Quote:
Originally Posted by Oberon
Perhaps rather than limit what women can and can't do because men can't keep it in their pants, perhaps we should encourage men to actually gain some self-control.
I know, I know, my reasonophobia again.  |
Indeed, reasonophobia. Because you simply ignore some simple facts from reality in order to insist on an ideal for principle reasons.
Consider this: the rule in Islam that women should cover all up, originally came from Muhammad's anger about women relieving themselves shamelessly even under the eyes of foreign men being nearby, watching them. He ruled they should do it behind a cover, or with a blanket put about themselves, to block male vision. Later, this was perverted into the demand that women should not show any hair or uncovered skin, since a single square-inch of uncovered skin already would provoke males and would serve as an incentive for males to lose their mind and jump onto these provoking females. Conclusion in Islamic logic: an uncovered women is a naked women and thus almost asks for getting raped.
Of course, that later development is sexist nonsense. Not to mention the male bigotry.
But by refusing that enslaving dress code of burkhas and veils and the like, can one conclude that women should feel encouraged to walk in public as lightly dressed as they would be if working in a pool-dance bar? Hardly.
Where your reasonophobia sets in is when you simply ignore that mutual attraction between both sexes, and the role that sights, physical arbitrary contacts, smells, pheromones and hormones play, are a part of human reality that nobody can avoid. You cannot make these factors non-existing. It just does not work that way.
That still does not make most civilised men charging into anythign female that has not climbed on the tree when counting one-two-three. But it happens - occassionaloly.
And the more situations you create and the longer or more intense or extreme said situations become, the more such exceptions from the rule that civilised standards keep biological drives in check, you provoke. Life aboard a submarine I would consider to be a situation being anything but "ordinary". The tight physical boundaries of the environment are fact. The isolation is more or less total, and lasts for weeks, sometimes months. Privacy is almost non-existent.
Not to mention the all-male culture that the war machine always has been.
If you want females on u-boats, then have all-female crews. I'm fine with that, if the qualification of the crew is the same like for a male crew. Whether that calculates well for the ministry, in money and personell needed (you need replacements for every single post, and a sufficient stream of future female cadets) is something different, and due to the personell "logistics" would almost mean to maintain not one but two submarine navies in your military. Unreasonable, since from a military standpoint it doe snot matter to have an all-female crewed submarine. What counts is to have that submarine. So why paying twice if you can have the same boat much cheaper?
To make it all a bit more pointy and to add to the contrast, so that what I mean maybe becomes clearer, imagine a bus that is crowded, and most passengers being men (this is from social-psychological examination done already in the early 80s, btw). Imagine a few young women squeezed into the standing crowd. It cannot be avoided that bodies touch bodies, shoulders, hips, stomachs, backs. Smells of hair and skin, perfume, pheromones fill the air. The chemistry does its intended natural magic. Now tell the men they should behave (that is what you demand,
and want to leave it to).
Still you will see that the number of cases about sexual harassment or attempts to sexually approach the women, does not stay the same (compared to the social environment outside the bus), but rises. And you will see that the number of such incidents somewhat correlates with the social culture you look at. You will have such incidents more often in Latin-American societies, India, and Japan, for example. Less often in let's say Scandinavian countries. You can tell the men as long as you want, Oberon, to stay calm and act polite and with self-restraint: the more often you allow women getting into this situation, the more incidents you will get as a turnout. But you accept that, for the sake of just demanding the ideal principally commanding what reality should turn into. But it won't.
And that is where your reasonophobia sets in once again indeed. Reality does not obey ideology or ideal. In the end, humans are animals like any other, with a thin layer of civilization-paint on their skin. We call that cosmetics. But our actions and thoughts are much more hidden from our "free will", are more driven by genetics, traditions (often basing on said biological realities), hormones, than we are usually ready to admit. It hurts our ego to admit that we are not to that degree masters of our "free will" and "free mind" as we usually dream to be.
In some situations, this concept of total equality just does not work well, because we are not all equal, but different - OBVIOUSLY.
And this difference sometimes, in some contexts and under some circumstances, is better served when accepting it instead of denying it. As I said, I have no problem with female infantry, fighter and bomber pilots, generals. But I have a problem with double standards for the physical fitness training. Women as combat divers (physically weaker than males of same training standard, and much more prone to exhaustion from low temperatures). Women not serving in huge naval environments like carriers or cruisers, but in small encapsuled entities like submarines.
And i would go even further today. I say new modern ultra-feminism with quota demands and genderistic rejection of any sexual differences, is not about "equality" (which only means anything reasonable and meaningful when meaning equality before the law) nothing else but brutal female egoism WITH A STRONG EGOISM-LOBBY.
Equality before the law - yes, I'm all for it. And that is the only conception of "equality between men and women" that makes sense to me.