Thousand Generations Print Company

This week there was great controversy over pushback that a Reformed pastor received for sending his daughter into the Marines. He was rightly chastised for sending a woman into a vocation of soldiering—a task that Biblically, historically, and culturally has been for men. I was a bit shocked, though I shouldn’t be I suppose, that this was actually a thing in “conservative” circles. Growing up, it was a basic fact that the differences between men and women precluded women engagement in something like the military. That’s a standard conservative Christian, and deeply Western and American teaching. But as a reminder of how far we’ve fallen, I was reminded of an essay I wrote in high school about how women’s soccer in Europe was outlawed. Women were not allowed to play many team sports. Why? Sports themselves were rooted in the training that men needed for constant preparation for war. Sports were physical, brash, competitive, muscular, heroic, brutal… masculine. They entailed blood, bruises, broken body parts, cuts, scrapes, injuries, ligament swelling, and on and on. Sports were “mannish” activities, unbecoming of the female sex. Soccer was physical, full of contact and aggression, rough, physically competitive. These are features of masculinity. The “female grace” (as the laws put it) would be undermined by the participation in “mannish” behavior. The female archetype would be mocked and distorted, and the difference between the sexes would be subverted. To be properly feminine was the social ideal of the woman in the civil order; and sports were a revolt against this ideal: the indecency of the dress needed, and the bodily movements required, would serve to undermine the purpose of the feminine in society. To expect of the woman to behave like a man was to ask of her to participate in a certain level of barbarity, which would compromise the integrity of both the woman behaving as such and the men who would watch her. In the Germany 1955 ban, this was the language used: “in the fight for the ball, female grace disappears… and the public parading of the body is offensive and indecent.” There were also concerns about how women would get distracted from their social function as being wives and mothers and reproducing their race (a crucial concern after WW1 and WWII). I could go on. It’s an interesting topic. But the point is this: the opponents of women in the military are entirely correct and have history and heritage on their side. Those seeking to blur the lines on the sexes are the Jacobins, the innovators, the hyper-moderns. The “complementarians” are egalitarians driving the speed limit.