The Draft Argument

Men who use the fact that the draft is mainly applied to men in some countries (not even their own country usually) as some sort of ’gotcha‘.

1. Why would women force other women to go to war because men are forced to go? Do you fight for men to be treated in the negative ways women are? Can groups of people only fight for rights once everyone is treated equally badly? Seems like a weird way to go about things.

2. Are you equally bothered about men fighting for women’s rights? Why do women have to fight to end the draft for men? I‘m not saying women should not care about this (women have protested against the draft alongside men) and I’ve never met a feminist who agrees with it. But maybe some of them are busy with other causes. Which is fine because you cannot take on all the causes but you can be an ally who doesn’t try to undercut the message by, oh I don’t know, bringing up the draft when someone is talking about abortion rights. Or do women have to wait until you feel men are not treated unfairly in anyway before they can ask for change for themselves?

3. In a very simplistic way, most wars are fought to gain some sort of power. War involves losing a large % of your population. If you send all able-bodied men off to war, it makes no sense to send able-bodied women off to war. Not because these governments love women but because you need them to give birth to the next batch of soldiers for when you go to war in another 18 years time. And that’s the patriarchy in a nutshell, it exploits everyone (albeit in different ways and to varying degrees) to give a few people power.

4. Women living in places of war do not have it easy.

5. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DRAFT?