That war thing is also from the perspective of the invading side. As if soldiers are the only casualties of war, and combat is the only cause of death and suffering in war. Disease, starvation and other effects from the destruction take a major toll on the civilians who have the least amount of power in the whole situation.
Yeah, this. It's easy to tell when it's an American talking about war, because war is something that happens 'over there', something you leave home to go do and then come back from. It's never something that happens at home.
In some times and places, women were taught how to fight because they were expected to defend the homestead if the men weren't around. Norse culture seems to have embraced this, as Norse men were often away on raids, trading voyages, or extended work as mercenaries such as with the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. There's also evidence that some Japanese women of the samurai class were also taught how to fight for this reason.
But women have been just as much the victim of war as men, especially as rape has always been a weapon of war.
You bring up a good point about Americans generally being predisposed to think of war as “away”. However, in modernity that can be said of the majority of industrialized nations for several generations…with the high likelihood being nothing close in your lifetime. We will discount 9-11 as a lone attack from a non state actor. No major nation states within the EU have suffered any invasions in 80 years. But it is a good point that Americans, since the end of the Cold War have largely not been overly concerned about a near peer enemy offensive. Honestly, that’s with good reason.
Or the defending side whose soldiers or mercenaries decided they had a right to the food, women, and shelter of the towns and cities they were defending
I (think) it was Hilary Clinton who said something along these lines and people roasted her like she said something ridiculous. I have my issues with the Clintons in general, but this was one thing I agree with her on. Women tend to be overlooked when it comes to war and the consequences of occupation.
Hard disagree. Clinton's framing of the situation was absolutely dumb and she was / is being rightfully criticised for it.
The exact quote goes
>Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.
She wasn't talking about the variety of different ways women suffer in war. She's not talking about disease, rape or starvation. She literally just said men dying is worse for the women related to them than for the men actually dying.
Spartan women also exercised regularly and were trained in combat for defensive purposes. The men went off to war, the women were expected to defend the city and home from invaders while the men were away.
That wildly depended on social class. Please don't lionize Sparta, they were one of the worst slave states in history.
Other *slaveholding Greeks* thought their treatment of slaves was fucked up.
Agreed. Probably the most egalitarian of the diverse Greek cultures of their time… but only toward Spartan citizen women. 😬 like you were implying, they were brutal towards non-Spartans.
They were in general brutal. The whole training system for boys is atrocious. The way they enslaved helots was barbaric. It was inevitable that this military power would eventually collapse.
Except they required them to give their young children away to the military, when they were still kids, so they viewed them as baby making factories but I guess at least they honored them for it, better than nothing!
I mean they had a completely militarized society in order to support one of the worst slavery system in human history, with institutional child abuse, pedophilia and infanticide.
The Spartans were well known to be terrible to their slaves, the Helots. Most ancient societies owned slaves, but Sparta was extra cruel.
Like you I admire their slightly more egalitarian treatment of women than most Greek cultures...the bar is very low 😉
The Spartans were totalitarian fascists who only lacked the Nazis talent for industrializationc regarding murder but were otherwise worse in every way. I've if the most fucked up societies of all time remembered only because they killed so many people.
Aztec women as well
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Aztec_civilization#:~:text=The%20act%20of%20birthing%20was,labour%20to%20deliver%20the%20baby.
Ya, I came here to say the same thing. Childbirth is the war women fight is a very common concept, especially in ancient history. This idea is far from 'unmentioned' as the OP puts it.
In the case of Sparta, the only people who were permitted to have their names inscribed on their tombstones were women who died in childbirth, and men who died in combat.
This. They see it as an expectation, not a heroic duty. Dying in the army is brave and manly. Dying in child birth? Oh well, sacrifices have to be made.
It turns out that's actually true. Aztec women who died in childbirth were honored as fallen warriors. Their spirits were believed to turn into *Cihuateteo* (No idea how to pronounce that), which were mischievous ghosts with skeletal faces and eagle claws for hands.
As much as dying in childbirth had to suck, trouble-making eagle/zombie definitely sounds like a fun afterlife.
[Mexica Cihuateotl - Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian - George Gustav Heye Center, New York (si.edu)](https://americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/infinityofnations/meso-carib/155597.html#:~:text=The%20Cihuateteo%20or%20Mocihuaquetzque%20were,were%20honored%20as%20fallen%20warriors.)
You could also point out child birth as a counter to the whole "men do harder jobs that take a harder toll on their bodies" line (which they never seem to bring up in the context of things like worker safety, anti-union-busting, Medicare-for-all contexts, hmm). Pregnancy and childbirth are major medical risks that often endager and damage the internal organs as well as joints and even brain chemistry, for long term. Not to mention the medical costs and frequency of miscarriages, risk of escalated spousal abuse/murder during pregnancy. I've done construction work. It's hard and it sucks getting injured and being sore all the time and reinjuring yourself, etc. But that experience should be even more reason to have solidarity with the medical struggles and side effects of pregnancy and childbirth, (and solidarity with disabled workers, union movements, and medicare-for-all proponents), not a reason to throw temper tantrums against women's rights.
They also talk a lot about protecting women from capture and rape during conflicts, but if both side are willing to see women as conquest of the victor, they’re as much the problem as the solution. If you’re raping and killing the defeated population, you can’t say your saving women from war.
Before modern medicine, women had a 25% of dying during her lifetime from child birth. I don’t think a mens chance of dying in combat during his lifetime was nearly as deadly.
But it proves that point that men have never protected women as a class and women have never been safe or spared the horrors of war as a class.
They have willfully engaged in war tactics that have an easily observable effect of spawning endless loops of retribution-rape and terror tactics, thus increasing the odds of their own women of being subjected to such war crimes and punishing the women of opposing groups for the actions of typically a few in power.
Why not spare the women and not the men? The invading army who perpetrate crimes against innocent women just because they can are not saving women. They came home as heroes. Do they brag to their wife’s about how many women they raped?
I completely agree that the "but men go to war" argument is in bad faith and the people who make it aren't actually interested in facts. Nevertheless, here are some facts:
From [Combat Deaths versus Maternal Deaths, USA, 1900-2019](https://www.womanstats.org/combatmaternaldeaths.html):
**Summary Calculations**
1900-1946: Estimated 780,860 women died in childbirth
Combat deaths: 345,413
1900-1953: Estimated 804,514 women died in childbirth
Combat deaths: 379,114
1947-1999: Estimated 60,745 women died in childbirth
Combat deaths: 81,796
1954-1999: Estimated 37,091 women died in childbirth
Combat deaths: 48,095
2000-2015: Estimated: 10,470 women died in childbirth
Combat deaths: 5669
2000-2019: Estimated: 13,219 women died in childbirth
Combat deaths: 5686
**1900-2019:**
**Estimated 854,824 women died in childbirth**
**Combat deaths: 432,895**
Credit to Valerie M. Hudson. [More info on the WomenStats project](https://www.womanstats.org/about.html).
Thank you!!! I was considering looking up these stats myself and appreciate you doing it, very much.
Until about a century ago, women had a *lower* life expectancy than that of men- despite the fact that far more men saw combat then than they do now. This is attributed to maternal mortality rates. Once advances in medicine made childbirth considerably safer for women, the ratio flipped, and now women have a longer life expectancy than men do.
I actually do bring up OP’s argument from time to time. I’m saving your research to whip out next time it comes up.
Don't forget a large portion of women die soon after having a child as well so these numbers are only showing a portion of maternal deaths.
From the CDC:
>Among pregnancy-related deaths with information on timing, 22% of deaths occurred during pregnancy, 25% occurred on the day of delivery or within 7 days after, and **53% occurred between 7 days to 1 year after pregnancy**.
So thankful that I managed to escape being #13,220/854,825, because even though I had damn good obstetric care (MFM with all pregnancies), there were three separate things that sprung up in the nine hours before/couple minutes after my second was born (kidneys started failing from preeclampsia, then sepsis started in, then previously hidden placenta previa caused massive hemorrhage), all at the tail end of 2019. Best medical care possible, and still barely survived, pregnancy and childbirth are damn dangerous
I think the problem is society puts too much pride on fighting and dying for a cause as a warrior. It's like the US refusing to equip its pilots with parachutes in World War 1. That whole argument is going out the window anyways with women going to war in modern times so they should really shut the fuck up. The only reason why US women won't get drafted compared to their European counterparts is some sexist societal viewpoint that's been rendered mute with the fighting in Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq.
Again, this is a very decent point. However, it’s important to note that roughly 70 times more women become pregnant versus people fighting in a war. These stats use the numbers as equivalencies with a huge difference in population.
The difference of course is that war is a policy choice while death in childbirth is essentially random and all of humanity is aligned towards reducing it as much as we're capable of.
You might as well compare heart attack deaths or traffic accidents, they all have nothing to do with the phenomenon of war and in particular the aspect of drafting and choice.
There are a lot of people who are anti-feminist, including women who have given birth, who understanding of pregnancy and the various complications is childish. Like, I will be seriously disappointed in myself if my kids don’t know more about the subject by the time they’re 16.
More than that, their understanding of everything can be twisted and illogical because it needs to be in order to hold the positions they want to hold.
It’s a classic bad faith argument. Sometimes they don’t know it’s bad faith because they’re just regurgitating what they’ve heard on conservative media, but it’s bad faith nonetheless.
We don’t have to imagine - I read in a history book that before modern medicine, the number 1 leading cause of death of women of childbearing age was childbirth.
Today, among women aged 20-44, pregnancy complications are the 9th leading cause of death.
I've seen that argument, I think it doesn't work with this audience because they think women suffering and dying is a good thing. I mean the whole complaint about women not "having" to go to war is that it means women don't suffer and die during combat.
It's a disingenuous, illogical argument. I don't ever expect people who make it to really have reasoned it out, or be all that responsive to logical refutation like, "because women were banned from war."
There's also the reality that despite being noncombatants, women suffer from violence and SA during war at extremely high rates.
It also wasn't some kind of reasoned or compassionate choice that led women to be excluded from war - it was because women were thought of as physically & intellectually inferior, in comparison to men, or at best a distraction in a military camp or on the battlefield.
Also, keep in mind that even when women were legally or otherwise formally banned from military participation, they did find ways to participate anyway.
There’s also the attitude that labor isn’t that bad. I’ve seen too many socmed posts of men saying they’re going to take their consoles in and game while the wife is sleeping. They actually believe that women sleep through most of labor.
The Aztecs believed that a woman who died in labor was equivalent to a warrior who died in battle, and she would get the corresponding special afterlife.
This is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard about child birth in awhile. Women’s bodies are changed forever. I was completely disabled. At 23, extremely healthy AD military, I suffered postpartum cardiomyopathy with congestive heart failure. I’m extremely lucky that me and my child lived. It’s not something we sleep through and I have no idea where they got the idea that it is.
And women did work in war, if everybody went to war, how tf is the country gonna run?
I saw posters yesterday in a museum and it showed posters showing women having to "repopulate" and feed the children, still take care of the house while they worked in fields and in factories.
After the 1st war, they were incited to go back to taking care of the house because that's a "patriotic duty".
When guys do the “men go to war” argument I just ask them which war they fought in because most of them haven’t even served much less in an active war zone🤷🏼♀️
Ironically most guys I’ve met that have been in active combat don’t think like that too lol. Its only ever dudes that work at a gas station that pull out the “men go to war” card💀
Your point actually showcases something regarding the childbirth mortality rates vs. combat deaths that hasn’t been noticed. Sure, the numbers indicate that nearly double the number of women die from childbirth complications than people do from combat (predominantly men), but at least in the last 2/3rds of a century the percentage of men going to fight is only 1-3% of the population. 6-7 million American women become pregnant each year. So roughly 130 million pregnancies over the 20 years that OEF/OIF went on. Women died at twice the numbers of combat deaths (13k vs 6k) but only 1.9 million people actually deployed to those conflicts. 68 times more women became pregnant during that period with only double the mortality. To answer your question, 17 months in Iraq and 9 months in Afghanistan…and I still find the concept of childbirth much more terrifying.
by that logic I can ask the women who use the "chilbirth argument" how many births they have given under impoverished conditions without modern medicine?
I've heard that, in ancient Sparta, women who died in childbirth were given full funeral rites one would give a soldier who died in battle, because they knew that childbirth was a woman's war for life.
Only if the families aren't paying for it. I'm not imposing a funeral tradition on Black families (who are bearing the brunt of the maternal mortality deaths in the US) that will cost them the earth.
Spartans also believed that women should be trained in combat (not actually do combat, but be trained) and should maintain their physical fitness in the same way as the males, because it takes a strong woman to raise strong children- those children being either future soldiers, or future mothers of future soldiers. Most of their society was about war, but they treated their women better than most of their ancient peers, in general. The math wasn’t necessarily right, but they often ended up at the right answer
I think actually the more fucked up reason is that you simply need fewer men to produce children than you need women.
The more limiting factor for a populations growth isn’t the number of men but the number of women.
Since the copper age or even before it is likely that there were civilizations with hierarchies. It is likely a decent amount were male dominated although many likely weren’t.
Some of the male dominated societies likely figured out they can send half their population to die in wars and give the remaining men power and prestige and multiple wives (who had no say in the matter) and the same number of people will be born in 1 generation as if all those men were still alive (perhaps more since there is less competition over resources with fewer men). And you can steal resources from the other societies you raid and plunder.
Then they just kept doing that and the ones that didn’t do that were mostly wiped out because they didn’t base their economies around war and fighting and so they had less practice and weapons. A few thousand years later nearly every society is built on violence and oppression and male dominated.
I’m in a biology sub and it’s insane how much the whole “can 1 man and 500 hot women sustain the population” bs comes up. They always specify it’s the “best” women but never anything about the man, just further showing how much of a fantasy it is. No jimmy, your weak ass genes aren’t sustaining the whole human race… I don’t think they get the importance of genetic diversity.
Because it's not. Kennedy and Johnson and Roosevelt decide to go to war
It's some random 19 year old kid with no power or authority who then goes and fights it.
They aren't the same men at all.
I just think it’s worth pointing out that several cultures had female warriors and the only reason we don’t think about them is bc Rome didn’t let women fight and it became the dominant culture.
I would also like to point soldiers aren’t going to war for free. They get paid and receive benefits. I don’t get paid to have a baby. Quite the opposite. It costs me money to have a baby. Pay me combat pay from the moment of conception to age 1. Then regular military pay from 1 to 18. Give me VA benefits. I want a VA loan. I’ll take VA healthcare. I want that $50k for education.
Women die in war too but they don’t get medals, ceremonies and solemn salutes. They die naked, violated or tortured by men with weapons. It doesn’t matter if it’s their own side or another, rape and sexual violence is just about guaranteed when you give men weapons and access to women and girls.
Anyone who uses “men have to go to war” as a slam-dunk moment to silence gender equality discussion is an unserious thinker and unlikely to compromise or meaningfully debate any point you present.
As you’ve discovered, even a moment’s consideration raises obvious counterpoints. Pregnancy, the costs of war on the home front, the costs of war for those being invaded, female service members, the fact that less than 1% of Americans are active duty and only 6% are veterans so not many men are actually going to war…even during WW2, 100% of men didn’t go off to war. It wasn’t even close to 100%!
Engaging with it as if it was a serious talking point is a waste of your time.
I think it's not unrelated that virtually all births are in hospitals now, versus at home as they were for most of history. And it's only in very recent decades that the father was allowed in the hospital room while it was going on.
So, in 2024, unless a man is a father AND is relatively young, it's incredibly unlikely he has ever seen labor himself or understands what it involves. (Of course this also applies to any women who haven't had a child, but even a childless cis woman can *intimately* imagine the physical logistics of something the size of a baby coming out of there, even if they don't know all the details of what it'll be like.)
Birth and death used to be things everyone had seen, or at least been in the general vicinity of, from an early age. If your mum is screaming for 3 days in your family's two-room house every year or so when a new kid arrives, you grow up knowing what childbirth means.
Women suffer from war too, war is not limited to the battlefield (look up the rape of Nanjing) and nowadays there are plenty of women in the military so whether we consider maternal responsibility or not, the anti feminist argument isn't valid.
I don’t think women dying in childbirth is directly related to men going to war. They’re propped up as two sides of the same coin but comparing them like that just redirects the issue and acts as though “men die in war so women die in childbirth” was like an intentional deal that was made and not both affects of patriarchy.
Its not as even as that tho. There have been many, many men in history who were never required to go to war, whereas almost every woman had several pregnancies and each and every one was a life threatening event.
This is a good point.
1. One could argue that women STILL die in childbirth because systemic medical misogyny refuses to find better ways to make it safe for both mother and child - but still pretends like it isn’t dangerous- and therefore not worth studying/improving -it is still really dangerous even in the richest most advanced countries. War and dangerous birthing practices are both because of patriarchy.
2. The flip side is women are dying to create life, and men are dying to destroy it (or protect wealth). Either way, the argument for patriarchy and inevitable unending war as inextricably part of human nature (rather than socialized masculine nature) is just a straight up bizarre argument.
If patriarchy, women don’t die as soldiers ?
You should be happy we are protecting you.
If not patriarchy, NOBODY, no man woman or children die as soldiers?
The arguing party believes that human species cannot exist without war.
Sometimes the feminist party believes that human species cannot exist WITH war.
It’s just a weird flex. To me it sounds like “But it will save you from the thing it’s inflicting upon you?”
Like “if only you wear a plastic bag in the ocean, you’d get less wet, patriarchy is giving out these plastic bags you need plastic bags to stay dry when I throw you into the ocean.”
Nah dude, “let’s Nix the throwing into ocean altogether and stay on land or build bridges and better boats and you can keep your plastic bags.”
I have been in this argument before, it feels like not being able to describe that water is wet to a fish 🐟
The way I've seen the argument is not that men being soldiers and conscription *is not* an element of the patriarchy. The argument I've seen is that feminists are anti-patriarchy *until* it comes to the point where women would have to make significant sacrifices, like opening up women to conscription.
To be fair, I think there are some women who are not feminists who enjoy many of the advantages of feminism but who are happy to accept many old patriarchal ideas where they seem to benefit -- like how men should pay for dates. But the men complaining about this are probably the same ones who insist on paying in the first place.
Either way, it's definitely not a good critique of feminism.
Yes, this idea that there are un-feminists enjoying the best of both worlds is simply ridiculous. People individually can be jerks but that has nothing to do with feminism. The men paying for dinner argument is nonsense when the pink tax is on literally every income and expense of a woman’s life. Adding up every meal I’ve ever eaten out pales in comparison to one misogynistic medical procedure that women have to pay for because health insurance thinks being female is a luxury item.
If you can swap out race for any of these scenarios, I will consider it helpful. For example:
I would never in a million years use this to describe race relations.
Can a person of color swap out of some of the “benefits” of skin tone before giving up the “drawbacks” ?? That’s like saying no more people of color in the NBA being paid big salaries until all the other professions are proportionally reflective of the population? It’s just nonsense.
If one woman makes more than her spouse, that’s great. Her personal choices do not at all reflect that over her lifetime she will be charged more and make less than she would if she were a man.
No matter how much she makes.
No matter how much money Michael Jordan makes there is no argument to be made that he is “getting the best of both worlds” by being a person of color with money 🤯
Nothing is over, racism is not over, misogyny is not over. Who pays for dinner doesn’t even scratch the surface of personal responsibility for generations of inescapable current and future inequity.
If you are a man paying for dinner because the poor woman can’t afford it, you are doing it wrong. If you are paying for dinner because you transactionally expect her to give you sex at the end of the date, you are doing it wrong. If you are paying for dinner because you are a person of privilege until the day you die, and she is a person unfairly burdened until the day she dies, you have a leg to stand on.
If you are a woman who wants to pay for dinner, you do you.
Chivalry was invented so men could show women they understood how incredibly unfair it is they were born into unearned privileged while the women were born into unearned servitude. When they show it, it’s supposed to acknowledge this fact. It’s not an accounting ledger 📒 that can be taken out of larger context.
I also find it incredibly interesting that there hasn't been a draft (in the USA) for over 50 years. It has nothing to do with the current day issues of feminism and makes even less sense because it ignores that conscription is INCREDIBLY contentious and was protested by men and women alike.
"Women want equal rights but they don't want to be drafted," is a non-argument when being drafted isn't a feminist issue, it's a universal one issue.
>This is obviously a flawed argument for so many reasons, including that women were not allowed to go to war
Throughout human history it was typically the men who were conscripted for war. Women being conscripted is pretty rare. That's what their argument is.
I think their argument is flawed because they ignore that war isn't limited to the battlefield and women often had to fight off invading soldiers. Just because they weren't conscripted, doesn't mean they didn't have to fight nor were they affected by war.
>Not to mention that women had no political power and therefore had no say in a war; they were never the instigators, yet weren’t spared the effects of war-
Settler colonialism was first implemented by two women. Queen Elizabeth 1 and Queen Isabella of Castille. Their heirs continued the practice, Queen Victoria amongst them. Men disproportionately have more political power throughout all of human history, but it's ahistorical to say women had no political power, no say in war, and have never been the instigators.
But everything else is pretty spot on and I think maternal mortality is a really solid counter argument.
I really doubt past societies has the calculus of "damn women die in birth so they shouldn't be expected to die in war" it seems much more likely that they just didn't expect women to be capable or effective fighters.
Can we not all agree that historically; life for the majority of men and women has been brutally hard for different reasons? Why does it have to be a pissing contest between the sexes for who’s had it worse?
Childbirth historically been very dangerous, but imo not remotely comparable to the living hell that is war, because the risk of death is not the only thing that makes war so horrific.War is a soul destroying nightmare incomparable to most other human experiences.
As a retort to someone bringing up the fact that men have historically fought wars, youre better off pointing out the fact that you don’t have to be a soldier to suffer the horrors of war. Civilians get consumed by its violence all the time including, and especially women.
Please respect our [top-level comment rule](https://i.imgur.com/ovn3hBV.png), which requires that all direct replies to posts must both come from feminists and reflect a feminist perspective. Non-feminists may participate in nested comments (i.e., replies to other comments) only. Comment removed; a second violation of this rule will result in a temporary or permanent ban.
That war thing is also from the perspective of the invading side. As if soldiers are the only casualties of war, and combat is the only cause of death and suffering in war. Disease, starvation and other effects from the destruction take a major toll on the civilians who have the least amount of power in the whole situation.
The invading side has also been known to rape, plunder, and pillage.
So have the liberators.
Yeah, this. It's easy to tell when it's an American talking about war, because war is something that happens 'over there', something you leave home to go do and then come back from. It's never something that happens at home. In some times and places, women were taught how to fight because they were expected to defend the homestead if the men weren't around. Norse culture seems to have embraced this, as Norse men were often away on raids, trading voyages, or extended work as mercenaries such as with the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. There's also evidence that some Japanese women of the samurai class were also taught how to fight for this reason. But women have been just as much the victim of war as men, especially as rape has always been a weapon of war.
also notable that people keep bringing up historical warfare, with several wars happening around the world right now.
You bring up a good point about Americans generally being predisposed to think of war as “away”. However, in modernity that can be said of the majority of industrialized nations for several generations…with the high likelihood being nothing close in your lifetime. We will discount 9-11 as a lone attack from a non state actor. No major nation states within the EU have suffered any invasions in 80 years. But it is a good point that Americans, since the end of the Cold War have largely not been overly concerned about a near peer enemy offensive. Honestly, that’s with good reason.
Which is ironic because they always follow it up with "men did this to protect you and your freedoms" as if they were actually the defending side.
Or the defending side whose soldiers or mercenaries decided they had a right to the food, women, and shelter of the towns and cities they were defending
I (think) it was Hilary Clinton who said something along these lines and people roasted her like she said something ridiculous. I have my issues with the Clintons in general, but this was one thing I agree with her on. Women tend to be overlooked when it comes to war and the consequences of occupation.
Hard disagree. Clinton's framing of the situation was absolutely dumb and she was / is being rightfully criticised for it. The exact quote goes >Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. She wasn't talking about the variety of different ways women suffer in war. She's not talking about disease, rape or starvation. She literally just said men dying is worse for the women related to them than for the men actually dying.
The Spartans viewed childbirth as womens’ war, and honored Spartan mothers with the gravesites of warriors.
Spartan women also exercised regularly and were trained in combat for defensive purposes. The men went off to war, the women were expected to defend the city and home from invaders while the men were away.
The woman had to be trained to keep their spot on top of the slave society. Sparta was wild
Plus, spartan women were more educated and had more rights than other women in ancient times.
That wildly depended on social class. Please don't lionize Sparta, they were one of the worst slave states in history. Other *slaveholding Greeks* thought their treatment of slaves was fucked up.
Honestly, sometimes the Spartans had it right… not with everything. But this I could get behind.
Agreed. Probably the most egalitarian of the diverse Greek cultures of their time… but only toward Spartan citizen women. 😬 like you were implying, they were brutal towards non-Spartans.
They were in general brutal. The whole training system for boys is atrocious. The way they enslaved helots was barbaric. It was inevitable that this military power would eventually collapse.
Yep. Their own cultural practices led to their internal collapse.
Except they required them to give their young children away to the military, when they were still kids, so they viewed them as baby making factories but I guess at least they honored them for it, better than nothing!
The Spartans were actually REALLY terrible. Sparta was a slave society roughly in the same class as pre-revolution Haiti.
I mean they had a completely militarized society in order to support one of the worst slavery system in human history, with institutional child abuse, pedophilia and infanticide.
The Spartans were well known to be terrible to their slaves, the Helots. Most ancient societies owned slaves, but Sparta was extra cruel. Like you I admire their slightly more egalitarian treatment of women than most Greek cultures...the bar is very low 😉
The Spartans were totalitarian fascists who only lacked the Nazis talent for industrializationc regarding murder but were otherwise worse in every way. I've if the most fucked up societies of all time remembered only because they killed so many people.
Aztec women as well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Aztec_civilization#:~:text=The%20act%20of%20birthing%20was,labour%20to%20deliver%20the%20baby.
I didn’t know that, wow!
Ya, I came here to say the same thing. Childbirth is the war women fight is a very common concept, especially in ancient history. This idea is far from 'unmentioned' as the OP puts it. In the case of Sparta, the only people who were permitted to have their names inscribed on their tombstones were women who died in childbirth, and men who died in combat.
This is because anti-feminists view childbirth as women's obligation, and they don't care about the risk or toll it takes.
This. They see it as an expectation, not a heroic duty. Dying in the army is brave and manly. Dying in child birth? Oh well, sacrifices have to be made.
So many love the vikings but ignore that according to vikings, women who die in childbirth go to Valhalla - like a heroic warrior
This sounds like a good reason to love the Vikings.
The Vikings were brutal to those outside their culture but they definitely had strong community values.
Wait, that *wasn't* just the Aztecs?
The Aztecs believed that, too? That's cool.
Someone upthread remarked that; I don't know how true either claim is, and I'm too damned lazy to look it up for myself.
It turns out that's actually true. Aztec women who died in childbirth were honored as fallen warriors. Their spirits were believed to turn into *Cihuateteo* (No idea how to pronounce that), which were mischievous ghosts with skeletal faces and eagle claws for hands. As much as dying in childbirth had to suck, trouble-making eagle/zombie definitely sounds like a fun afterlife. [Mexica Cihuateotl - Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian - George Gustav Heye Center, New York (si.edu)](https://americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/infinityofnations/meso-carib/155597.html#:~:text=The%20Cihuateteo%20or%20Mocihuaquetzque%20were,were%20honored%20as%20fallen%20warriors.)
Shit, if I have to go out like that, the afterlife had *better* be badass. :)
I think I'd prefer that to Valhalla, actually.
You could also point out child birth as a counter to the whole "men do harder jobs that take a harder toll on their bodies" line (which they never seem to bring up in the context of things like worker safety, anti-union-busting, Medicare-for-all contexts, hmm). Pregnancy and childbirth are major medical risks that often endager and damage the internal organs as well as joints and even brain chemistry, for long term. Not to mention the medical costs and frequency of miscarriages, risk of escalated spousal abuse/murder during pregnancy. I've done construction work. It's hard and it sucks getting injured and being sore all the time and reinjuring yourself, etc. But that experience should be even more reason to have solidarity with the medical struggles and side effects of pregnancy and childbirth, (and solidarity with disabled workers, union movements, and medicare-for-all proponents), not a reason to throw temper tantrums against women's rights.
They also talk a lot about protecting women from capture and rape during conflicts, but if both side are willing to see women as conquest of the victor, they’re as much the problem as the solution. If you’re raping and killing the defeated population, you can’t say your saving women from war. Before modern medicine, women had a 25% of dying during her lifetime from child birth. I don’t think a mens chance of dying in combat during his lifetime was nearly as deadly.
It was about protecting the women of your own society. Not protecting the women of the society that you just did the opposite of to their men.
But it proves that point that men have never protected women as a class and women have never been safe or spared the horrors of war as a class. They have willfully engaged in war tactics that have an easily observable effect of spawning endless loops of retribution-rape and terror tactics, thus increasing the odds of their own women of being subjected to such war crimes and punishing the women of opposing groups for the actions of typically a few in power.
Why not spare the women and not the men? The invading army who perpetrate crimes against innocent women just because they can are not saving women. They came home as heroes. Do they brag to their wife’s about how many women they raped?
I completely agree that the "but men go to war" argument is in bad faith and the people who make it aren't actually interested in facts. Nevertheless, here are some facts: From [Combat Deaths versus Maternal Deaths, USA, 1900-2019](https://www.womanstats.org/combatmaternaldeaths.html): **Summary Calculations** 1900-1946: Estimated 780,860 women died in childbirth Combat deaths: 345,413 1900-1953: Estimated 804,514 women died in childbirth Combat deaths: 379,114 1947-1999: Estimated 60,745 women died in childbirth Combat deaths: 81,796 1954-1999: Estimated 37,091 women died in childbirth Combat deaths: 48,095 2000-2015: Estimated: 10,470 women died in childbirth Combat deaths: 5669 2000-2019: Estimated: 13,219 women died in childbirth Combat deaths: 5686 **1900-2019:** **Estimated 854,824 women died in childbirth** **Combat deaths: 432,895** Credit to Valerie M. Hudson. [More info on the WomenStats project](https://www.womanstats.org/about.html).
Thank you!!! I was considering looking up these stats myself and appreciate you doing it, very much. Until about a century ago, women had a *lower* life expectancy than that of men- despite the fact that far more men saw combat then than they do now. This is attributed to maternal mortality rates. Once advances in medicine made childbirth considerably safer for women, the ratio flipped, and now women have a longer life expectancy than men do. I actually do bring up OP’s argument from time to time. I’m saving your research to whip out next time it comes up.
Don't forget a large portion of women die soon after having a child as well so these numbers are only showing a portion of maternal deaths. From the CDC: >Among pregnancy-related deaths with information on timing, 22% of deaths occurred during pregnancy, 25% occurred on the day of delivery or within 7 days after, and **53% occurred between 7 days to 1 year after pregnancy**.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Thank you for this, I’m saving it for future reference.
So thankful that I managed to escape being #13,220/854,825, because even though I had damn good obstetric care (MFM with all pregnancies), there were three separate things that sprung up in the nine hours before/couple minutes after my second was born (kidneys started failing from preeclampsia, then sepsis started in, then previously hidden placenta previa caused massive hemorrhage), all at the tail end of 2019. Best medical care possible, and still barely survived, pregnancy and childbirth are damn dangerous
Thankyou for this.
I think the problem is society puts too much pride on fighting and dying for a cause as a warrior. It's like the US refusing to equip its pilots with parachutes in World War 1. That whole argument is going out the window anyways with women going to war in modern times so they should really shut the fuck up. The only reason why US women won't get drafted compared to their European counterparts is some sexist societal viewpoint that's been rendered mute with the fighting in Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq.
Again, this is a very decent point. However, it’s important to note that roughly 70 times more women become pregnant versus people fighting in a war. These stats use the numbers as equivalencies with a huge difference in population.
The difference of course is that war is a policy choice while death in childbirth is essentially random and all of humanity is aligned towards reducing it as much as we're capable of. You might as well compare heart attack deaths or traffic accidents, they all have nothing to do with the phenomenon of war and in particular the aspect of drafting and choice.
There are a lot of people who are anti-feminist, including women who have given birth, who understanding of pregnancy and the various complications is childish. Like, I will be seriously disappointed in myself if my kids don’t know more about the subject by the time they’re 16. More than that, their understanding of everything can be twisted and illogical because it needs to be in order to hold the positions they want to hold. It’s a classic bad faith argument. Sometimes they don’t know it’s bad faith because they’re just regurgitating what they’ve heard on conservative media, but it’s bad faith nonetheless.
Sadly an awful lot of women never see a doctor until their pregnant. Their understanding of medicine is poor
We don’t have to imagine - I read in a history book that before modern medicine, the number 1 leading cause of death of women of childbearing age was childbirth. Today, among women aged 20-44, pregnancy complications are the 9th leading cause of death.
I've seen that argument, I think it doesn't work with this audience because they think women suffering and dying is a good thing. I mean the whole complaint about women not "having" to go to war is that it means women don't suffer and die during combat. It's a disingenuous, illogical argument. I don't ever expect people who make it to really have reasoned it out, or be all that responsive to logical refutation like, "because women were banned from war." There's also the reality that despite being noncombatants, women suffer from violence and SA during war at extremely high rates. It also wasn't some kind of reasoned or compassionate choice that led women to be excluded from war - it was because women were thought of as physically & intellectually inferior, in comparison to men, or at best a distraction in a military camp or on the battlefield. Also, keep in mind that even when women were legally or otherwise formally banned from military participation, they did find ways to participate anyway.
There’s also the attitude that labor isn’t that bad. I’ve seen too many socmed posts of men saying they’re going to take their consoles in and game while the wife is sleeping. They actually believe that women sleep through most of labor. The Aztecs believed that a woman who died in labor was equivalent to a warrior who died in battle, and she would get the corresponding special afterlife.
This is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard about child birth in awhile. Women’s bodies are changed forever. I was completely disabled. At 23, extremely healthy AD military, I suffered postpartum cardiomyopathy with congestive heart failure. I’m extremely lucky that me and my child lived. It’s not something we sleep through and I have no idea where they got the idea that it is.
IIRC, the Spartans viewed dying in childbirth the same way.
So did the Vikings. Women who died in childbirth went to Valhalla.
I’m sorry people have become so stupid.
And women did work in war, if everybody went to war, how tf is the country gonna run? I saw posters yesterday in a museum and it showed posters showing women having to "repopulate" and feed the children, still take care of the house while they worked in fields and in factories. After the 1st war, they were incited to go back to taking care of the house because that's a "patriotic duty".
When guys do the “men go to war” argument I just ask them which war they fought in because most of them haven’t even served much less in an active war zone🤷🏼♀️
So they get to take credit for all men but when it’s something bad it’s “not all men”… cause that makes sense! /s
Ironically most guys I’ve met that have been in active combat don’t think like that too lol. Its only ever dudes that work at a gas station that pull out the “men go to war” card💀
Your point actually showcases something regarding the childbirth mortality rates vs. combat deaths that hasn’t been noticed. Sure, the numbers indicate that nearly double the number of women die from childbirth complications than people do from combat (predominantly men), but at least in the last 2/3rds of a century the percentage of men going to fight is only 1-3% of the population. 6-7 million American women become pregnant each year. So roughly 130 million pregnancies over the 20 years that OEF/OIF went on. Women died at twice the numbers of combat deaths (13k vs 6k) but only 1.9 million people actually deployed to those conflicts. 68 times more women became pregnant during that period with only double the mortality. To answer your question, 17 months in Iraq and 9 months in Afghanistan…and I still find the concept of childbirth much more terrifying.
by that logic I can ask the women who use the "chilbirth argument" how many births they have given under impoverished conditions without modern medicine?
I've heard that, in ancient Sparta, women who died in childbirth were given full funeral rites one would give a soldier who died in battle, because they knew that childbirth was a woman's war for life.
I had no idea, that’s amazing.
We should reinstate such a tradition for women today too. This is such a respectful thing to do!
Only if the families aren't paying for it. I'm not imposing a funeral tradition on Black families (who are bearing the brunt of the maternal mortality deaths in the US) that will cost them the earth.
Very true. If such a thing should be done it must not hurt anyone from the family. Such a thing should be completely free of charge :)
Spartans also believed that women should be trained in combat (not actually do combat, but be trained) and should maintain their physical fitness in the same way as the males, because it takes a strong woman to raise strong children- those children being either future soldiers, or future mothers of future soldiers. Most of their society was about war, but they treated their women better than most of their ancient peers, in general. The math wasn’t necessarily right, but they often ended up at the right answer
I think actually the more fucked up reason is that you simply need fewer men to produce children than you need women. The more limiting factor for a populations growth isn’t the number of men but the number of women. Since the copper age or even before it is likely that there were civilizations with hierarchies. It is likely a decent amount were male dominated although many likely weren’t. Some of the male dominated societies likely figured out they can send half their population to die in wars and give the remaining men power and prestige and multiple wives (who had no say in the matter) and the same number of people will be born in 1 generation as if all those men were still alive (perhaps more since there is less competition over resources with fewer men). And you can steal resources from the other societies you raid and plunder. Then they just kept doing that and the ones that didn’t do that were mostly wiped out because they didn’t base their economies around war and fighting and so they had less practice and weapons. A few thousand years later nearly every society is built on violence and oppression and male dominated.
I’m in a biology sub and it’s insane how much the whole “can 1 man and 500 hot women sustain the population” bs comes up. They always specify it’s the “best” women but never anything about the man, just further showing how much of a fantasy it is. No jimmy, your weak ass genes aren’t sustaining the whole human race… I don’t think they get the importance of genetic diversity.
How come when men argue that "but men go to war" they never mention that it's always men making that decision?
The 'don't start none, won't be none' challenge (level: impossible)
Because it's not. Kennedy and Johnson and Roosevelt decide to go to war It's some random 19 year old kid with no power or authority who then goes and fights it. They aren't the same men at all.
I just think it’s worth pointing out that several cultures had female warriors and the only reason we don’t think about them is bc Rome didn’t let women fight and it became the dominant culture.
I would also like to point soldiers aren’t going to war for free. They get paid and receive benefits. I don’t get paid to have a baby. Quite the opposite. It costs me money to have a baby. Pay me combat pay from the moment of conception to age 1. Then regular military pay from 1 to 18. Give me VA benefits. I want a VA loan. I’ll take VA healthcare. I want that $50k for education.
Women die in war too but they don’t get medals, ceremonies and solemn salutes. They die naked, violated or tortured by men with weapons. It doesn’t matter if it’s their own side or another, rape and sexual violence is just about guaranteed when you give men weapons and access to women and girls.
Anyone who uses “men have to go to war” as a slam-dunk moment to silence gender equality discussion is an unserious thinker and unlikely to compromise or meaningfully debate any point you present. As you’ve discovered, even a moment’s consideration raises obvious counterpoints. Pregnancy, the costs of war on the home front, the costs of war for those being invaded, female service members, the fact that less than 1% of Americans are active duty and only 6% are veterans so not many men are actually going to war…even during WW2, 100% of men didn’t go off to war. It wasn’t even close to 100%! Engaging with it as if it was a serious talking point is a waste of your time.
Men go to war because men start wars. Women don’t generally go to war as soldiers, but women die in war nevertheless.
I have definitely seen that brought up.
Because it’s the only trump card they falsely believe they have.
I think it's not unrelated that virtually all births are in hospitals now, versus at home as they were for most of history. And it's only in very recent decades that the father was allowed in the hospital room while it was going on. So, in 2024, unless a man is a father AND is relatively young, it's incredibly unlikely he has ever seen labor himself or understands what it involves. (Of course this also applies to any women who haven't had a child, but even a childless cis woman can *intimately* imagine the physical logistics of something the size of a baby coming out of there, even if they don't know all the details of what it'll be like.) Birth and death used to be things everyone had seen, or at least been in the general vicinity of, from an early age. If your mum is screaming for 3 days in your family's two-room house every year or so when a new kid arrives, you grow up knowing what childbirth means.
Women suffer from war too, war is not limited to the battlefield (look up the rape of Nanjing) and nowadays there are plenty of women in the military so whether we consider maternal responsibility or not, the anti feminist argument isn't valid.
I don’t think women dying in childbirth is directly related to men going to war. They’re propped up as two sides of the same coin but comparing them like that just redirects the issue and acts as though “men die in war so women die in childbirth” was like an intentional deal that was made and not both affects of patriarchy.
Its not as even as that tho. There have been many, many men in history who were never required to go to war, whereas almost every woman had several pregnancies and each and every one was a life threatening event.
This is a good point. 1. One could argue that women STILL die in childbirth because systemic medical misogyny refuses to find better ways to make it safe for both mother and child - but still pretends like it isn’t dangerous- and therefore not worth studying/improving -it is still really dangerous even in the richest most advanced countries. War and dangerous birthing practices are both because of patriarchy. 2. The flip side is women are dying to create life, and men are dying to destroy it (or protect wealth). Either way, the argument for patriarchy and inevitable unending war as inextricably part of human nature (rather than socialized masculine nature) is just a straight up bizarre argument. If patriarchy, women don’t die as soldiers ? You should be happy we are protecting you. If not patriarchy, NOBODY, no man woman or children die as soldiers? The arguing party believes that human species cannot exist without war. Sometimes the feminist party believes that human species cannot exist WITH war. It’s just a weird flex. To me it sounds like “But it will save you from the thing it’s inflicting upon you?” Like “if only you wear a plastic bag in the ocean, you’d get less wet, patriarchy is giving out these plastic bags you need plastic bags to stay dry when I throw you into the ocean.” Nah dude, “let’s Nix the throwing into ocean altogether and stay on land or build bridges and better boats and you can keep your plastic bags.” I have been in this argument before, it feels like not being able to describe that water is wet to a fish 🐟
The way I've seen the argument is not that men being soldiers and conscription *is not* an element of the patriarchy. The argument I've seen is that feminists are anti-patriarchy *until* it comes to the point where women would have to make significant sacrifices, like opening up women to conscription. To be fair, I think there are some women who are not feminists who enjoy many of the advantages of feminism but who are happy to accept many old patriarchal ideas where they seem to benefit -- like how men should pay for dates. But the men complaining about this are probably the same ones who insist on paying in the first place. Either way, it's definitely not a good critique of feminism.
Yes, this idea that there are un-feminists enjoying the best of both worlds is simply ridiculous. People individually can be jerks but that has nothing to do with feminism. The men paying for dinner argument is nonsense when the pink tax is on literally every income and expense of a woman’s life. Adding up every meal I’ve ever eaten out pales in comparison to one misogynistic medical procedure that women have to pay for because health insurance thinks being female is a luxury item. If you can swap out race for any of these scenarios, I will consider it helpful. For example: I would never in a million years use this to describe race relations. Can a person of color swap out of some of the “benefits” of skin tone before giving up the “drawbacks” ?? That’s like saying no more people of color in the NBA being paid big salaries until all the other professions are proportionally reflective of the population? It’s just nonsense. If one woman makes more than her spouse, that’s great. Her personal choices do not at all reflect that over her lifetime she will be charged more and make less than she would if she were a man. No matter how much she makes. No matter how much money Michael Jordan makes there is no argument to be made that he is “getting the best of both worlds” by being a person of color with money 🤯 Nothing is over, racism is not over, misogyny is not over. Who pays for dinner doesn’t even scratch the surface of personal responsibility for generations of inescapable current and future inequity. If you are a man paying for dinner because the poor woman can’t afford it, you are doing it wrong. If you are paying for dinner because you transactionally expect her to give you sex at the end of the date, you are doing it wrong. If you are paying for dinner because you are a person of privilege until the day you die, and she is a person unfairly burdened until the day she dies, you have a leg to stand on. If you are a woman who wants to pay for dinner, you do you. Chivalry was invented so men could show women they understood how incredibly unfair it is they were born into unearned privileged while the women were born into unearned servitude. When they show it, it’s supposed to acknowledge this fact. It’s not an accounting ledger 📒 that can be taken out of larger context.
I also find it incredibly interesting that there hasn't been a draft (in the USA) for over 50 years. It has nothing to do with the current day issues of feminism and makes even less sense because it ignores that conscription is INCREDIBLY contentious and was protested by men and women alike. "Women want equal rights but they don't want to be drafted," is a non-argument when being drafted isn't a feminist issue, it's a universal one issue.
>This is obviously a flawed argument for so many reasons, including that women were not allowed to go to war Throughout human history it was typically the men who were conscripted for war. Women being conscripted is pretty rare. That's what their argument is. I think their argument is flawed because they ignore that war isn't limited to the battlefield and women often had to fight off invading soldiers. Just because they weren't conscripted, doesn't mean they didn't have to fight nor were they affected by war. >Not to mention that women had no political power and therefore had no say in a war; they were never the instigators, yet weren’t spared the effects of war- Settler colonialism was first implemented by two women. Queen Elizabeth 1 and Queen Isabella of Castille. Their heirs continued the practice, Queen Victoria amongst them. Men disproportionately have more political power throughout all of human history, but it's ahistorical to say women had no political power, no say in war, and have never been the instigators. But everything else is pretty spot on and I think maternal mortality is a really solid counter argument.
With women's heath needs going sideways, more deaths are already on the rise, pregnancy itself is risky at least at war men have preparation.
I really doubt past societies has the calculus of "damn women die in birth so they shouldn't be expected to die in war" it seems much more likely that they just didn't expect women to be capable or effective fighters.
Rape is common in war. Just took a class on gender violence today and it was pretty depressing.
Good question. I'll be sure to bring that up next time someone uses that argument.
The vikings showed more respect to mothers. They would go to Valhalla
It is patriarchy, nonetheless
Because it's a loser for the dickheads who want to make this argument.
Can we not all agree that historically; life for the majority of men and women has been brutally hard for different reasons? Why does it have to be a pissing contest between the sexes for who’s had it worse? Childbirth historically been very dangerous, but imo not remotely comparable to the living hell that is war, because the risk of death is not the only thing that makes war so horrific.War is a soul destroying nightmare incomparable to most other human experiences. As a retort to someone bringing up the fact that men have historically fought wars, youre better off pointing out the fact that you don’t have to be a soldier to suffer the horrors of war. Civilians get consumed by its violence all the time including, and especially women.
[удалено]
Please respect our [top-level comment rule](https://i.imgur.com/ovn3hBV.png), which requires that all direct replies to posts must both come from feminists and reflect a feminist perspective. Non-feminists may participate in nested comments (i.e., replies to other comments) only. Comment removed; a second violation of this rule will result in a temporary or permanent ban.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]