Some things light up — an uneasiness that, at first, you wouldn’t know how to define. But then you eventually do, and a shudder rises up and down your spine.
Sometimes, it wouldn’t be much of a line. It doesn’t have the poetry of “I-breathe-the scent-of equality,” or the elegant journalism on the verge of literature. That would be tearjerker work of seduction and persuasion…on that instead of reason uses sentiments… by touching your heart neutralizes your defenses about women in the military.
The attempt to equalize sexes is going to be asymptotic (to incite a position or condition, means, cause or manner).
You think you have reached “equality,” but one cannot, in the nature of things, make equal that which is not the same.
You can play only around the words as one wishes. Miscible? Yes. But miscible elements retain their identity, because if they couldn’t, life together would be impossible.
Just when you have reached equality, there is still a long difference. There’s a shop of nullities, who live in the ambiguous and misrepresentations of equality.
Because women’s strength believes that equality does not demand the sacrifice that freedom demands, or the courage that freedom requires, and even if all are equal before the law, women are quick to say it’s not about a mental and moral quality, nor an equality of value and intelligence and grit.
The awful, fanatical compulsion to perfect interchangeable sexes does violence to primary instincts that are wrong when abused — yet to over correct this abuse, is to commit fresh abuse.
Should a woman aspire to be a poet, architect, doctor or an engineer, it does no violation to the critical insight of separateness of nature.
A tug against nature is when a woman ignores what binds her to the newborn child or enjoins her to comfort men.
When there’s ugly residue left in one’s thinking on the matter of noble women in the military, it cannot adequately be comforted by other men. And that man, himself (a poet, doctor, architect or an engineer) — should he cease instinctively to gravitate to his responsibility to protect the home — is a violation of his nature, indeed.
Because we know that women should have education, vote, exercise their capacity to lead, it does not dissipate that tropism which assigns her primary responsibility to care for a child; to the man it gives primary responsibility to care for the woman.
There’s the right of women to equality in the trenches that has grown so fast — proving there is little correlation between human strength and military skill — if speed of response is the only criterion relevant to women in the military.
Yet transplanting it all into the battle scene, we need to wonder about all this “equality” — whether the machine gunner is exposing his life to effect a mission isn’t dismayed at the thought of a young woman firing away at his side, causing him to wonder whether the war he is fighting reflects a civilized order.
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