictate otherwise. Air Force Security Forces is a profession open to both men and women, and quite often they're pulling convoy escort duties with the Army and Marines.
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Your version of the test is inferior. It increases the ambiguity of the riddle by rendering the status of the father unclear. This reduces the diagnostic validity of the construct.
Which is the point Joshua originally made. Without explaining that the father is dead it's pretty easy to say that the doctor is the father who was in the crash.
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Then why the **** does his version exist?
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Then why the **** does his version exist?
Because people are stupid.
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Because due to the way language works it's pretty hard to come up with a logic puzzle with only one answer. People pretty quickly find loopholes in your sentence that you didn't see because you already had the answer.
The fact that the doctor could still be a man even though the father is dead is a great example of this. The man might be the biological/adoptive father (compared with the one who died). He might be step-father or gay co-parent. Even more bizarre scenarios also exist (identical twins who slept with same women would have no idea which one was the father).
If the riddle had been phrased as "A boy and his father" it could have been taken the man being a priest.
Basically there is no simple way to phrase a riddle like this one without someone coming up with something you haven't thought of and the more of an attempt to make to do so, the more words you add for someone to take a double meaning from.
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The thing is, it's not a concious effort on the part of the people in the towns, it's a much harder hurdle, which is the assumption that soldiers are men, it's been ground into people since birth, from movies like Commando and Rambo to toys like GI Joe and Action man, I would be interested to find the percentage of people who actually realise that females play more than a support role nowadays. This is similar, in some ways, to the fact that people like Douglas Bader and the 633 Squadron are remembered during WW2, and yet people like Nancy Wake are probably unknowns to many people.
Rambo and the like - aren't all of them commandos? You know, elite forces? To my knowledge, there are no women serving in any special forces unit, anywhere.
Women in military are delegated to support roles - not that it makes contribution to the war effort any smaller. Far from it. The "support" roles are vital to any military operation and that also makes them tempting targets for the enemy.
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The fact is that women serve in front-line infantry roles all the time. They just aren't allowed to be called that.
Women serve in special forces units such as the Korean White Tigers and the Israeli YAMAG and Unit 669. Women also served as infantrymen and combat snipers during World War II. The problem women face is that most aren't physically fit enough to pass the qualifications for these units, but there are still women with the capabilities. It's just a matter of letting them.
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Not to mention that I just mentioned six posts before that USAF Security Forces is open to both genders, and they deal with combat overseas more often than you'd think while working convoy security. There's plenty of women I've known since enlisting that could handle special operations if they were given the chance.
Women are relegated to support roles because of a misguided belief that women in combat would destroy unit cohesion, but just hidden under a veil of "they can't physically qualify". Besides, I'm almost certain (this after speaking with people who've been in these situations) the last thing on someone's mind while they're getting shot is how good that female Private's ass looks in ACUs.
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The thing is, it's not a concious effort on the part of the people in the towns, it's a much harder hurdle, which is the assumption that soldiers are men, it's been ground into people since birth, from movies like Commando and Rambo to toys like GI Joe and Action man, I would be interested to find the percentage of people who actually realise that females play more than a support role nowadays. This is similar, in some ways, to the fact that people like Douglas Bader and the 633 Squadron are remembered during WW2, and yet people like Nancy Wake are probably unknowns to many people.
Rambo and the like - aren't all of them commandos? You know, elite forces? To my knowledge, there are no women serving in any special forces unit, anywhere.
Women in military are delegated to support roles - not that it makes contribution to the war effort any smaller. Far from it. The "support" roles are vital to any military operation and that also makes them tempting targets for the enemy.
Ummm... You know that there's female combat pilots all over the place, right? That's not really a "support" role, but rather a "direct combat" role. :doubt:
Also, unless I'm mistaken, the IDF uses women as front-line troops along with the men. Be more careful with the generalizations here, people...
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Please read thread before posting, Thaeris. Trash is about the only one making that 'generalization.'
And it's important to remember (as Nuclear1 pointed out) that the 'support roles' are in fact direct combat roles in modern warfare.
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Right, sorry about that one...
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As I understand it...
The (stated) reason women can't be 'basic infantry' is because a man will do anything to protect the gal, up to and including disobeying orders / compromising objectives. Chivalry for the lose.
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Don't go off and dismiss chivalry, Aardwolf. That in itself is fail...
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Chivalry is fail. You want to be polite and considerate, be polite and considerate to everyone. Singling women out for special coddling itself implies a lack of respect.
edit: In particular, chivalry has no place whatsoever in a military context. If a woman is fighting alongside you, she is your comrade and should be treated as such. Anything else is highly inappropriate, disrespectful, and stands a reasonable chance of getting you both killed.
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As I understand it...
The (stated) reason women can't be 'basic infantry' is because a man will do anything to protect the gal, up to and including disobeying orders / compromising objectives. Chivalry for the lose.
Sounds like a problem with the male soldiers in need of correction.
If it were true it would mean our soldiers suck pretty hard compared to, say, Israelis. Running around with an obsolete and sexist code of honor that impairs tactical performance? Better tighten them up.
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Yeah, we already had this discussion here. Every reason for keeping women out of ______ is actually a male-specific problem, not a female-specific one.
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Ummm... You know that there's female combat pilots all over the place, right? That's not really a "support" role, but rather a "direct combat" role. :doubt:
Also, unless I'm mistaken, the IDF uses women as front-line troops along with the men. Be more careful with the generalizations here, people...
Functions that serve to support the front line troops are referred to as suppoert roles. This includes logistic, survailance, communications, and air support.
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Yeah, we already had this discussion here. Every reason for keeping women out of ______ is actually a male-specific problem, not a female-specific one.
No.
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There is, mind you, a fundemental biological reason for our bias. It's no longer valid, but it exists. You only need one male to repopulate. But you need a lot of females.
Being admittedly no longer valid, however...
To second Nuclear1's comment about SFs, there is at least one female Air Force Security sniper "ace".
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According to hte Combat Readyness Cetner, males have a 40% great uppr body strength and 30% greater lower body strength and endurance (IIRC, can't recall if those were the exact numbers).
Female soldiers that were subject to the same training regime as males showed a 50% increse in injuries, mostly back related.
Strength, endurance and carry capacity play a role in modern warfare too. If you think otherwise, you're sorely mistaken.
Sure, with a sniper rifle a woman is as deadly as any man. But being a sniper is more than jsut sitting in a tower. When the time comes you have to run with that heavy rifle to avoid enemy patrols, endurance and strenght suddenly matter a lot.
In the old days of melee combat women were severely outclassed by men. Today, thanks to ranged combat, this is not the case anymore. But the differences still exist.
I can guarantee you won't see a woman in the SEALS, SAS or (especially) Delta Force. Well, not unless they reduce the joining criteria
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Ummm... You know that there's female combat pilots all over the place, right? That's not really a "support" role, but rather a "direct combat" role. :doubt:
Also, unless I'm mistaken, the IDF uses women as front-line troops along with the men. Be more careful with the generalizations here, people...
Functions that serve to support the front line troops are referred to as suppoert roles. This includes logistic, survailance, communications, and air support.
Thanks for the generalizations. You've never served in the military have you?
Combat pilots aren't a support role, whether their aircraft is designed for CAS or not. They're in combat just as thick as infantry. Surveillance, if you're not an analyst back behind the wire or stateside, is nearly as dangerous. If an RC-135 is going down, the 35 people onboard are going down with it--we're not issued parachutes.
Logistics, again, if you're not stateside, are damn near combat roles these days. I don't know how many times I have to repeat myself about convoy duty.
Yeah, we already had this discussion here. Every reason for keeping women out of ______ is actually a male-specific problem, not a female-specific one.
No.
Goddammit, are you just going to ****ing troll, or actually argue her point?
Keeping women out of the workforce was a problem with men because they wanted someone to watch the kids and have dinner ready when they came home from work.
Keeping women out of politics was a problem with men because they thought the political process would "pervert the purity of women."
Keeping women out of education was a problem with men because, hell, men don't like to be outdone by those people with lesser intellects.
Keeping women out of the military was a problem with men because some rear echelon general thought men couldn't keep it in their pants even while they're being shot at.
*snip*
That's funny, because when their lives are in danger, women have performed just as well in combat as their male counterparts. If you think otherwise, Sergeant Hester (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Ann_Hester), Specialist Piestewa (RIP) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Piestewa), Specialist Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Johnson), and Sergeant Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Lin_Brown) would be happy to kick your ass.
So, what's that? The misogynist armchair general and his statistics are proven wrong by real world examples of women displaying excellence and courage under fire? Whoulda thunk it! :rolleyes:
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Yeah, we already had this discussion here. Every reason for keeping women out of ______ is actually a male-specific problem, not a female-specific one.
No.
That post just permanently lost you the right to post in General Discussion as it pretty much proves you are actually incapable of having a discussion.
You've been warned time and time again that your particular brand of trolling is not appreciated yet you continue to do it. Well, you won't be doing it on here any more.
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I'm glad this is the topic that finally got TrashMan banned from GenDisc.
We've explained to him more than once that the relative physical weakness of women is not an argument for keeping women out of front-line combat roles. It's an argument for keeping weak people out of combat roles. Any female who can pass the physical tests should be able to fight - and such women do exist.
He was also clearly ignoring most of the posts that conflicted with him. I've never seen one-man groupthink before.
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Any female who can pass the physical tests should be able to fight - and such women do exist.
+1.
Well, not just the physical tests, but along those lines, yes. :yes:
If there are women on this Earth who can function as an effective part of a Fire-Team, both gender's behaviour being in check, then why the hell not?
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We've explained to him more than once that the relative physical weakness of women is not an argument for keeping women out of front-line combat roles. It's an argument for keeping weak people out of combat roles. Any female who can pass the physical tests should be able to fight - and such women do exist.
DAMN. STRAIGHT.
I can't tell you how many tough female cadets I've been friends with. These ladies were nothing to scoff at in the slightest.
Furthermore, it's interesting to note that many soldiers in general aren't necessarily all brute and muscle. In fact, I'd say the majority probably aren't. Rather, you have what amounts to fairly light and agile people - this type of build is suited for endurance, which is far more important than quick feats of strength on the field. In many ways, that bulk is just extra weight to carry around...
That said, there's many female combatants that fit that criteria. Ideally, there's no reason for those troops not to be employed as standard infantry...
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Aye, fair points all.