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Bask in the Crazy: The Mystery of Male Armies
Whatever one thinks of Jordan Peterson, the man raises a point that should be headed by all free peoples: Once you stop fighting with words, the only thing left to do is fight with weapons. Upon personal reflection, I decided that my personal style of writing was not conducive to productive dialogue with the left. As a result, I have largely withdrawn from writing altogether. Like The Incredible Hulk, I must contain my rage for the safety of the world.
It turns out, however, that if we do start fighting with weapons, the only reason men will be the ones who do almost all of it is because of their fear of being cheated on while they are at war. Oh no … not now … must maintain self-control … Frank smash!
The team at the University of St Andrews said the rarity of mixed-sex armies from prehistoric times to the present day was ‘puzzling’ because excluding women would effectively halve your fighting force.
Other mysteries plaguing the brains of researchers at the University of St. Andrews include why drinking glasses are not poked full of holes to reduce their weight, and why soldiers have never carried extra weapons and shields with their feet, halving their usable limbs.
But now researchers have a theory – all-male armies formed because of a fear of sexual betrayal by their wives.
If all men did not go off to fight, those remaining behind would be able to mate with others’ partners, the study says.
Like hell, stupidity comes in levels. Most bad ideas are terrible from a single angle of observation. Often one that is not obvious to the person doing the brainstorming. Some ideas fail on multiple core concepts but could appear viable to middling minds blinded by their ideology. I call these Yglesiasisms. Still, other ideas are so profoundly dumb that humanity’s average intelligence moves downward by a fractional amount when they are uttered.
Even under the most generous assumptions, these researchers have gone off the deep end. Assuming the Daily Mail is misrepresenting their query when they state, “from prehistoric time to the present day” and that their research is purely a question of prehistoric times, it is still one of the most extraordinarily moronic questions ever posed by a human being.
I guess the children will just protect each other
One wonders if those assuming that bringing all of the women into battle would be the logical thing to do have ever seen a child. Given Scotland’s birthrates, maybe not. Speaking of birthrates.
The men are going to have to start having babies
A society can survive losing half of its men, as each one can happily do the job of impregnating two women. If a society loses half of its women, it goes into irreversible decline.
Men literally exist so that women don’t have to fight
Staring these researchers in the face, yet going completely unseen, are several immutable biological facts. The most obvious is the existence of two genders in the first place. Such specialty was an evolutionary advantage, or else it wouldn’t have evolved in the first place. Men exist to protect and provide for women and children. Only a university employee could conclude that people doing the thing they evolved to do is puzzling.
No, “all” men did not go to war
For all of history, and by extension some amount of pre-history, the number of individuals who could be sent off to battle was limited by how difficult it was to feed and supply an army. Human warfare came into existence as human populations became large enough that resources had to be fought over. A good rule of thumb is that no ancient peoples could afford to send more than 5%-7% of their population to war. Every person sent to war, and every day they were being not being productive, put them at risk of starvation.
As a rule, people don’t like to starve. There were plenty of men left home to sleep with your wife.
Who will dig the graves for your double-sized army
Until the invention of guns, we fought by stabbing each other with sharp objects. Turns out, if you have more than one person stabbing at you, you are hosed. We dealt with this by fighting in lines. Most casualties didn’t occur while the outcome was uncertain, but once one side’s lines were broken and they turned and ran.
The larger army can easily lose if they are the first to run. If the people next to you are dying because they have literally half of the upper body strength, and 5 inches less reach, your lines break first and you lose.
We know the Sumerians (ca. 4000 BC) organized their armies in lines. This is only 1,500 years after organized warfare appears in the archaeological record. It apparently doesn’t take long after you discover warfare to dispense with useless ideas such as running at the other guys with as many people as possible, your love of Braveheart notwithstanding.
They aren’t saying it, but your female colleagues have ruled you out as potential mates
If it is non-obvious to you why men do the fighting, I’d advise you keep this fact a secret throughout the dating process. Your odds of getting laid increase exponentially. Publishing research that confirms your dearth of masculinity was probably not the direction I would go.
Published in Culture, History, Military
Frank, you are correct. An article like this lowers the overall intelligence of the race.
You briefly touched on the item I consider almost as central as “men are stronger” – women are more valuable to the continuity of your tribe or society. As you noted, a woman can repopulate the tribe only once every 10 months or so. And she has unique value for quite some time thereafter.
One of the times I get most annoyed at the “feminist” crowd is when they fail to recognize that many of the social constructs that they claim put women down as weaker or less capable and “less valuable” are in fact constructs to protect and honor the women because they are more valuable to society than men are.
Yep, for them, equal is us going into combat and getting our nose shot off.
In WW2, the Soviet Union lost 97% of what we would call “college age” men (18-22) in the year of the invasion. One echo of that was the ascension of young Gorbachev in the 1980s — a whole generation was missing between Gorbachev/Andropov and him.
I’ve long been curious about the sexual dynamic after the war. I haven’t found much, except an indirect reference that married women should not complain about their husbands’ liaisons, as they were necessary for national survival.
Does anyone know more than I do on this?
I don’t know, but that also happened in France, both WWI and WWII. The flower of young manhood was just gone. All that was left were boys and old men for years.
And in the 13th century with the crusades against the Albigensians, after which concubinage was winked at.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Boys high school teams in [name sport] will beat Women’s olympic teams.
The vast majority of high school state records [pick a state] for Boys track and field events would be Olympic records for women’s events.
Any person who can carry a baby for nine months and give birth is much more capable of physical effort than I would ever be . . .
But that’s feminine painstaking and sacrificial physical courage. It’s admirable and noble.
And it deserves protection by men.
Yeah, they’re also actually designed for it.
Toxic, man. Straight up toxic masculinity, right there.
How dare you speak truth, oppressor!
That seems much too high. The Red Army suffered 4.5 million casualties in 1941. Of which 3.1 million were either killed or prisoner. The Soviets were able to recover and field millions of soldiers over the next four years. Their total battle casualties (dead) from June 1941 through May of 1945 were 6.3 million with an additional 500,000 non battle deaths. The Soviets conscripted over 29 million into the armed forces.
I agree with your point, though. The impact on young men was devastating.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
You left out “patriarchal.”
What a fine, fine post. It is good to see the hulk rampage now and again.
I looked for it again but did not turn it up. However back a few years ago I read one of those fun articles about what interplanetary war would look like between the races. One of the points the scientist made was the need for male armies to fight because we could lose so many men.
His point if memory serves was that humanity could lose 90% of all men and we would not lose a step in genetic diversity and easily restore our pre war numbers (though monogamy as a norm would have to be lost for while). However if we lost 50% of our women it would take generation to recover, if we ever did.
Bottom line? Protect the women!!
I think Buck Turgidson would approve.
A culture change would be needed as well. Right now in peace time with no shortage of either sex, people in most Western nations are not having enough kids to maintain the population let alone repopulate the species.
Incentives. Children are expensive and hard work (wonderful too, but not everyone agrees). If incentives shifted, we’d have more children.
This reminds me of what is, I think, a Heinlein story. Earth is at war with aliens and the survival of the race is at stake. Women everywhere are pregnant. All women who can make babies are making them. The main character is a new commander of a group of men who have been grown, as opposed to born. “Grown” men cannot reproduce and so feel inferior. The commander gains their trust when he reveals that he too cannot reproduce because of exposure to radiation.
Can’t think of the name of the story, though.
Frank,
It seems that the modern academic doesn’t read much Homer.
Regards,
Jim
That doesn’t sound like any Heinlein I’ve ever read – and I’m pretty sure I’ve read everything he wrote..
Thinking the same thing.
OK, but it was a story and I did read it.
All that is true, but there are pretty well established cycles to fertility. Too much wealth always suppresses it but when people feel on their own they have children just to have people on their side. Religious people still have babies though so we could end up in a more religious future once again.
Still I have hope that if 90% of men were killed in great war over the fate of our race the women would be willing to repopulate the planet. Perhaps they wouldn’t though. The article in question didn’t dig into those issues. I guess for the writer it was just a question of genetics and math and if we kept just 10% of the men and women were willing to carry and raise babies we would replace all the men we lost in a single generation. Which is pretty amazing if you think about it…