By Selwyn Duke

Senseless advice and nothing nice; that’s what
little-girls-in-combat policy is made of.

The obvious has already been said about placing women in front-line
combat positions. Their presence will reduce unit cohesiveness; male soldiers’
natural instinct to protect women will influence battlefield decisions; there
will be the problem of sexual impropriety within the ranks and of rape when
women are captured; women will have more trouble measuring up to the physical
and psychological demands of battle; special accommodations will no doubt be
made so that women may tend to feminine concerns; and, as the high pregnancy
rate aboard naval vessels has proven, having young men and women operate in
close quarters is folly. Yet the truth is that it was just a matter of time
before women were allowed in combat; it’s a piece that fits seamlessly into the
modern sex-role puzzle. And it’s not surprising if a majority of Americans
support the policy; they are sex-role puzzled.

When I worked with children years ago, one of my students,
an 11-year-old boy, guessed that the women’s world record for the mile would be
faster than the men’s when a question about the matter was put to him. In the
same vein, a respondent to one
of my articles mentioned a young man she knew who opined that women and men
should compete together in sports. When she informed him that this would
eliminate athletic opportunities for women — boys’ American high school records
surpass women’s world records — he was surprised that the gap between the sexes
was so great. You may be surprised at a knowledge gap so great. Don’t be.

For a few decades now, children have been raised seeing
women in combat. Movies and television shows have long featured masculinized
female characters who talk, act, and fight like men — except when they’re shown
fighting even better and vanquishing men. If a show features a male hero, he
almost invariably has to be balanced with a tough(er?) heroine. Professional
wrestling will now occasionally even show women grappling with men (yes, it’s
fake, but not to a seven-year-old). Kids also have equality dogma drummed into
them; equality this and equality that, and the only departure from it is when
they’re exposed to entertainment that makes men appear weak or to specious
science indicating female superiority. It is another example of how the
left presents the young with a distorted picture of reality.

It’s thus no surprise that people make poor decisions on
policy affecting the sexes. We better understand the different roles of horses
and dogs because we perceive their characteristic strengths and weaknesses;
likewise, how can we understand what roles are suggested by the sexes’
characteristic qualities if we blind ourselves to them?

Ah, dare I speak of “roles”? Some will now accuse me of
fostering sex stereotyping, the very thing the left has been combating with the
agenda outlined earlier. (This, by the way, is one of the main reasons
Hollywood mainstreamed masculinized female characters: they wanted to change how
people think. It worked.) All right, let’s discuss stereotypes.

One of these stereotype opponents would be Beck Laxton, a
British mother who strives to raises “gender neutral” children and has said,
“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into
boxes?” Thus, Laxton believes in allowing her son to find his own sex-role
path; as Shine’s Piper Weiss tells
us, she is on a quest to “let her kid just be a kid.” But this raises a
question: if putting people in boxes is such an imposition, why put your kid in
a kid box?

In other words, why impose species-oriented norms on a child
and put him in a human box? After all, we instill ideas about identity and
innumerable other things when we put children in clothing; cut their hair;
teach them to wash and brush their teeth; teach them language, manners, a
conception of virtue, and social norms; and laugh at some behaviors while
frowning at others. But do we consider that, like self-professed
canine “Wolfie Blackheart,” the child may later decide that homo-sapiens
status isn’t for him?

The point is that it isn’t a matter of whether we’ll put
children in boxes; that is unavoidable.

It’s a matter of putting them in the correct boxes.

And we put a little human in a human box not because we’ve
been brainwashed with some arbitrary social construct but because he was born
in a human body, and it’s better for everyone if is he is socialized as a human
than trained as a ferret. His human status involves unique abilities and
relative physical weaknesses; thus do we apply “species stereotyping” when
raising him. Of course, he may announce when he is 18 that he is a ferret, or
something slightly larger, such as Robert Reich. That’s what mental
institutions are for.

The truth is that we only hear complaints about stereotypes
when those stereotypes are out of fashion — or out of favor with the
“fashionable” set. For example, it’s now common to scoff at traditional female
portrayals such as that of devoted housewife June Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver. But what of her
husband, Ward? Do little boys dream of growing up, wearing a suit, and working
9 to 5 at a job that is probably drudgery? Yet what would have been better?
Should Ward Cleaver have been cast as a layabout Beat Generation type who some
nights never came home, drank like a fish, mainlined heroin, and frequented
bathhouses? Would it have been healthy to destroy the Cleaver stereotype and
institute a new one such as that reflected in the now cancelled All My Babies’ Mommas? I think men should
be pushed toward the box of gainfully employed, loving, responsible father —
that’s the only way civilization can survive. And women have their boxes, too.

This is where “sex stereotyping” (the term gender
is misused today) comes into play. Sure, we’ve heard that it places
children in a potential-stifling straitjacket. But there is another theory, one
considered self-evident truth not long ago. It goes like this: at issue here
isn’t negatively connoted “stereotyping.” Rather, just as we give humans a
species-specific upbringing, we should give a boy a sex-specific upbringing;
this is not because we’ve fallen victim to some arbitrary social construct but
because he was born in a boy’s body (that’s called a clue). Is this stifling?
On the contrary, just as you may provide art-specific opportunities to help a
child with a proclivity for art exploit his potential, sex-specific
childrearing helps the sexes cultivate and augment their unique potential. That
is how boys and girls come to full flower as men and women.

I haven’t said much here about women in combat, and for good
reason. It’s just a branch on the feminist tree, a branch whose appearance was
just a matter of time. And now I’ll be the hatchet man.

Even science, which often eventually catches up with common
sense, tells us that the sexes have different characteristic qualities and
strengths. And since “male” and “female” are real and different statuses, also
real are the adjectives that describe what is characteristic of each one,
“masculine” and “feminine.” It also then follows that the verbs “masculinize”
and “feminize” describe actual changes that really can be effected.

Taking it further, the sexes’ different proclivities imply
different roles, which we call masculine and feminine roles. Two of these,
“mother” and “father,” are of inestimable importance because they constitute
the nucleus of civilization’s central building block: the family. Thus,
anything that diminishes the chances of the sexes successfully performing those
roles threatens to destroy the family — and, hence, civilization.

Given this, should we accept any social norm that
discourages the cultivation of a sex’s respective qualities or serves to
masculinize women or feminize men? Does it behoove us to steer girls toward
masculine endeavors? Those are the big questions — and they get at the big
picture. 

And this answers the little-picture question of women in
combat. If warfare isn’t a masculine endeavor, what is? And if putting women in
military uniforms, giving them weaponry, and teaching them to be warriors
doesn’t masculinize them, what does? And what does it say about our society
that the masculinization of women has reached this advanced stage?

It says that the feminist tree is deep-rooted and tall, with
a canopy that blocks out the light of common sense. The sooner that tree is
burnt to ashes with the world’s fiercest accelerant, the better.

 
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