Interesting but can't beleive how author didn't spend more time on how crazy discriminatory this practice is, which is also common in other countries in the middle east. No war but class war.
Biological male draft has always made sense from a population maintenance standpoint. If you did a biological female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft.
That only works in a polygamous society. In monogamous societies like the UK the deaths of many men in the world wars led to "marriage gaps" where a roughly equivalent number of women were unable to marry and have children.
So X people dead in war led to 2X people not reproducing. If the draft had been 50/50, then X dead would have only led to X not reproducing.
No need to go full polygamy. After WW II (or the Great Patriotic War), USSR didn't exactly became polygamous but put policies to support single motherhood, that works too.
"The shortage of men also meant a very important shift, in which the Soviets worked to try and both destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda, while also tacitly encourage even married men to sleep around by preventing the single mothers from suing the father for child support, and making it harder for their irate wives to divorce them. The result being that many men would have numerous affairs, and even unmarried men would often bounce from relationship to relationship."
The interbellum period in France and Germany also saw an increase in sexual freedom leading to more single mothers, without going to polygamy.
Most societies are polygamous when you look in terms of sex and reproduction, even if they aren’t when it comes to socially recognized family bonding.
> In monogamous societies like the UK the deaths of many men in the world wars led to "marriage gaps" where a roughly equivalent number of women were unable to marry and have children.
Unable to marry, maybe, unable to have children, less so, hence the spike in unmarried share of births around the end of WWII (probably even moreso in WWI, too, but the information I have starts in the 1920s.)
As a father of two daughters, I have to say conscription of young women is a barbaric logical outcome of egalitarian ideology. Perhaps in modern militaries there are less brutal work environments where 'sexism' could still come into play by providing differing roles for men and women - but that would already break the purity of the original conclusion.
Sure, for the sake of argument, if women and men are no different at all they should both be forced to go to the front lines in Ukraine and die for their country. I for one say men and women are different enough that conscription should work differently for them. I guess I'm sexist then!
> Feminism wants to erase all male privileges, seems unfair to do that while still saddling men with extra duties.
There are different types of Feminism.
The first wave of Feminism is defined in terms of trying to gain rights that males had:
> Originating in late 18th-century Europe, feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, run for public office, work, earn equal pay, own property, receive education, enter contracts, have equal rights within marriage, and maternity leave.
I think that you may be referring to more recent strands of Feminism that may be going in more radical directions.
It all comes down to instincts we developed as chimps. Men fight to protect (or expand) tribe and territory. Women don't fight. It's in our DNA. If you have to apply logic to it, use the biological basis as your guide. Men shoulder all the fighting to enable female reproduction, and women reproduce. It seems asymmetrical but pretty equal to me.