Historically countries didn't let women fight in wars because they didn't want their civilisation to die out. If a country loses a double-digit percent of its men it can still repopulate just as quickly, because one man can make multiple women pregnant, while if it loses its women then it takes significantly longer to repopulate, because one woman can't have multiple babies at the same time so the birthrate will necessarily be reduced.
People keep repeating this, but nobody has so far answered my follow-up question: do you have any example where that actually happened? Even in heavily impacted countries (like Serbia in WWI, which lost around 50% of its prewar male population), there were no laws or campaigns to allow harems or one man - multiple women combinations.
At least in Russia it meant: less options for women, a more male centric dating market and more children born out of wedlock.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
> Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility
Lower rate of fertility is the important bit.
I see it working without the luxury of extra legal and financial protection.
> A married man going around spreading seed and women getting pregnant and going at it alone?
Well that and more. It's a combination of all available options:
* Men having kids outside of marriage
* Men having kids from 2-3 marriages
* Women marrying older men who normally are out of the reproduction race
None of that is unheard of even in peace times, and just becomes more frequent.
> women getting pregnant and going at it alone
Women going at it alone is a very modern phenomenon. It takes a village to raise a child, not just your partner. And conversely if you do have a village to support you then you don't need your partner that much.
So all of it certainly can work and did work in the past. How it will pan out in the 21st century no one knows yet. I hope we'll never have to learn.
IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over. Nobody is able to come up with any examples of anything like that happening, which again leads me to believe that the premise is bullshit and the real reasons why only men are drafted are somewhere between biology and misogyny.
It's one of the concerns, not necessarily the primary. Somebody had to keep the household going, raise and feed the existing children, and so on (which, at the day, and even today in most parts, was the role of women).
>IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over.
That doesn't follow. Governments would only need to "do something, anything" if the thing didn't just happen by itself - which generally, it did.
And of course the morals of the day wouldn't have them explicitly promote anything of the sort.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...
Sounds about right. Historically, the military culture is obviously deeply rooted in patriarchy. Men are to defend their countries, in the same way that 'women and children' have been supposed to go first into lifeboats.
There are some arguments to be found in the above mentioned Rostker v. Goldberg, and in the legal debate that followed:
Once the combat issue is put in proper perspective and the evidence of women's recognized ability to perform military functions is assessed, it becomes apparent that an exclusion of women from a draft registration requirement would be the product of the archaic notion that women must remain 'as the center of home and family.'
and
Congress followed the teachings of history that if a nation is to survive, men must provide the first line of defense while women keep the home fires burning.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150502095151/http://digitalcom...
You don't need laws or campaigns, it happens naturally, due to the increased sexual selection availability. And of course, given that, why would men opt of harems (especially where they aren't even historically relevant to their culture)? They'd just have relationships on the side, jump ship and marry again, etc.
Again, do you have any examples of this actually happening in the real world? It naturally happens that men become more desirable because there's less of them, but is there any actual case where it became widespread for men to get multiple different women pregnant to repopulate the country?
Not to mention, even if it did happen (and again, nobody has come up with any examples in the tens of times I've asked this question, and Google hasn't been helpful either), unless there was a concentrated government policy to that effect, you'd be mistaking correlation with causation - less men than women, so men are more desirable and can pull off multiple kids from multiple women doesn't mean that's the reasoning why only men were drafted.
You were given examples already: "Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility, higher nonmarital births, and reduced bargaining power within marriage for women most affected by war deaths"
You can read about similar post-war periods with similar problems and outcomes in history books too.
>unless there was a concentrated government policy to that effect you'd be mistaking correlation with causation - less men than women, so men are more desirable and can pull off multiple kids from multiple women doesn't mean that's the reasoning why only men were drafted.
Women were needed to raise the present kids, and to be able to raise future kids. People didn't need to have this spelt out in law, or to have subsidies for sex with more different partners post war.
Even so, the very link you continue to ignore mentions such legal changes too in the case of post-WWII USSR:
"The impact of sex ratio imbalance on marriage and family persisted for years after the war's end and was likely magnified by
(...wait for it...)
policies that promoted nonmarital births"
The fertility rate (amount of kids per woman) dropped, so no.
> policies that promoted nonmarital births
Nonmarital births does not mean that men were getting multiple different women pregnant at the same time.
Of course it did, since tens of millions men still died and tons were left with severe impairements. It's not about it remaining stable or raising after the most horrible war casualties in history it's about it not dropping as much. It's about it being elevated to where it would be if what we describe wasn't the case.
"The magnitude of the effect on completed fertility is relatively small in light of the scale of male losses, perhaps due to the pronatalist policy that promoted out of wedlock births"
>Nonmarital births does not mean that men were getting multiple different women pregnant at the same time.
Who said anything about "same time"? Men had more choice and thus more affairs/women and reduced being tied to marriage. This translates to more women pregnant by fewer men over the previous period - doesn't mean men got 2-3 women pregnant at a time.
In any case, I think this is more of a "hands on the ears" mode, than a discussion mode, so I'll stop here.
Edit: To provide more context: It was not exactly "official policy", but single mothers became much more common in Britain after WWI due to the fathers either dying in the war or, well, being already in another marriage. To the point the women started organizing and campaigning for their rights https://www.gingerbread.org.uk/about-us/gingerbread-history/
In no cases were there laws, government doesn't need to pass laws to make it happen, just just because there weren't laws doesn't mean it didn't happen a lot
Any data on Paraguay?
This is the actual process of human natural selection, and it's not much influenced by laws and things like that, no matter how hard the law tries.
I don't believe not using a condom with a Tinder date is an option, at least in the West. No matter how attractive and insisting the male is, a woman knows she is the one to bear the consequences. Even if they're on a pill, STDs are still a thing, so why take the risk.
The man has to also bear the consequences in most nations, since he has to pay a lot of money. They like sex, but not at that price.
(Although having sex isn't something that you need to survive (like eating), or something that will happen embarrassingly for physics reasons if you don't choose a voluntary place to do it (like peeing), it is controlled by similar mechanisms thanks to evolution being evolution.)
It's a very common option. About 30% report non-use of condoms in their previous one-night-stand.
Most STDs are minor and/or easily treatable diseases. The worry about them has a huge moralistic component.
It works somewhat, but to a much lesser extent than, say, penalties for driving without carrying a warning triangle, which is a rational-brain activity. At some point the penalties are creating a cost that is bigger than the cost of dealing with the thing they are trying to prevent, while still not working all that well.
Anyway, that's extremely off topic. I think the point is that there's no shortage of babies wanting to get made, and if you want the population to make more babies, you should reduce the things that are preventing them from doing so, not add positive incentives (unless they cancel out negative ones).
No, women have been excluded from front-line combat because they are physically weaker than men and would be killed quickly without accomplishing much. Men are just much more aggressive, have higher stamina etc. It's never been about repopulation. Nothing biologically stops a woman having 10 children with a single man, it's just rare.
You'll have to forgive me for finding this non-explanation unsatisfying. Do you think there's any reason for it being "rare"?
What went wrong - in fubar situations, men instinctively lunged for protecting women, instead of rationally estimating situation and acting accordingly. We men are simply still too much gentlemen to have women around when bullets are flying, despite feminists trying hard erasing this. Give it 2 more generations and western society will be there.
FYI eastern Europe countries like Ukraine have women in the military, including combat positions. Not surprisingly they keep getting injured and dying just like rest of them.
This report might be useful. It summarizes a large scale study done in 2002 by the British army. The tests were heavily rigged in favour of the women but even so the conclusion was to keep them out of combat roles. Note the part where they say that fewer than 2% of women were as fit as the average male soldier:
https://www.cna.org/reports/2012/Practices-of-Foreign%20Mili...
A panel of subject matter experts conducted the study. They issued a report, A Study of Combat Effectiveness and Gender, to British ministers in 2001.[24] The study's tests were designed to examine the feasibility of mixed-gender tank crews, all-women crews, mixed infantry units, and all-women infantry units. They also were designed to examine how men would react to the presence of women on the battlefield and how each gender coped with the physical demands of combat.
According to news articles, some reports maintain that the exercises found that women were as capable as men for service in combat units, but the results were mired in controversy [56]. Senior military officers, including Brig Seymour Monro (the Army's director of the infantry), stated that the Army field tests were so diluted that they “amounted to little more than aggressive camping.” Brig Monro also said that tasks that women were not physically capable of doing were simply dropped from the trials [56]. According to the final Ministry of Defence report, the study showed that fewer than 2 percent of female soldiers were as fit as the average male soldier [57].
Specifically, news reports stated that the trials stalled early on when women were not able to complete a number of tasks under battlefield conditions:
• When asked to carry 90 pounds of artillery shells over measured distances, women failed 70 percent of the time (compared with a male failure rate of 20 percent).
• When asked to march 12.5 miles carrying 60 pounds of equipment followed by target practice in simulated wartime conditions, women failed 48 percent of the time (compared with a male failure rate of 17 percent).
• Women were generally incapable of digging themselves into hard ground under fire.
• Women were generally slower in simulated combat exercises involving "fire and move" drills.
• Women suffered much higher injury rates in close-quarter battle tests, such as hand-to-hand combat.
It might be interesting to think about what sets them apart from regular armies, which have often had trouble in this area.
You're confusing the requirements and needs with regular armies.
Really? Might is also have something to do with women having trouble moving 80-100 lbs of gear like in WW2? It was 50 lbs in the Civil War. Do you think the leaders at the time had the foresight to keep women out of the war for future breeding purposes?
That's thinking 15-20 years into the future while they are fighting wars now.
That policy changed by 2016, so the rationale no longer holds.
With that said, we also haven't had mandatory conscription since the Vietnam War, and I think it's unlikely that we would any time in the near future, short of WW3 landing on our front doorstep (either directly or as a result of NATO's collective defense clause) -- recall that we didn't formally enter WW2 until after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
I recall that the only reason I signed up for selective service was because it was a requirement to receive federal financial aid for college, although it seems that requirement was removed in 2023.