As part of their assault on the traditional gender roles-which formerly complemented each other in ways that reinforced marriage and family life-feminists have battered down the barriers surrounding society's male bastions. Women now find ample employment opportunities even in the military and the police. It is in this context that social scientist Martin Van Creveld asks if there still exists even "a single field in which men are at a clear advantage and [in which] women will NEVER be able to play more than a marginal role?" In an extended analysis, recently published in Social Research, Van Creveld dares to assert that "such a field does exist...and its name is violence." In his assessment of the social meaning of violence, Van Creveld goes so far as to suggest that "one of its functions is to clearly separate men from women."
Van Creveld freely acknowledges "the ongoing feminization of the police and the armed forces" in the industrialized nations, but he discounts this phenomenon as "an illusion." "The more women there are in any branch of the police, the further removed from violence that branch is likely to be," he remarks. "The more women in any armed force, the less likely it is to engage in serious military operations."
Van Creveld does not have far to look to find the reasons that, even in the police and the military, women are not to be found in the theater of violence. "There is nothing like violence," he reasons, "to penalize weakness. It does so quickly; it does so in the most unpleasant way imaginable; and it does so with results which, all too often, are irrevocable." Putting women into the police and military has not erased "the fact that women's bodies are much less suitable [than men's] for engaging in violence or defending against [it]"; in fact, much of the most compelling evidence on the relative weakness of women is now coming from the military. The U.S. Army, for example, now reports that its average female recruit is "12 centimeters shorter, 14.3 kilograms lighter, has 16.9 fewer kgs. of muscle, and 2.6 kgs of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper body strength and 72 percent of the lower body strength of the average male." ROTC officers report that among their cadets, 78 percent of the males but only 6 percent of the females could run two miles in under 14 minutes.
Cruel biology has also dashed the feminist hope that intensive military training would narrow the gap in physical strength separating men from women. In fact, because of the "'superior ability of men to add muscle to their bodies,' intensive training, far from diminishing the physical differences between the sexes, tends to increase them still further." Thus, after eight weeks of such training, male cadets at West Point demonstrate 270 percent more power on the bench press and perform 473 percent more work than their female counterparts.Of course, what the military is seeing has widely been documented by others. A biologist cited by Van Creveld estimates that, "if the hundred strongest individuals were to be selected out of a random group consisting of one hundred men and one hundred women, then ninety-three would be male and only seven female." Another expert has calculated that "only the upper five percent of women are as strong as the median male."
Against the arguments that modern technology has rendered males' superior strength irrelevant, Van Creveld points out that in the Canadian Army, "only ONE OUT OF A HUNDRED women who entered the standard infantryman's training graduated," and that in the U.S. Army, officers have discovered that most women "could not even throw a hand-grenade to the minimum distance-35 meters-necessary to ensure that they themselves would not be hit by flying fragments." He further notes that while women are as capable as men of firing a tank gun or operating a tank radio, it remains true "that tanks tend to shed their tracks and that each link weighs around 50 kilograms, [making] a female crew-member...a clear liability to the repair work, and an all-female crew a near impossibility."
Another reason that women have steered away from actual violence in police work and in the military is that the relative frailty of their bodies leaves them far more vulnerable to injury from violence than men. Reports from West Point indicate that its female cadets "suffered ten times as many stress fractures as did men," and a 1988 U.S. Army study found that women were "more than twice as likely to suffer leg injuries, and nearly five times as likely to suffer fractures as men." In situations in which women have been put into exercises involving "jumping out of helicopters, descending walls while suspended from ropes, and the like," Van Creveld reports, "surely the greatest beneficiaries have been the orthopedic hospitals."
Is it any wonder that in our remarkably feminized military, "repeated surveys have shown [that] the last thing that enlisted women in particular want is to see violent action"? Is it any surprise that despite the sharp rise in female police officers, "whenever there are armed criminals to be flushed out, or a hijacked aircraft to be broken into, those who undertake the job consist almost exclusively of men"? No, Van Creveld concludes, "the near monopoly that men have always exercised over violence is alive and well.... At most, women have increased their presence in supporting positions such as administration, communications, logistics, and medical services. However, even this is doubtful, given the fact that women have always acted as camp-followers."
The inference Van Creveld draws from his research will infuriate feminist theorists: "No society can survive without either the use of violence or the threat of it. Therefore, complete equality between men and women will never be realized."
