My wife likes to tell me that she'll know when feminism has succeeded when the US Supreme Court is all women. I tell her that I'll know when feminism has succeeded when the military is all women.
I do admit the existence of insanely moronic arguments that are sometimes made. "As a woman you have to vote for Hillary because she's a woman.". What a dumb argument, that's still identity politics. If the choice was between someone like female Sarah Palin that wants government control of women's bodies, because she thinks the Bible should trump the constitution vs. a man who would respect the separation of church and state (e.g. the catholic Biden who nevertheless supported Roe v. Wade), would a woman have to still be obliged to vote for Palin?
The power is right there, ready to be taken. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to wait for the “white man” to grant you more power. But, to do so, you will need to risk more than your online reputation.
Huh, let's just forget that women had to e.g. fight for the right to vote, or the whole civil rights movement... OK, fine, it's 2025, and let's see, is the discrimination that's in people's heads about "what's normal" totally gone? I can admit that if you ask me to imagine a CEO, I'd imagine a middle-aged white man, am I the only one? And what does this image of normality do to the idea of who will be picked for a particular job, by a group of people?
Yeah if I'm looking for a caretaker for my child, a male candidate would also make me go "Huh, interesting". Women have the advantage for this job, and men have it for the CEO job, I wonder which job is more powerful in the world (if we don't pull out a philosophical idea of "powerful"...).
The reason that military forces tend to be composed mostly of men is for two very practical reasons:
1. Men are on average physically stronger than women, and at their peak are physically stronger than is possible for any woman. This is more useful in a combat situation.
2. Women's bodies are specialized for pregnancy and childbirth. Without women providing this essential function, the next generation of humanity would not exist. By contrast, men are more disposable because all they do is provide the sperm.
A society where almost all women have been killed in battle cannot effectively repopulate, as there is a bottleneck of pregnancy: it is a long process that - excluding relatively rare cases of multiple births - requires one woman per newborn to conduct. A society where almost all men have been killed can repopulate much more rapidly, as it only takes a small number of men to fulfil the male reproductive role of providing sperm.
In fact the existence of sperm banks makes the widespread obliteration of males even less of a risk to the survival of humanity. Plus there is a promising subfield of stem cell research on growing viable sperm from female cells, which would remove the reliance upon males entirely.
