1. They do fight in wars

  2. They're the ones that get burned and raped and pillaged by invading (and sometimes allied) forces

Fuck anyone who says only men suffer during war. I won't stand for that shit.

  • 18558355324 [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Based.

    Also, that badass who saved up and sent a letter to Stalin with the enclosed funds to construct a tank along with the request to be its driver so she could avenge her slain husband. She fought. She killed nazis. She got out of the tank every time it was disabled and repaired it under fire. She may not have lived to drive through Berlin, but her crew did. The same tank.

    Anyone who says women don’t literally fight in wars has never bothered to study what a war of survival looks like and the badass women who stood between would be exterminators and their people.

    We need a :nightwitch: emoji or something

  • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I recommend reading the The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich for more stories about women warriors. They got screwed over after the war too, most of them were not given the same awards and praise that men received.

    Edit: One of my favorite stories is a one about an all-female Soviet infantry unit. This was during the early years of the war so the Red Army still faced a lot of supply issues. This unit was marching with many other male units in front and behind. Suddenly there were shouts of concern behind them "medic! We need medics up here! Somebody is bleeding up ahead!" You probably know where this is going, nobody was bleeding, at least not from any wounds. The women unit had just started having their periods on the march (I guess they were synced up or something) and decided just to take their pants off and bleed on the ground so they could stay on the march with the rest of the army. Badass shit. Incidentally the way the red army in 1941 dealt with this was to basically just give you a rag you stuffed in your pants, I'm pretty sure the same rags were used as socks lol

    Here is another cute one. A mixed Soviet tank crew (I think female tank driver and male commander and gunner) had successfully fought its way through 1944-5 and finally reached the Battle of Berlin. Again the crew fought bravely and professionally, scoring several German tank kills, and survived to see the Soviet flag raised over the burning Reichstag. The tank crew got out of their tank and were sitting on top celebrating their victory with the rest of the army. The woman driver looks over to see the gunner crying, and she asks him what's wrong. He looks at her and asks her to marry him, to which she says yes but then punches him in the face "for asking such a question in such a terrible place" and tells him he will have to ask again when they return to Russia. :soviet-bottom:

    • wrecker_vs_dracula [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I want to point out here that the red army used foot rags instead of socks. This was normal in that part of the world, and was even a point of pride. There’s a special way you wrap and tie them. It’s a whole thing.

      This is to say that using strips of fabric as socks, sometimes called “foot rags”, shouldn’t be looked at as evidence of “supply issues” in the red army. A fairly thick sanitary napkin could be folded from these long strips of fabric, but I’m not able to weigh in on their likely effectiveness as menstrual products.

    • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Incidentally the way the red army in 1941 dealt with this was to basically just give you a rag you stuffed in your pants, I’m pretty sure the same rags were used as socks lol

      Good way to get menstrual toxic shock syndrome tbh. Hope nobody died from that. I don't blame them btw. I know conditions were desperate.

      EDIT: i talked to some women in my household and they said I was wrong anyway lol. You only get toxic shock syndrome from tampons because that's how anaerobic (without air) bacteria forms. That's what kills people. A sock wouldn't do that I guess because there's still a gap with some air between you and the sock, as opposed to what happens with tampons. So the sock functions as a pad and you're not very likely to get toxic shock syndrome from pads.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I dunno if this makes it better or not, but the socks the Soviets used were so used because they were easy to change and clean regularly, so presumably women using them as ad-hoc tampons could do that too.

        • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          i talked to some women in my household and they said I was wrong anyway lol. You only get toxic shock syndrome from tampons because that's how anaerobic (without air) bacteria forms. That's what kills people. A sock wouldn't do that I guess because there's still a gap with some air between you and the sock, as opposed to what happens with tampons. So the sock functions as a pad and you're not very likely to get toxic shock syndrome from pads.

    • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Seems like a cool book, but I'm guessing there's at least 3-4 horrifying stories for each wholesome tank crew one, right?

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Western men don't have to fight in wars, just don't join the fucking military dumbasses.

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Western men don’t have to fight in wars

        the draft will be back pretty quick when there's not enough volunteers.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          You think people will respect it? What's going to happen if there's a massive quantity of people that are just like "nah" ?

          • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            the government could arrest you and force you into the military theoretically... though making openly disloyal people soldiers is usually a COOL ZONE idea

            • Awoo [she/her]
              ·
              2 years ago

              This is what I mean, if recruitment is low now then clearly people DO NOT want to go fucking die in a war.

              You think you're gonna draft a bunch of queers and trans people into the military? That they won't be like "no" ? And won't be a nightmare to try and deal with training even if they submissively accept it? What about black people?

              You think these groups are just going to accept being drafted to fight for a country they think hates them? Doubt it.

              • nohaybanda [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                You're missing something here. Imprisoning lots of conscientious dissenters and using them as slave labour to disempower a nascent working class movement is very much something capital would do as the Empire crumbles.

                • Awoo [she/her]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  2 years ago

                  Oh I absolutely agree that it might try to do that but the point is that it's far too numerous to succeed and would accelerate its collapse as more and more groups form internally that explicitly want it to collapse because they feel persecuted or actively harmed by it. The larger this pool of people gets the more likely that it would fail catastrophically in a situation where the draft is needed.

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Depends on what they get drafted for and how fed up they are with conditions apart from that. i honestly don't think the US would survive something like the draft during the Vietnam war again, but lots of governments get away with drafting people for non-fighting positions, historically including most liberal democracies. fairly sure that any newly instantiated draft would be gender neutral, though. the constant discussion conservatives have about that in my home country always emphasizes that point, that they'll draft everybody (read: everybody younger than them). such discussions also usually center around drafting people for all kinds of services from military to nursing jobs to disaster relief. once you re-normalize that people have to go through a period of forced labor while they're young, why stop at military stuff? There's plenty of labor shortages in other areas.

            i'm not saying this to defend the dude side here, btw. i think people who make the "b-but men may get drafted" argument as supposed evidence for an imagined "female privilege" are reactionary idiots and also engage in a pointless, individualistic act of bullshitting themselves to avoid facing the entirity of patriarchal opression that damages men, women and nonbinary people alike, but still very obviously has men at the top of the hierarchy and hands out the most privileges to men as a social group. arguing that some commonly not-marginalized group has it worse than anybody else is also a type of chauvinist liberalism and can be disregarded entirely, just to make this clear. i simply made my point because the US military complained just this week that they do not have enough recruits.

            • Awoo [she/her]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              fairly sure that any newly instantiated draft would be gender neutral, though

              Are women going to accept that? Are they going to be like "yeah we want to fight for a country that doesn't respect our bodies" ?

              Black people? Black women?

              LGBT people?

              There's a lot of groups that feel like the country literally hates them and I can see all of them saying "lol nah fuck that" to a draft. People aren't going to be particularly enthusiastic about dying for a country that is like this.

              There’s plenty of labor shortages in other areas.

              As soon as you get the military involved in labour shortages you are opening the door to people saying "this is literally a war against the workers". Deploying the military as scabs is a horrible idea that would lead people to revolution very quickly. Deploying soldiers against workers as a method of strike breaking would lead workers to treating their labour issues as a literal war against the state.

                • Awoo [she/her]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  2 years ago

                  Because it directly and immediately affects them whereas all the other things can be mentally distanced provided that their immediate material concerns are met.

                    • Awoo [she/her]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      The 20% of the population that are lgbt will not have kids to threaten with starvation. It will be the individual and the individual alone making a decision between living in a difficult way or getting physically shot at. The threat is not large enough to make people choose getting shot at.

                        • Awoo [she/her]
                          ·
                          2 years ago

                          People literally choose getting shot at now over living in poverty. I struggle to see how that will change when people are starving to death en masse.

                          Sure but that's happening in fewer and fewer quantities, which is why a draft might even be necessary, despite the poverty and the ever decreasing "middle" class.

              • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                well the question there is if black people, and the lgbt decide they don't want to go couldn't the government throw them in prison. After all the nature of persecuted minorities is that they have neither numbers nor political power.

                If as a group white men said they won't go the government would be forced to come to the negotiating table but more marginal groups could be more feasibly simply forced

                • Awoo [she/her]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  2 years ago

                  20% of the generation that would be drafted (genZ) is lgbt. This is not at all an insignificant group size, it's absolutely massive.

                  The imperial core is in a situation where it MUST figure out what it's going to do with the lgbt community and how to integrate it into the military with approval from this group or it will be incapable of functioning.

          • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Another issue is that a good portion of Americans might not be healthy enough for military service

  • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    yankees pat themselves on the back so hard for allowing combat roles in 2016 like vietnamese women werent doming marines 60 years ago

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Because she said women were the victims for losing their husbands, sons, and fathers. Which is an obvious bad take because the dead person is the greater victim.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        She referred to refugees and civilian war victims as well, for all its worth.

        But Conservatives pounced and made a bland obvious statement into a culture war wedge issue.

        • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Her whole thing was saying almost true statements as stupidly as possible and losing voters for avoidable reasons.

  • Tapirs10 [undecided,she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Also reddit mra types are like "but women don't get drafted!!1!" Ok cool then get rid of the draft, but you don't care about that you're just sexist.

  • Sen_Jen [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Dudes will say this whenever misogyny comes up but then never actually do anything about it because they don't care

  • Grownbravy [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Women are fighting in wars, and they’re in more danger from their own side

      • PapaEmeritusIII [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Depending on how I’m feeling, either Cirice, Prime Mover, or If You Have Ghosts. Year Zero is hands down the best when performed live. It’s too early to tell if any songs from the new album will get added to my faves list, I’m still so enamored by the whole thing and the recency bias is strong!

        • 18558355324 [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It’s such a good album! Cirice introduced me to the band when I was still :LIB: and they went on Colbert. Still mad I missed a chance to see them live since my city is never on tours. Pinnacle to the pit seems like a very bouncy song that would be good live as well.

  • Acute_Engles [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    People have said this to you in real life? Obviously internet psychos would think like this I'm not surprised by the opinions on the internet.

  • pink_mist [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Well, there’s no need to be that messy. Why waste a good-looking boy? -- Mildred Pierce reporting