Imagine a country consisting of ten people, five men and five women, all individually choosing to defend their nation against the threat of another. The army general has calculated that four of the country’s ten citizens must die before they can win the war and only one of two scenarios will occur.
- Scenario one: Four women die, leaving you with five men and one woman.
- Scenario two: Four men die, leaving you with five women and one man.
The army general has the ability to control which of the two scenarios takes place, but he would like to seek your counsel on which scenario you would choose first. So which one would it be?
Well, if you care about your country existing fifty years after the war, the decision is a no-brainer.
In the first scenario, the problem is not - as many might wrongly conclude - that the women who died were less capable of fighting in the war. The real problem with scenario one is how exactly the country is going to continue to grow its population after they’ve won the war. In this scenario, you only have one woman left.
This is unlike the second scenario where four men die, leaving you with one man and five women. Choosing scenario two leaves you with a theoretical five times greater reproduction rate than the first.
Given that it wouldn’t make much sense for a country to fight in a war if they didn’t care about survival, it’s fair to say that the second scenario would make the most sense to most people.
But which scenario might feminists choose?
What feminists surprisingly fail to realize is that women are far more valuable to the continuity of human life than are their male counterparts. Feminists elect not to champion the most dominant trait that women have, and instead, focus only on proving to the world that women can do all the things men can.
Men are, in fact, more expendable. From a Darwinian framework, we can understand why men have been “selected” (so to speak) to go to war, and also why women have simultaneously been discouraged from doing so.
Given that this system of risk assessment has been embedded into our subconscious over millennia, should it then surprise anyone that men and women have different interests, and therefore make different choices?
Throughout history, men were required to do the more laborious and dangerous tasks – the tasks associated with greater risk. This included hunting, fighting and building, for example. Yet, despite females being more important, radical feminists today inform society that to treat women as if they are more important to continuing life (i.e discouraging them from being on the front lines) is…sexist?
There is a predictable feminist counter-argument: While it may be true that the second scenario presented at the beginning increases a society’s potential to reproduce, the women are nonetheless being used as mere vehicles for reproduction. It fails to consider the possibility that the women remaining in either scenario do not want to reproduce!
It is true that the women remaining in society may not want to reproduce. However, assuming that women who wish to fight in wars are doing so for the continued existence of society, and acknowledging that refusing to reproduce threatens the continued existence of society, in this specific case the counter-argument doesn't pan out.
Statistical disparities in representation regarding sex in the military and other professions very often do not reflect malicious intent, but instead, reflect a natural divergence out of necessity for survival. This divergence does not necessarily occur because one sex is physically or mentally better suited for a job than another; it could be the case that one sex is better suited for a job than another because of the divergence.
Therefore, let the distinction be made that, while certain biases against women do exist today, the reason women are discouraged from fighting wars has to do with future generations.