A nightmarish dystopia

My wife is watching "The Handmaid Tales" lately. She casually commented how "it's eerie to see how things could go wrong if the state gets control over women's bodies".

That's indeed a scary dystopia. Imagine if the state had the power to force citizens (but only one of the sexes) two put their bodies at its disposal to serve some collective purpose.

As you might have guessed from the title, there's some sarcasm here. What is a nightmarish distopia for women, is still is reality for millions of men.

This is of course about forced military service.

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The usual comebacks

"Do you know someone who was drafted? It's just a theoretical hypotesis, it hasn't happened in ages. How does it affect you personally?". These are some typical comebacks we hear everytime the Draft is brought up as a men's issue.

They stem from a superficial and short-sighted point of view. But just for the sake of precision, I'll reply to these common objections as a western european:

  1. Yes, I know someone who was forced to serve. In fact, all the males I know over a certain age were mandated to spend at least 1 year doing military service. It wasn't frontline war, but it was still a year of their life that will never be given back. An year in which they were forced to leave on hold their careers, studies, friends and families, and to be subjected to a controlling environment with strict discipline and all kinds of mobbing. Like being in prison just for being born male. I also happen to know guys who fled their country to avoid military draft. So yeah, plenty of examples if one looks a bit farther than one's nose.
  2. It's not some ancient rule that hasn't been applied since the Middle Ages. It happens regularly in 2023 everywhere in the world where there's conflict (Ukraine and Russia are just the latest notable examples) or wherever the state believes it needs to give military training to its population. I was particularly struck by the example of Finland, a very advanced country where roughly half of the ministers are women, and yet it has a male-only mandatory military service (must be the famous "men harming themselves through the patriarchy").
  3. I am not directly affected by it. But, where I live, military service is not abolished. It's just suspended. That means all males living in my country have a sword of Damocles on their head, which might fall as soon as a regressive enough politician decides it's a good idea to restore it. I believe the situation is similar for most developed countries. And no. If military service is restored it will not be applied to both sexes. To propose something like that would be politically suicidal.

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Just another Duty

Ok, sometimes military service is mandatory. So what? Everyone has duties.

Yes sure, law can overwrite individual freedom sometimes. You cannot ride your bike without helmet and you must pay your taxes. These, like all duties, apply to every adult citizen. In exchange, these citizens get a well-functioning society, which allows them to exercise their human rights.

Just like a body can sacrifice some cells to protect the organism, states sometimes deem appropriate to sacrifice some citizens to preserve the integrity of the community. Personally I find this notion very problematic. To be frank, I see it as blatant abuse of power and not dissimilar from slavery. But it's common practice during wars and it's accepted by many people...so let's pretend it's ok.

But here's the issue: applying this duty only to half of the adult population, depending on their sex, creates an obvious mismatch between equality and responsibility.

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[(Men and Women) and Children] or [Men and (Women and Children)]

As a society claiming to be committed to gender equality, we must decide in which of these two worlds we want to live:

- [(Men and Women) and Children]: a world in which men and women are both equally adult and responsible citizens.

- [Men and (Women and Children)]: a world in which men are fully responsible and adult, while women preserve a hybrid status between adults and children.

The first is the progressive world. The second is the conservative world.

Currently, the western countries are in between these two worlds. But their coexistence constitutes a paradoxical incoherence. There cannot be a reality in which men and women have equal rights and yet, should the need arise, men are still expected to give away everything for the collectivity, while women preserve autonomy and freedom. It doesn't get more unjust than that. Therefore, one of these worlds must go.

Feminists claim to be pushing hard for the realization of the first world. But we see innumerable examples of important institutions, nominally guided by feminist principles, resorting to the "women and children" rethoric. We also see exactly zero examples of feminist institutions speaking against the gender discrimination of military draft, despite it being clearly a product of the second world, which they claim they want to destroy.

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Some other common objections

1) Women are less fit to fight. They would be a liability on the battlefield.

This is quite a generalizing stance...not all women are weak and not all men are strong. A just policy would be to draft all the physically and psychologically fit people instead of making it gendered at the root. But, setting that aside: most armies accept female volunteers. If you consider women fit to fight as volunteers, why would you consider them unfit to fight as conscripts?

2) Women in the battlefield would not be simply killed: they would be taken prisoners and raped by the enemies.

I'm aware that sexual violence is a big issue for women in the army. But soldiers in the battlefield face all kinds of brutality. Being tortured, losing a limb on a landmine, being in agony for days, burning alive. Honestly, sexual violence is just another instance of this hell. Which, I know, as an issue would predominantly hit women, and that should definitely be taken into account in determining their role in the military effort. But to exempt all women to spare them one of the many instances of horrors of war, frankly, seems just an excuse.

3) The power is held by men, so men should be the ones involved in wars

This point drives me crazy. Power, in democracies, is held by democratically elected representatives. Which are democratically elected by all the adult population (reminder: it's both men and women). Also, women politicians and presidents are a thing, and they (I hope) will be more and more a thing in the future. In this context, what the f*** does it mean for the power to be held by men? Are the women supporting Putin in Russia not to blame for his policies? Only the men?

4) Feminism didn't invent military conscription: the Patriarchy did. Why is feminism the villain?

That's right. Feminism didn't invent any of the issues men face disproportionately or exclusively. They are in place because of traditional, patriarchical society. I completely agree.

But this, like all the others, IS A FEMINIST ISSUE. At least it would be if we took the feminist goal of smashing the patriarchy seriously, instead of as an empowering slogan.

But they are not treated as feminist issues. In fact, feminists will simply glide around them, because addressing them would be to the detriment of women. In not facing these problems, feminists are working AGAINST their own principles and therefore aligning themselves with conservatives.

This obviously goes beyond the issue of military conscription and broadly affects all men's issues. Feminism is the main villain even in leftist men's advocacy groups because, in omitting, silencing and dodging gender issues whose solutions would be to the detriment of women, they are in fact operating a betrayal of the progressive mission, resting instead on traditional prejudices and on our biological biases that make us value women more than men.