Billy: I heard that men don't have to go to war anymore, not since the 1970s, and it's the 21st Century and that women are in the military now, too.
Johnny: Oh, god. There's a lot to unpack there. Have you heard of Ukraine? Do you know anybody from France or Switzerland? I mention those two because they happen to be a couple of places whose military traditions I know a lot about. So war and violence suddenly care about which number the calendar starts with, is that it?
B: I'm just talking about the United States.
J: I'll get to that. Men have the same problem anywhere in the world, throughout history. Israel may be the only country where women are actually required to serve in the military, but you'd have to look into that. Women have always served in the military, by the way, often fighting in front line situations, so that's nothing new, but that's a whole other issue. In Ukraine, millions of women have escaped the war into Poland with their young children, but all men are turned back, handed a gun (if they're lucky) and sent back into the meat grinder against the Russians. And the Russians have lost something like a million men already, just casualties. They're de facto drafting men right, left, and center, disproportionately from the East, for...reasons.
B: So what about France and Switzerland?
J: Men in Switzerland are effectively in the army until they're forty, actively, really their whole lives, and are expected to join in military exercises for at least two weeks every single year, and even if they live abroad, in which case they are expected to come back. France had compulsory military service, les bidasses, until sometime in the 1990s, I think. Until then every man was expected to do a year of military training. If you're an engineer or scientist, working in some militarily relevant field, it's two years--I had a buddy who was doing hydrodynamic research relevant to submarine screw cavitation. I think you'll find that most European countries, possibly with the odd exception of Germany, have something similar. A French relative of mine registered her two daughters at birth, in America, as French citizens, but not her son, since he would've had to go back to France to do military service. So he missed out on dual citizenship because of his gender.
B: Okay, okay, so it's bad for men everywhere else. What about America? America is totally different since the 1970s, right?
J: Before we get to the 1970s, have you heard of Iraq? Desert Storm?
B: But nobody got drafted for that, right?
J: That's not really the case. They called up a lot of reserves, because they didn't have enough people. You know the Abu Ghraib prison scandal?
B: Yeah, everybody's heard of that.
J: Well, as I recall, there was some woman, a reservist colonel, who was working at a bank job in New York a few weeks before, and she was called up and sent to Iraq, and put in charge of Abu Ghraib. She wasn't an experienced military officer, and that may have led to a lot of the problems.
B: But she wasn't drafted, right?
J: I don't know. But whatever, it's picking nits to say she wasn't drafted. She got short notice to get on a plane to an overseas front line deployment. Maybe "technically" not, but I imagine that she was a patriotic American who thought she was making herself available to defend our country in case we got invaded, not get dragged into an offensive war on the other side of the world. But I did go to draft information meetings during that war.
B: But there wasn't a draft during Iraq, right?
J: Oh, boy. You have heard of the Selective Service Act which came in during Reagan in 1980, right? I was among the first cohort of 18-year-old young men who had to go and sign up for that. Have you ever set foot in a United States Post Office?
B: Of course. Oh, yeah, you mean the posters they have up there that say "A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do"?
J: Exactly. "A MAN's gotta do." They have a male torso in a white T-shirt. No head or face shown. Bloody poetic, no?
B: You mean that we men are just bodies as far as our governments are concerned?
J: Exactly. Anyway, so Saddam Hussein had the 7th-largest army on the planet at the time, so there was a lot of concern, since we were sending over lots of reservists to make up the shortfall, that there would be a draft. I went to one of the many meetings about it and found out that I was too old to get drafted, I think I was about 23 at the time, so they'd "have to kill about half a million men before they'd get to me," but that my brother and several of my cousins would be first in line for the meat grinder if they activated the Selective Service Act. So kind of a relief, for me, but also chilling. Obviously if we were in Russia right now, we'd've all been drafted for the Ukraine thing.
B: So you were afraid?
J: Absolutely. When your country decides they need you, you have to go. I have living male relatives who were drafted in Vietnam. My female relatives told me how horrible it was. You have a couple of days to show up, and they send you off to fight, get shot at, bombed, gassed, even (although that's technically illegal, but war doesn't care). It doesn't matter what's going on in your life, you have to drop everything immediately. If you don't show up, they hunt you down and put you into prison, or execute you. It's positively terrifying. War is terrifying. I have more male relatives and friends who fought in World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, and I'm not from a "military family," not by a long shot. The US used to have an educational deferral--the British never have. They killed the guy who measured the weight of the electron--one of the greatest scientists ever--in the trenches in World War One. So "men don't have to war"--what a cruel joke.
B: Okay, so what about the 1970s? What happened then?
J: Okay, just the broad strokes. The United States effectively withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, so there were still drafted soldiers there at that time. I think our troop strength there was something like a million (perhaps way more) around that time. So that's the entire population of some Western States, like Idaho or Utah, or five times the population of Wyoming, all over fighting in Vietnam. We lost 50,000 men, as in dead, by the way. I promise you it wasn't half women, not to denigrate the contribution of women, but the people filling all the body bags and wheelchairs coming back were men, and most of them HAD to go, by law, under force.
B: But what about the draft laws during the 1970s?
J: I'd have to look it up, but we know that men were being drafted through the 1970s. Vietnam started under Kennedy around 1961 (JFK was assassinated in 1962--two years into his first term), continued with LBJ, Nixon was elected in 1968. One of his goals was an "all-volunteer army," but I don't know what got done about that before he resigned in 1974 due to the Watergate Scandal. Ford finished his term. Saigon fell to the Vietcong in 1975, and US forces were still there. Carter came into office in 1976, and talked about pardoning "draft dodgers" who had gone to Canada during Vietnam, but I don't remember what happened with that (probably nothing). The SSA came out in 1980, under Reagan. So maybe there technically "wasn't a draft" sometime between 1975 and 1980, but that's not a very meaningful statement. Do you remember the movie, "Stripes" with Bill Murray?
B: Yeah, why? That came out in 1981, right?
J: That may have been one of the first times when you saw the US Army "advertising" to get recruits.
B: So what about women in the military?
J: I don't know exactly. I think more women serve and fight than people like to think. We always think of them as "far fewer" and "not in front line combat roles" but neither is probably really true. To say that "women are in the military 'now'" is a slap in the face to all those brave women who've fought and died and often faced far harsher treatment than many men. Something like half the Soviet soldiers in WWII were women, including many of their best snipers. There are lots of historical examples of women who served some very important and very dangerous espionage roles in wartime. Some American women were killed and wounded in Iraq, and you'd have to check the numbers, but in all wars it's overwhelmingly men who fight and die, and only men who get drafted. Women may be strongly encouraged to volunteer, maybe, like in Israel, Switzerland, and Soviet WWII, but otherwise it's just disingenuous what-about-ism. So where did you hear this 1970s draft thing?
B: This woman I know.
J: Oh, god. Well, obviously she's pretty ignorant, perhaps willfully so. Maybe she's just stupid. Do you know her SAT score? The worst case would be that she knows the facts, maybe even knows people with lived experience, and is simply incapable of empathy, is dismissing the suffering of others because it does not and cannot directly impact her. She should be ashamed of herself. She may be seeing things through the lens of Female Privilege.
B: Ashamed? Really?
J: Absolutely. It's disgusting for someone to lecture some other group about their own oppression and suffering, or about their "privilege." She's definitely never had her daddy say to her when she was a little girl anything like, "I hope this thing we're in doesn't turn into a shooting war, because I don't want to see you become cannon fodder."
B: Grubsnarkery?
J: Ha-hah, right, good one. A grubsnark patronizes people who know more about the subject than they do, so yes, or a grubsnark is an "arrogant beggar," as in "I want this and you have it so you have to give it to me," so both of those apply. When you're talking down to a group of people about how they are "privileged" from your perspective, or how their suffering and oppression is "not so bad," it's evil, but I guess all grubsnarks are at least a little bit evil, so it still fits.
B: Yeah. Hang on a second. You said, "Female Privilege" before. I thought there was only "male privilege."
J: Oh, no. Every distinct group has "privilege," otherwise they wouldn't be a distinct group. Since your lady friend seems to be obsessed with the halcyon days of the 1970s and how everything suddenly became perfect for everybody back then, let's set the Wayback Machine for the 1970s and see what else happened then. For one, legislation for the disabled started to happen in 1973, and that's also the year that Roe v. Wade was decided.
B: So women and the disabled had all their problems solved in the early 70s.
J: Yeah, right. Millennia of mistreatment, lack of societal recognition for their unique hardships, all corrected with the stroke of a pen. Women still get pregnant, still have their own unique medical needs, the disabled still can't see, can't climb stairs, don't have wheelchair ramps, can't drive cars, but it's all fixed now, right? Except it wasn't. Personally, I regard women having open and affordable access to the reproductive medical care they need as basic, and I don't see some court decision in 1973 as erasing all the history before that, and unless you were in a coma during the 1980s you remember how under Reagan there were all kinds of "gag orders" preventing doctors from discussing abortion with their female patients and so on, plus they were trying to knock down Roe v. Wade the whole time, and now they've succeeded. The point is, it was bad. How bad, only women can really know. I'm a man, so I've never had to sit in an office with a gynecologist who's legally constrained not to tell me the truth, or who may not even know what the truth is. Women have issues that we as men may or may not even know about, pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, menopause, and so on, but we can't ever really know what it's really like, or how they deal with it. For some women, I guess, it's easier, but for some it's much harder, and again, how can we begin to understand?
B: So it's easier for men, and we have nothing to complain about, right?
J: Let's put it this way, do you own a car?
B: Yeah, sure.
J: Does that mean you can imagine what it's like to NOT have a car, or not to be able to have a car, for example, because you can't afford one, can't get a driving license, or are disabled, or whatever?
B: Uh, kind of. Actually, no, that's kind of a tough question.
J: That MIGHT be what it's like to try to imagine somebody else's situation, and their "privileges" and whether those "privileges" make up for their, shall we say, built-in hardships. I'd be interested in your lady friend's take on the disabled.
B: Hang on, are you saying disabled people have "privilege"? I don't like where this is going.
J: No, no, what I mean, is that if you don't know anything about another group that you're not a member of, and you don't know, or don't care, what kinds of hardships they suffer from, and can only see what they get to do that you don't, then you can see them as "privileged" with respect to your own situation. So your lady friend might see the disabled as being "privileged" because of their handicapped parking spaces, which presumably she doesn't get to use. Or she might say, like she said about "conscription" (which we've already established is completely wrong anyway), that in the 1970s the historical plight of the disabled was resolved through legislation in the 1970s (which it also wasn't, certainly not in practice). So she grubsnarkily dismisses their historical and ongoing suffering and hardship because it doesn't directly affect her.
B: So you don't see disabled people as "privileged"?
J: No, I don't. But if you only look at the goodies they get because of their group membership and ignore the suffering they undoubtedly go through, don't have empathy for their overall situation, that shines a light on your own privilege.
B: I don't follow. What illuminates my own privilege?
J: For example, disabled people get the good, special parking spots, and I don't. If that's all I see, then I see them as privileged with respect to me, as a privilege I don't have. It's kind of true, but it's not the whole picture, not by a long shot. I don't know what disabled people go through, what they have to put up with, and I can't ever know, so it's cruel to dismiss all that, even if I don't know what it is. Another side of that is, like conscription, since she doesn't have to face that issue, it's somehow not important, kind of like a wheelchair ramp if you don't need one. People notice the privileges others have, and the oppressions and hardships they themselves face, taking their own privileges for granted. That's what your friend is doing.
B: But is that really what she's doing?
J: I think so, regardless of what she intends to do, and I don't place a lot of weight on intent as a concept--you did it or said it or you didn't. I would say it's more evil to denigrate and downplay the suffering and hardship and oppression of another group, as she's doing, than to, say, harp on the "privileges" you see them as having. They're both pretty bad. The problem is you can't equate the two, you can't say that a group's privileges somehow "outweigh" or "make up for" the hardships they face. That's just really ugly, really grubsnarky. That's like saying that "women are made to have babies" or that mothers of young children "get all kinds of social and legal privileges" or whatever, and dismissing their suffering and hardship and resenting them for the special "privileges" they supposedly enjoy (which you can't really measure anyway).
B: Pregnancy hurts, is uncomfortable, at least as far as I can tell as a man. Getting shot, or gassed, or blown up in a war is the same for everybody and we can all agree on that. You could say that men have no choice in going to war if they're drafted...
J: Or if they join the Navy before they get drafted into the Army, as friends of mine have done...
B: ...exactly, but I was going to say that getting pregnant is ultimately a choice, but that's not really true, is it?
J: No, it isn't. You could list cases, try to identify "exceptions" like getting raped by a family member, but that's just an awful thing to get into, and it's the same thing that your lady friend is doing, that is, telling another group about what is and is not an oppression or hardship for them, or a choice they get to make. Every woman lives in the fear (or hope) that she could get pregnant, that it could be unwanted in whatever horrible way, and she might be told by society, the government, whatever, that she has some very unpleasant choices ahead of her, or no choice at all, perhaps even a very painful and lonely death.
B: And that's what men face if there's a war and they get drafted.
J: I have a little trouble comparing the two, despite all we've said, since I just can't imagine it, unwanted pregnancy, or pregnancy in general, to be honest. I'm a man, and to me it all just seems terrifying. I remember an episode of "Friends" where a pregnant character starts freaking out and yelling at her partner, "Oh yeah?! Well, you're not the one who has to have a pot roast pulled out through your nostril!" I'll have to check, but my guess is that a man wrote that scene, since women don't seem to think about it that way, as near as I can tell. Women in their 8th or 9th months talk about how it's uncomfortable and they mainly just want it to be over with, and not so much about how can the baby actually get out through such-and-so orifice, which is all that men can understand. It's terrifying, but what the pain is like, how it might be mostly from the contractions of an organ we don't even have, is inaccessible. All you can do is listen and try to be helpful. As you said, though, getting shot or blown up in a war is the same for everybody, in terms of pain and terror.
B: So a woman who avoids getting pregnant gets to avoid all of that.
J: I don't know. I can maybe think about whether I want to have kids or not. I can't think about whether I want to get pregnant, since that's not an option. Women have both choices. As a man, I don't know how women think about it--I imagine it's more complicated, but who can know? I wish women could understand that, kind of like our "do you have a car?" analogy. For example, men not being able to get pregnant, at all, means that we are the ones who have to go to war, and also have a lot less to go on when it comes to feeling sympathy about childbirth, or more to the point, knowing how much we should worry about our female friends, relatives, or wives, who are going through it. Is she in "too much" pain, or is it "normal"? They seem to think of it as "less than," where it might be more of two sides of the same coin. However, a mother, a wife, a girlfriend, a female friend, who is watching her son, husband, friend, go off to war knows the whole picture, the danger, the risks, the fear, the agonies. Women might actually be emotionally tougher, and better at fighting in wars--which is part of what pisses me off about comments like "women are also in the military NOW"--it's just that we don't draft them because they are too important. Not being "as important" might describe the oppression men face here.
B: How to wrap this one up? Is it worse for society to label you as a "baby factory" or "cannon fodder"?
J: They're both pretty bad, and both express how society owns us as individuals, how we're not free. Maybe it's enough to say that empathy for other groups is difficult almost to the point of impossibility, and that it's cruel and arrogant to tell other people how "good or bad" their situation is.
B: Don't be a grubsnark, in other words.
==== Extra Notes ====
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J: Yeah, kind of like the government could call for a draft tomorrow. Oh, and if we want to pick nits, like your draft-denying woman friend, during Reagan there were all kinds of things like "gag orders" and other nonsense preventing doctors from talking with their female patients about abortion. So in practice it was often still very limited. I always knew that Roe v. Wade was hanging by a thread, since it's a court decision. Even if it were a law, which is slightly harder to reverse, does that really fix everything that women have to worry about?
B: I don't know. I guess not. I'm a man, so how can I know for sure?
J: Exactly. I know that women have babies, they menstruate. There are probably many other things that I don't even know about. Women seem to cope with those things, but I don't know how. Even still, there are women for whom these kinds of things are way more difficult, so if I talk to the "typical woman" I still don't know the whole story, and I'm coming in as an outsider, anyway, so I know how women feel about each other, or men, or anything. As a man, I have a crushing weight of social expectations and pressure from other men, but how can I know it's not way worse for women, with a lot of other stuff piled on besides? Or a lot of things I worry about could be way easier for women (like the draft) but I can't know most of it for sure.
B: Being able to attract all the men you want and have babies, and not get drafted, must be awesome, though, right?
J: Maybe. Maybe. There may be baggage that we can't see. Just like with the car ownership thing. Somebody has something I do not, or I have something they do not, does not mean I can imagine their situation. I just have to listen, and try not to make others' burdens heavier.
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Some might argue that childbirth is the important difference between men and women, so it's a "privilege" for women, or not having it is a "privilege" for men, take your pick, but it also seems to be true that societies over human history have not celebrated women getting pregnant except in a very narrow set of circumstances, and as a man I can only imagine what that must be like.
