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I’m not the type to lament the current state of the “New Corps” in favor of the ever-glorious and omnipresent Old Corps. However, if there ever was an event that could distinctly signify the new, it is the recent news that the Marine Corps will officially be fully integrated and moving toward gender-neutral MOS titles.
The Marine Corps is changing, and you can’t stop it.
This is upsetting for a lot of Angry Facebook Veterans, as you’ve probably noticed over the last few days if you’ve been anywhere near the internet. If you were to believe them, you’d see the integration of females as the end of the Corps as we know it or the Wookpocalypse, as I like to call it, and possibly even being an early sign of the end of times.
Camp Pendleton, CA — After the Wookpocalypse
This is of course nonsense.
I’ll be honest here… I don’t really see this as a huge deal.
Remember that awesome co-ed shower scene from Starship Troopers?
Or the badass Vasquez from Aliens?
Those scenes were never going to happen in real life without dramatically changing the way the military handles females. People keep talking about standards, and it’s because women have never been held to the same standards as men in the Marine Corps. This creates a culture of separation, and a culture where men simply don’t respect female Marines on equal ground–because there has never been equal ground.
If you’re not a Marine and you’re reading this, what I mean is that women have essentially been coddled by weaker PFT standards than men. Women aren’t required to meet the same physical fitness standards as men, and they never have been. The Marine Corps tried to implement pull-ups into the female PFT a couple years back and was met with laughable results; forcing them to double back.
Another study was recently conducted on the viability of women in the infantry by monitoring integrated teams against all-male teams, and concluded that women performed notably worse–with higher risks of injury and weaker performance overall. However, I would argue that this study was inherently flawed from the start, and the data gleaned from it essentially useless. The women in the study were still never held to the same PFT standards as male Marines, yet tasked with competing against them. Had the women been properly vetted as recruits with male standards, you might have seen different results.
If the Marine Corps is willing to raise the standards for women in the Corps to the same as men, this whole thing will be a nonissue. You will lose a lot of females in the Corps, but you will maintain the same combat viability as before and everyone will truly be equal. My assumption here is that this will inevitably happen.
Let’s be realistic here: men already dominate the Marine Corps statistically. The infantry is also a relatively small population, and I assume there won’t be a plethora of women clamoring their clams to be grunts. At most, you’re going to have one or two females in a single battalion, and if they can’t hack it physically they’ll probably just be the company clerk or something anyway.
Hardly a game changer, if you ask me. At the end of the day I don’t see this having a profoundly huge impact. My hope, as well as many others I’m sure, is that women will finally be held to the same standards as men. If you can’t hack it, maybe the Marine Corps isn’t for you.
On a vastly unrelated note, I’ve still got some limited edition 6th Anniversary prints left! These are 11×17 prints, autographed by yours truly.
We’ve also added a new T-Shirt with the same image on it for a limited time! I haven’t done a print sale in a long time, so if you’re a TL fan you should definitely order one here.
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