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April
Ch. 3, What the All-Male Draft and the Combat
Exclusion of Women Tell Us About Men, Women and
Feminism
Excerpts from Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate by Warren Farrell
"Every society rests on the death of
men."--Oliver Wendell Holmes
Item. Almost one out of four American men is a
veteran.[i]
Item. In one World War I battle alone (the
Battle of the Somme), over one million men were
killed or maimed.[ii]
Understanding men requires understanding men's
relationship to the Three Ws: Women, Work, and War.
As we just saw in the Section on Power, only
18-year-old boys are legally required to register
for future wars. How realistic is it that the boys
will, in fact, be drafted? We know only that in 24
to 72 hours the first induction orders can be in
the mail.[iii] Should
another 9/11 happen tomorrow, that's how fast your
life or your brother’s or boyfriend’s
life could change. As I write this, National Guard
and Reserve units practice each week setting up the
infrastructure to allow 100,000 men to be trained
for potential death in boot camps in four
weeks.[iv] This
efficiency is made possible by the pre-registration
system.
If a boy refuses to register for the draft when
he turns 18, he can be barred from all federal
jobs--from the US Post Office to the FBI.[v]
He faces a fine of up to $250,000 and five years in
prison.[vi] Once in
prison, a young man's nubile, young body combined
with his reputation for not fighting makes him a
perfect candidate for homosexual rape and,
therefore, AIDS. In brief, he is subject to being
killed. Why? He was too sensitive to kill.
The Multi-Option Woman And The No-Option
Man
In many states, an 18-year-old boy who has not
registered for the draft cannot attend a state
school.[vii] He cannot
receive even a loan for a private school.
Male-only draft registration leaves a woman who
doesn't register for the draft able to:
(1) go to a state school;
(2) go to a private school with federal aid;
or
(3) get married and work; be single and work;
have children...
It leaves a man who doesn't register able
to:
(1) go to jail;
(2) go to jail;
(3) go to jail.
“Male obligation” vs. “Female
entitlement”
Before boys and men can vote, they have the
obligation to protect that right with the risk of
their life; women receive the right to vote without
the obligation to protect that right with the risk
of anything. Only women receive the privileges
of freedom without a single obligation. This
male-female legal gap creates a male-female
psychological gap—a gap between male
obligation and female entitlement.
I say “male obligation” vs.
“female entitlement” because, even if one
believes that women should not be in combat (for
whatever reason), there are dozens of other
obligations that women could be required to
register for at age 18—administrative roles,
technical support, medical support, factory
support. But nothing is required of women. And
everyone takes that for granted. That’s
entitlement.
How the Law Affects Men vs. Women’s
Moral Maturity
More important, when registering to be a
potential killer is a legal requirement for only
boys, that frees a woman from moral dilemmas,
allowing her to see herself and other women as more
innocent and moral than the young man she sits next
to in class. (Hence, we decry “the
innocent women and children” killed in
war.)
The magnitude of the moral dilemma is greatest
at two points in history: when going to war is
likely; when our country is engaged in a war the
boy considers immoral. Then, every boy must face
the moral dilemma of registering to be drafted to
potentially lose his life and kill others for
something he may consider immoral. For many boys,
even if they are in college and think they will
never be drafted, the likelihood that their college
teachers and peers will consider a war like the War
in Iraq immoral and illegal, makes registering for
it an ethical dilemma. No matter what their level
of developmental readiness, only boys are forced to
lose their innocence as a rite of passage to
adulthood.
My Body, My Business?
For women, it's "our bodies, our business"; for
men, it's "our bodies, government business." For
men, G.I. means government issue. A woman’s
body is a woman’s issue; a man’s body is
the government’s issue.
Registering all of our 18-year-old males for the
draft in the event the country needs more soldiers
is as sexist as registering all of our 18-year-old
females for child-bearing by force in the event the
country needs more children.
Why Should Women Fight in the Wars Men
Cause?
Some feminists say that men cause wars, so
it’s only right men should fight. This is like
saying, women raise children, so it’s only
right women should go to prison for the crimes
committed by children. Parents—not women-- are
ultimately responsible for raising children, and
voters of both sexes are ultimately responsible for
their laws and their leaders. And in the U.S.,
seven million more female voters than male voters
elect the politicians who create the policies that
make or prevent war.
Aren’t there more male politicians, though?
Yes. Politicians are like chauffeurs—their
bodies are in the driver’s seat; voters are
like the owners in the back seat telling the
chauffeur where to go. The politician and chauffeur
have some discretion as to how to get there, but
the voters-- or owners in the back seat—are
the ones who must take responsibility for the
chauffeurs and politicians they hire, and where
they tell them to go.
On the deepest levels, wars are not caused by
men, and oppression is not created only by men.
Rent An Officer and a Gentleman. When I saw
An Officer and a Gentleman in a theater when
it first opened, the women cheered wildly when the
female heroine got the officer who had learned how
to kill, not the pacifist who refused to kill. As
long as women choose the killer genes, they will
create children from the genes of killers, not from
the genes of pacifists. And if women did not choose
those genes, there would be no war from which
Europeans would live in America. And if American
women only started choosing pacifist men’s
genes in 1900, they would now be Nazis speaking
German. Similarly, if women cared about Blacks not
being oppressed, no woman would be wearing a
diamond mined by companies supporting Apartheid.
Women who are adult enough to take responsibility
for their choices will acknowledge their role in
both war and oppression.
[i]See US Department of
Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical
Abstract of United States: 2006, 126th edition, p.
346, Table 509; p. 344, Table 505; and p. 13, Table
11.
[ii]See John Laffin,
Brassey's Battles: 3500 Years of Conflict,
Campaigns, and Wars from A-Z (London: A. Wheaton
& Co., 1986), p. 399.
[iii]Air Force Lt. Col.
Ronald Meilstrup, Deputy Director of the Selective
Service System's Regional Headquarters in
Illinois.
[iv]Bob Secter, "The
Draft: If There's a War, There's a Way," Los
Angeles Times, January 3, 1991, p. E-1 &
E-5.
[v]Military Selective
Service Act. See "Privacy Act Statement," SSS Form
1, Registration Form, September, 1987.
[vi]Military Selective
Service Act. See "Privacy Act Statement," SSS Form
1, Registration Form, September, 1987.
[vii]Jim Schwartz,
College Press Service, 1986.
© 2010, Warren
Farrell (with Steven Svoboda) vs. James P.
Sterba
* * *
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow
victim. - Betty Friedan
Warren
Farrell, Ph.D., is the author of numerous
international best-sellers on men and women,
including Why
Men Are The Way They Are
and The
Myth of Male Power.
Women
Can't Hear What Men Don't
Say was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection and
Father
and Child Reunion has
led to Dr. Farrell doing expert witness work that
has encouraged many judges to keep dads in
children’s lives. Dr. Farrell’s released
Why
Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay
Gap and What Women Can Do About
It in 2005 and
Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate
in 2008.
Warren is the only man in the US
ever elected three times to the Board of Directors
of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New
York City. He has been chosen by The Financial
Times as one of the world’s top 100
thought leaders, is in Who’s Who in America
and in Who’s Who in the World. He has taught
in five disciplines, most recently at the School of
Medicine at the University of California in San
Diego, and is ranked by the International
Biographic Centre of London as one of the
world’s top 2000 scholars of the Twentieth
Century. He has appeared on over 1,000 TV shows
worldwide and lives in Mill Valley, California with
his wife and two daughters.You can visit him at
www.warrenfarrell.com
or E-Mail
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