Although my aim in this chapter is to present only examples of male disadvantage, it should be clear, as I present these examples, that some of them are also the products of discrimination. However, the arguments for the claim that they are instances of wrongful discrimination will only be presented in subsequent chapters. Other examples I shall present, although clearly instances of disadvantage are not clearly examples of discrimination. I raise them nonetheless. One reason for this is that they parallel some forms of female disadvantage that feminists cite as instances of sexism. Thus I shall argue that either the relevant male disadvantages are instances of sexism or the comparable female disadvantages are not.
Conscription and Combat
Perhaps the most obvious example of male disadvantage is the long history of social and legal pressures on men, but not on women, to enter the military and to fight in war, thereby risking their lives and bodily and psychological health. Where the pressure to join the military has taken the form of conscription, the costs of avoidance have been self-imposed exile, imprisonment, physical assault or, in the most extreme circumstances, execution.1 Millions of men have been conscripted and forced into battle. Others have been press-ganged into naval service. While conscription has been abolished in an increasing number of countries — at least for now — it is still employed, in one form or another, in over 80 countries.2 These include many developed liberal democracies, where the legal barriers to the advancement of women have (almost) all been broken down.
In those times and places where the pressures on men to join the military have been social rather than legal, the costs of not enlisting have been either shame or ostracism. It may be hard for people in contemporary western societies to understand how powerful those forces have been in other contexts. However, young men, and even boys, have felt, and been made to feel, that their manhood is impugned if they fail to enlist. In other words, they would be cowards if they failed to respond to the call to arms. Women, oblivious to their own privilege in being exempt from such pressures and expectations, have sometimes taken a lead in shaming men who they thought should already have volunteered.
One particularly graphic example of this is the campaign, during the First World War, of British women distributing white feathers — a symbol of cowardice — to young men who were not in uniform.3 These were distributed even to adolescent boys who were technically too young to register.4 One boy, Frederick Broome, who had succeeded in enlisting at age 15, fought in battle, was returned to England in a febrile state and then discharged at the insistence of his father, who produced his birth certificate to convince the authorities. Then, while walking over a bridge in town, then age 16, young Frederick was accosted by four girls who gave him three white feathers. He later recalled as follows:
I felt very humiliated. I finished the walk over the bridge and there on the other side was the Thirty-seventh London Territorial Association of the Royal Field Artillery. I walked straight in and rejoined the army.5
Even in those few societies where women have been conscripted, they have almost invariably been treated more leniently. Thus, Israel, one of the few contemporary states (and perhaps the only liberal democratic state) currently to conscript women, is far less demanding of women than it is of men. Women are conscripted for under two years and men for a full three years.6 While men serve in the reserves until age 54, women serve only until age 24.7 Moreover, married women but not married men are exempt. Women are also much more likely to be exempt on other grounds (such as religious commitments).8 Most important of all, women are not forced into combat and are thereby spared the worst of military life.9 Indeed, they are largely placed in jobs that “free up” more men for combat.
Some have noted, quite correctly, that the definition of “combat” often changes, with the result that although women are often formally kept from combat conditions, they are sometimes effectively engaged in risky combat activity.10 This is most pronounced in the case of the United States military where, de facto even though not de jure, women are increasingly in conditions where they come under enemy fire. Kingsley Browne acknowledges that these female soldiers are “in combat” in the sense that they face “combat risks” or are “in harm’s way.” However, he suggests that these women are not “in combat” in another, narrower sense which refers to “seeking out the enemy and closing with him for purposes of killing him.”11 In other words, the difference between being “in harm’s way” and “in combat” (in the narrow sense) is the difference between hoping but failing to avoid contact with the enemy and seeking out such contact and engaging with the enemy. Moreover, it remains true that in those relatively few situations, both historically and geographically, in which women are permitted to take roles that expose them to greater risk, it is a result of their choice rather than coercion. Even then women are usually kept, insofar as possible, from the worst combat situations.
Others have noted that the exclusion of women from combat roles has not resulted in universal protection for women in times of war. Where wars are fought on home territory, women are regularly amongst the casualties of the combat. It remains true, however, that such scenarios are viewed by societies as being a deviation from the “ideal” conflict in which (male) combatants fight at a distance from the women and children whom they are supposed to be protecting. A society attempts to protect its own women but not its men from the life-threatening risks of war.
Nor should we forget just how terrible combat is. The conditions can be appalling. Consider, for example, the conditions faced by the English troops awaiting the battle of Agincourt on October 25, 1415:
Waiting… must have been a cold, miserable and squalid business. It had been raining, the ground was recently ploughed, air temperature was probably in the forties or low fifties Fahrenheit and many in the army were suffering from diarrhoea. Since none would presumably have been allowed to leave the ranks while the army was deployed for action, sufferers would have had to relieve themselves where they stood. For any afflicted man-at-arms wearing mail leggings laced to his plate armour, even that may not have been possible.12
Nor is diarrhea a necessary condition for these excremental indignities:
As contact with the enemy draws nearer, anticipation sharpens into fear. Its physical effects are striking. The heart beats rapidly, the face shines with sweat and the mouth grows dry — so dry that men often emerge from battle with blackened mouths and chapped lips. The jaws gape or the teeth chatter, and in an effort to control himself a man may clench his jaw so tightly that it will ache for days afterwards. Many lose control of their bladder or bowels. Nearly a quarter of the soldiers of an American division interviewed in the South Pacific admitted that they had fouled themselves, and the spectacle of soldiers urgently urinating just before they go into action is as old as battle itself.13
1
Will Ellsworth-Jones,
2
At the time of writing these appear to include: Albania, Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Benin (selective), Bhutan (selective), Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burundi (selective), Cape Verde, Central African Republic (selective), Chad (selective), Chile, China (selective), Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia (selective), Iran, Iraq, Israel, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Lithuania, Madagascar, Mali (selective), Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Niger (selective), North Korea, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Senegal (selective), Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo (selective), Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam and Yemen. It is very difficult to get reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date information on which countries still conscript. The above list is drawn from a few different sources and involves a measure of verification (or falsification) between them and independently. The full list of sources is too long to include here, but the initial, general sources were: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_con-military-conscription; http://www.wri-irg.org/programmes/world_survey; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription.
4
For more on adolescent soldiers in the First World War, see Richard van Emden,
5
Quoted in Will Ellsworth-Jones,
6
Originally women were conscripted for 24 months and men for 30 months. However, the period of women’s service was reduced to less than 21 months and men’s was increased to 36 months. Dafna N. Izraeli, “Gendering military service in the Israel Defense Force,”
8
Ibid., and Nira Yuval-Davis, “Front and rear: the sexual division of labor in the Israeli Army,”
9
Women did serve (voluntarily) in combat in Israel’s War of Independence, and women are now admitted to combat units, but only voluntarily.
10
Judith Wagner DeCew, “Women, equality, and the military,” in Dana E. Bushnell (ed.),
11
Kingsley Browne,
13
John Keegan and Richard Holmes,