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The United States: Protecting, Valuing Women World-Wide

Jill

There’s apparently quite an issue brewing over whether or not we should allow female soldiers in combat — despite the fact that female soldiers already are in combat, and are being killed and injured regularly. Of course, the current administration is ignoring their deaths and injuries, just like they’re ingoring the deaths and injuries suffered by male soldiers. And if that ain’t equality, ladies, I don’t know what is.

Women are doing pretty much everything men are doing in Iraq, but getting a fraction of the credit for it. And some people are still arguing that we’re too small or too emotionally weak to be proper soliders, when the women on the ground are proving that they’re just as capable as they need to be.

While this discussion is happening in the background of the war, women continue to do their day to day jobs on the front lines. And civilian women in “liberated” Afghanistan face injury and death for trying to exercise their most basic rights.

Two gunmen on a motorbike killed the provincial director of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs outside her home Monday in apparent retribution for her efforts to help educate women, officials said.
…
Ahmed-jan was known for being an active proponent of women’s rights in this former Taliban stronghold, a region where insurgents have turned increasingly violent the last several months.

Her secretary said one of Ahmed-jan’s most successful projects was running trade schools. ”She was always trying her best to improve education for women,” Abdullah Khan said.

In Kandahar alone, Ahmed-jan had opened six schools where almost 1,000 women learned how to bake and sell their goods at market. She had also opened tailoring schools for women, and clothes made there found their way to Western markets, Khan said.

All the burdens, and a fraction of the rights. When women are laying down their lives — or having their lives stripped away from them — it’s about time to offer them a little more respect, and allow them equal rights, freedoms and liberties.

20 thoughts on The United States: Protecting, Valuing Women World-Wide

  1. I suppose equality is always a good thing in the abstract.

    But I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t actively celebrate the fact that women now have a better chance of getting blown to bits in a pointless war.

  2. You realize that women have always had an excellent chance of getting blown to bits in a pointless war? Whether or not they’ve been paid as fighters, they’ve always been targets.

  3. Correct, Kaethe. I meant female soldiers, of course.

    Civilians catch it in the neck–young or old, male or female. That’s never going to change.

  4. How quickly we’ve forgotten about Afghanistan . . . and the uneducated masses begin with the “Women in Iraq are going to school for the first time.”

    Ugh.

    *headdesk*

  5. What’s funny in a bitter way is how the wingnuts have adapted to the existance of female soldiers. First they say, “Uh, thank you for your service.” Then they say, when you disagree with them, “You’re not really a soldier.”

  6. Also, why in hell do these articles always cite Elaine Fucking Donnelly? She’s a collaborator the same way Ann Coulter is. Every frickin’ article cites her.

  7. When I was researching my Masters’ thesis, I came across some interesting correlations between this topic and women among the ancient Celts. Ancient Celtic women had rights that women don’t have today in the vast majority of the world, and enjoyed incredible autonomy, and there’s interesting evidence that that freedom was tied to their direct participation in armed service. When that was taken away from them sometime after Christianization in the 9th century, they lost all the rest of their rights in very short order by virtue, I’m guessing, of being the ‘protected’ and not the ‘protector’. It gave the newly Christianized men a fantastic excuse to make their women subservient.

  8. I don’t think there are any good reasons not to allow women in combat.

    I do think pregnancy is problematic. There’s just not an easy way of dealing with it. Allowing pregnancy to excuse you from duty is just unfair on people who can’t or won’t get pregnant. Most other things that would get you excused from duty would be disciplinary offences – but people would go mental if we punished pregnant women.

  9. How bout you let women decide if they want to serve their country and not you.. That’s the only problem you have .. that if they are fighting for soemthing they believe in they aren’t serving you are they??

    aww poor baby, now get in the kitchen and do some women work and stop your bitchen.

  10. I do think pregnancy is problematic. There’s just not an easy way of dealing with it. Allowing pregnancy to excuse you from duty is just unfair on people who can’t or won’t get pregnant. Most other things that would get you excused from duty would be disciplinary offences – but people would go mental if we punished pregnant women.

    Question: If men in the army are injured in a non-combat situation and can’t perform his duties — like, let’s say someone breaks his leg while playing football with his friends off-base — is he punished? Or is he just excused or reassigned until he heals?

  11. Totally agreed, Jill. It’s taken years for establishments to recognize that pregnancy is in many ways an inherent condition of being female. That is, it should never be unfair or unreasonable to accomodate women in the case of pregnancy just because it only affects women. It’s a health issue at the core. Should we not cover prostate cancer because that only affects men, too?

  13. Jill – the situation is a little more ambiguous than you are giving it credit for. Let’s play around with the contents of the dashes a little.

    Question: If men in the army are injured in a non-combat situation and can’t perform his duties — like, let’s say someone breaks his leg while playing football with his friends off-base — is he punished?

    No.

    Question: If men in the army are injured in a non-combat situation and can’t perform his duties — like, let’s say someone suffers a self-inflicted injury by shooting themselves in the foot— is he punished?

    Yes. The same would go for lots of other activities too.

    The army’s structured around coercing people to fight who don’t want to. So they have rules to make it difficult to get out of fighting. I support allowing women in combat, but I genuinely think fitting pregnancy into these rules is difficult.

    Wouldn’t it piss you off no end if you had to risk your life in combat, but someone else got a ticket home because her desire to have children was regarded as more pressing than the job she signed up for?

  14. Nik, you do realize that there are mothers of very young babies serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?

    Women aren’t discharged when they get pregnant anymore. Nor are men discharged when they break their legs playing football. Each is reassigned to some other duty during the duration of their disability, and put back on regular duty when it ends.

  15. Wouldn’t it piss you off to no end if you had to risk your life in combat, but someone else got a ticket home because his desire to play football with his friends was regarded as more pressing than the job he signed up for?

    Look, people of both sexes have medical issues that excuse them from combat. If a woman has an unplanned pregnancy — just as if a man has an unplanned injury — she needs to deal with that. Taking time off isn’t ridiculous.

    And honestly, I’d take the Army’s position on pregnancy a little more seriously if their healthcare policies covered birth control (including emergency contraception) and abortion. As it stands, abortion definitely isn’t covered, and EC isn’t available at Army hospitals. Just something else to think about.

  17. For those of you not familiar with the military, Nik is calling pregnant women in the military lazy sluts who get pregnant deliberately to avoid combat. This is common to a certain type of guy—do I hvae to elaborate here?—-who also believes that women lie about rape, abuse, child support, and what have you. If one woman did this in the entire history of the Army, then all women are capable of it and the bravery of dozens or hundreds of female soldiers can safely be dismissed while we talk about that one lazy, cowardly slut. She’s the military equivalent of the guy who always brings up, “But women do it, too!” Strangely enough, the guys who help these women never called lazy lying bastards, or what have you.

    The lazy lying pregnant woman is the stereotype that certain sexist conservative guys like to talk about. If one guy talks about her to another guy, then she becomes two women. If the story passes to a third, a third woman springs into slutty existance. Strangely enough, the men who pass around horror stories about their shitty female coworkers are uttelry unaware and uninterested in the heroics of female soldiers—or they flatly believe it’s a ‘social experiment’—a la Rush Limbaugh.

    It’s a great canary in the coal mine, though. It really reveals a mindset.

  18. I read something in here that almost made me laugh: “If a woman has an unplanned pregnancy – just as if a man has an unplanned injury – she needs to deal with that. Taking time off isn’t ridiculous.”

    Time off?? I can’t speak for the Army, but if you’re a Marine and you’re injured or pregnant, you don’t get “time off”. They will find SOMETHING for you to do, unless you are near death or bedridden.

    The problem is that it’s a lot harder to prove a woman intentionally got pregnant to avoid deployment (not necessarily combat mind you) than to prove a man intentionally injured himself. So there’s always that little bugger in the back of their heads saying “Nah, she just did it on purpose!” Goes back to that whole thing about unmarried women who get pregnant are whores…and how they apparently think only stupid women have babies.

    And as far as women being in actual combat, it is and isn’t true. There’s two different “types” of combat here and people keep talking about them as if they are the same. One is that there is no front line to “keep the women away from” so jobs like military police and truck driver are suddenly fair game and sometimes run into firefights in this war. Is that combat? Sure. Most women are in these sorts of positions and not part of an actual combat/grunt unit. But female Marines are not assigned to grunt units. They aren’t patrolling in AAVs and LAVs or functioning as a normal part of a unit doing patrols and fighting through towns. In fact, I’ve never met a grunt who worked with women in his unit. I’ve never heard of a female Marine being assigned to a ground level grunt unit either and believe me, if it happens, we’d hear. Grunts would be blowing gaskets left and right.

  19. Well, then, that’s settled.

    Oh, yeah, and speak for yourself. You’re sure not speaking for Army female MPs, for me, or those female Marines who were killed in Fallujah.

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