Matt Zeitlin

Fellow whippersnapper blogger ( I think he’s 21, so he’s actually downright ancient compared to me) and prolific commenter on many left wing blogs (including this one!) Mike Meginnis has quite the extensive post, really more of an essay, on something I’ve never really thought about before.  It’s nearly exclusively men who fight in wars.  Sure, this point at first seems banal and obvious, but when most think that consequential gender imbalances are ipso facto evidence of either discrimination or a societal problem that should be addressed, it is worth thinking about which gender is fighting in wars.  Here’s the nut:

Do you want to know something every bit as sexist as the conservative wars on abortion and birth control? It was called the draft. If I have estranged left-leaning readers with my comments, perhaps I can unify us around that old rallying-point: Vietnam. Until just a couple decades ago, it was considered normal for the government to take control of a man’s body, to use him as a weapon, and to use him as cannon fodder. It’s still widely understood that the government could do so again in an emergency. As awful as it is when the government seizes control of a woman’s womb, it must be just as awful when the government seizes control of a man – and proceeds to baste the countryside with his guts.

I don’t have a ton to argue with the piece, but a one point to make.  While, yes, 80 percent of the armed services are men, only men get drafted and women can’t serve on the “front lines”(a distinctions that’s becoming all the more meaningless in a conflict like Iraq), the civilian victims of war are often the most disadvantaged in a society – and those are usually women.  From rape being used as a weapon, to the disgusting show trials and public shaming of French women who “collaborated” with the Nazis during the occupation – its women who suffer from the widespread violence and breakdown of society and protection in wartime, as our current boondoggle in Iraq shows.