A MALE READER writes:

I was introduced to your blog a year ago by View From the Right.  I  wanted to commend for your ability and willingness to stand against  the tide of today’s society.

I wanted to relay an experience that I believe is relevant to many of  your postings.

I am military officer and over the course of my career I have had three women work under my command.  During that time, I gave orders to  those women as I would anybody else.  The other day, I ordered  a  woman to do something.  At the time, it did not seem different.  However, in hind sight I realized this case WAS different. Why? Her husband was there; something I had never experienced before.

After the fact, I felt uniformly (pun intended) uncomfortable with telling a woman to do something in front or her husband; a prerogative I would reserve for  her husband alone.  I am not married (incidentally, I echo the sympathies of the college junior who wrote in a few days ago regarding  the difficulty of finding a solidly Christian women), so I am not  certain how I would have reacted in the situation, however it felt most uncomfortable.  On the whole, the normalizing of sexual egalitarianism in the military is an extremely difficult concept to deal with on a day-to-day basis. I do not need to rehash many of the arguments presented on your site;  needless to say difficulties abound when we must constantly pursue the meaningless concept of equality over military readiness.

Thank you.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

That is a dimension to the feminization of the military that never occurred to me. Imagine the implications of being in command of both a wife and a husband at the same time, particularly in tense situations in which one or the other must be ordered to do something dangerous or difficult. It places all involved – officers and soldiers – in an unnatural position. If these circumstances don’t make a married man and woman conscious of the unnaturalness of it all then there is something wrong with their relationship as husband and wife. 

I assume that those in command try not to put husbands and wives together, which adds another bureaucratic task to the many others created by the presence of women in significant numbers. But people can get married at any time, so a married couple could be unexpectedly among those enlistened and assigned to the same unit at any time.

Then of course, there is the horrible possibility of dealing with adulterous affairs in a unit in which both a husband and wife are deployed. No diversity seminars can obliterate or overcome the unreality of it all. Altogether, the significant influx of women creates a serious and dangerous distraction for those in command and amounts to the purposeful pursuit of military un-readiness.

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