Surprise! Pentagon to end ban on women in front-line combat. I knew about the lawsuit back in November and got the sense that things were kind of moving on this front, but I didn’t expect this one. Happy inauguration present, I guess?
Having never served in the military, I can only really speak to how it’s looked from the outside. Like it’s seemed really ridiculous to continue to keep women out of combat assignments when female soldiers have gotten wounded fairly often in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, considering the way combat in those wars hasn’t stayed nice and neat on a battlefield. And I’ve heard over and over that combat assignments are the better path to promotion (is this true?) which would make keeping women out of those assignments beyond shitty.
That, and I think it’s an intense pile of bullshit to keep women out of a job so long as we’re physically capable of doing it. And what I mean by that is that I totally understand why in, say, firefighting you want someone to be able to drag at least a 150 lb person to safety when you might be depending on them to save your ass one of these days. And if a woman can do said dragging? There’s no excuse to keep her out.
Thoughts from actual military type people? I’d like to hear.
If you’d like to laugh yourself sick or potentially cause brain trauma from too much headdesking, read some of the comments on the CNN article. Apparently this is a bad decision because women have periods (if this is even potentially a problem, there is birth control that actually prevents this by the way), it’s a scientific fact that men use logic and women use emotion (my emotions say LOL), and women are meant only to create and nurture life and we are disrupting the order of the universe (if that’s the order of the universe it could use some more disruption thanks).
I cannot even make this shit up.