US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has previously expressed opposition to women serving in combat, has ordered the military to develop gender-neutral physical fitness standards for frontline troops, a memo released Monday said.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has previously expressed opposition to women serving in combat, has ordered the military to develop gender-neutral physical fitness standards for frontline troops, a memo released Monday said.
The intent is to make military service even less appealing to women.
Step 1: Dramatically restrict who is allowed to volunteer for our volunteer miitary.
Step 2: Bemoan that the US no longer has a standing military large enough to support its interests.
Step 3: Here comes the draft again.
Step 4: Wait a bit and all your undesirables age out or are driven out of the military.
Step 5: Well I’m not sure about this one, but you’ve got a big army full of the only people you really want to have any power, personal autonomy, or decent standard of living anyway; I’m sure you can find something to do with it.
You forgot step 4.5, starve and under train 90 percent of your military while a super loyal 10 percent get the best training and rations in a Republican Guard.
I feel like it’s less about putting people in power (although it may do that to a certain extent) and more about reinforcing the role of poor and minority men as disposable tools. War is a means for the rich and powerful to squabble over resources, but it’s also a way for them to exert their control over a large population of men. One of my bigger feminist sticking points on the topic of how patriarchy hurts men is that its not just about controlling women, its also about creating a class of men who are disposable by convincing them that it’s either for the benefit of women and / or to help them control women too (which it does a little, it’s just that most of that power is still going to a small subset of men).
It also partially eliminates potential uprising from men, if they are all used as cannon fodder.
That’s a great point and much better thought out than my own! 💯
Well, and this what men are getting to when they get upset about men’s rights and bring up the draft right? It’s genuinely something they should be mad about they’re just misdirecting their anger.
I’ve thought about this one a lot; there’s several fanfics I’ve written that touch on this; one is an alternate of historical fictions and the other involves the Drow from the forgotten realms. There’s this tendency (especially in erotic media) for matriarchal societies to have women act more masculine and sexually aggressive and have men crawling around on the floor in excrement and it always bugs me. There’s so many existing negative stereotypes of men and positive stereotypes of women that could just be inversely accentuated to create that kind of society. I could talk for days about that one, LOL.
I don’t like to comment to much on the military since its what I’ve done most of my adult life and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the last 25 years. The ACFT took almost 20 years to develop so unless they just go back to the APFT or the Marine Corps fitness test and only use the men’s criteria the test won’t be ready before he’s gone.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, I really think they’ll just use the men’s criteria.
Ironically, when I was in I thought it was really unfair that the women could openly grow long hair and just tuck it under their cover and the men could not.
I’m ashamed to say that back then I took it as an example of women wanting special treatment, when I’m sure in retrospect that it was nothing of the sort.
I’m one step ahead by being too out of shape to be drafted
Checkmate
Than it already is, the SA that get swept under the rug, because it might hurt a officers chance of staying in the service is already a detterant
Military service is already pretty unappealing to any empathetic human being imo
OK…what exactly does that have to do with gender based fitness tests?
You don’t see how a comment about military service being generally unappealing relates to your comment about something making military service less appealing to women specifically?