T A B L E__T A L K Would you give your kids Ritalin to calm them down? Join the debate in Table Talk
- - - - - - - - - -
Family myths, family realities
- - - - - - - - - -
R E C E N T L Y
The Forgiven (Part 2)
The Forgiven (Part 1)
Time for One Thing
Cyberspace: The final dating frontier
- - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - -
Mamafesto
|
BAD NEWS FOR G.I. JANE? | PAGE 2 OF 2 How will single-sex units improve the situation for women? I think they would find more confidence as they go through the training. They would not have to compete with men when men have the advantage. And I think they would be more ready to go into the next stage of training, and the Marine Corps experience bears that out. Do you see any positive aspects of gender-integrated training? No, not really. In fact, the only positive results of it, as claimed by the proponents, are quite minimal. All they can point to is an Army Research Institute study that showed an increase in morale among the women. But, at the same time, there was a dip in the morale of the men. My question is, why do they claim success can be determined only by the morale of the women? The purpose of training is to come up with very confident soldiers, it's just not a matter of morale. Once they're separated from men, would you recommend higher physical standards for women than the ones that exist now? If you did that, you would have to accept the fact that fewer women would succeed because they are at a disadvantage. It's just like the Olympics, you have women champions and you have men champions in many events where women are at a disadvantage. If you merge them together, you would never have any female champions or you'd have very few. Do you think these lower standards for women, such as requiring a woman to throw a grenade 25 yards while men must throw one 35 yards, contributes to the perception that women are less capable? If you are in a foxhole with somebody who you know cannot throw a grenade very far, you don't want to be in the foxhole with that person. They are endangering themselves and others. There are biological differences between men and women that are well-documented, and women are at a disadvantage. Women can be physically built up from exercise and Olympic training and become stronger than they are, but compared to men, they're only going to reach a peak of, perhaps, the lower-ranking average male. After the death of Lt. Kara Hultgreen, who was portrayed by Meg Ryan in the film "Courage Under Fire," you raised questions about her qualifications to fly. Lt. Kara Hultgreen was a courageous young women, she was one of the first two to be trained to fly the F-14, she was given a lot of leeway and training concessions that probably would have been denied a male aviator. On the day she died, she happened to make the same error she made twice before in training and had received a pink sheet for it, which is a signal of difficulty -- usually one or two is cause to disqualify you from aviation, but she had four of them. And the second female aviator had seven, but both of them were allowed to graduate to the boat. After Hultgreen's death, the Navy kept insisting that the accident was due to engine failure, but most of the aviator community knew that that wasn't the case. Do these lower standards for women put everyone at risk? Oh yes. The backseater in Hultgreen's plane was almost killed; if she had crashed on the carrier itself, hundreds of people could have been killed. The fact that her life alone was lost is one too many. I certainly don't want to see it happen ever again. It's a matter of safety. It's not a women's rights issue, even though some people try to present it as such. Do pregnant women in the military put the country at risk? When they are needed on ship, and they are not there, that does cause a huge readiness problem. What I think needs to end is the very generous benefits that are offered in the Navy and the other services that actually encourage and subsidize single parenthood. The Navy doesn't need more single mothers, no matter how good those sailors are. If they're not there when the ship leaves the docks or they have to leave before the cruise is over, they're not an asset to the ship, they're a liability. How about if they are there, but they're pregnant on the ship? There are serious hazards that escalate all the more when you talk about combat ships. People don't like to talk about this, but it's a real problem: the risk for birth defects. You have everything from nuclear power to high vibration noise, you have toxic substances, you have all kinds of hazards that especially in the very early weeks and months of pregnancy could severely impact the unborn child. And there haven't even been studies done on the effects of all these factors. Should pregnant women serve at all? No. We have bent over backwards to advance the careers of the pregnant women at the expense of three other parties: mainly the unborn child, the captains of the ships and the Navy officials themselves. Those interests need to be balanced. Right now all the interests are skewed in favor of the mother.
Should women and men be separated during military training? Are these women's rights or national security issues? Discuss in Table Talk. |
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
