Any female who dreams of being a soldier should do this.

Wait until there is a rainy night. Not a night where the rain is just sprinkling down, wait for a night when it is really coming down in torrents. Go into the backyard on such a night and dig a hole. Get in the hole. Stay in the hole for a week short of food, devoid of a blanket, and perform all of your normal bodily functions in the hole.

If you think that is bad enough, add somebody shooting at your head every time you put your head up, and high explosive raining down upon you blowing your neighbours in other holes to fragments. Toss in the fact that you will be expected to kill large numbers of people and ask yourself if you can live with that? Then you might get some idea of what it is really like to be a modern warrior in a real war, why military comradeship among men is crucial to survival, and you might understand why so many men break down when confronted with such horrors.

One reason why the death penalty was abolished in Britain was because large numbers of female warders routinely suffered nervous breakdowns when confronted by the hanging of another female. The idea of involving women in the killing of anyone, especially other women, is contrary to the normal (as Poirot would say, "Brutish") instincts of females.

If you want to end up with mental hospitals full of psychologically shattered female soldiers then go right ahead and continue with this feminist fantasy that women can be front line soldiers. And if you want to advocate that men who can live and fight in such conditions need sensitivity training and a more enlightened attitude to female equality, you are going to lose the next war.

On the matter of brutishness.....I'm saying that humans are capable of conceiving order in their societies which is above and beyond that which is experienced in other species. We're capable of psychological removing ourselves from the reality of our condition. We're clever at adaptation and we have the ability to control and shape our environments to suit our needs and desires. However, when the chips are down, we're confronted with our condition as a creature which creeps upon the earth, is often threatened - and forced to act accordingly. That is psychologically difficult to absorb for a species that likes to paper over its carnality.

We're one of the few species that practices war and savagery on our own species as a matter of course.

As far as the physical and practical aspects of warfare and violence are concerned, males appear to be hard-wired to take on that role. I do think there's an aspect of brutishness involved in hacking another human to death or even in the modern sense of blowing other humans to smithereens.

I reiterate the fact that above I wrote "physical and practical" because I believe women support their menfolk in many ways when their territory or resources are threatened from without or when new territories or resources are to be acquired.

LEGO

Just because the AVERAGE strength, muscle mass etc of women is lower than the average for men, this should not disqualify ALL women from combat. And just because combat is rough and uncomfortable, why do you assume that ALL men, and NO women, can cope with this?

And get a grip on all this business about men dropping everything to run and help a downed female soldier. Any soldier worth his training would assess every combat situation on its merits. If a soldier is stupid enough to put archaic notions of chivalry before the safety of his fellow troops, he should not be in a war zone in the first place.

Aristocrat

‘The claim that humans deep down are 'good' and then only corrupted by society is a myth perpetuated by Rousseau. All you've done is exchange one myth for another.’

Caring, compassion and cooperation does not equal ‘good’. War and brutishness does not equal ‘bad’.

I haven’t read Rousseau in any depth, but I suspect his noble savage concept referred to societies living in tune with nature; I doubt if he meant their ‘moral state’.

The more advanced and complex societies become, the more they distance themselves from nature. As societies become more complex, they inevitably adopt ‘unnatural’ behaviour patterns, like military warfare, class hierarchies, stark inequalities of wealth and rigid gender roles.

Poirot

My comments were about anthropology disciplines and documentaries rigidly enforcing male-centric viewpoints and treating women in prehistory as virtually invisible. I ‘belittled’ the stereotypical traditional men’s and women’s roles in equal quantities.

Don’t blame feminism for devaluing women’s traditional role, when it’s overwhelmingly the PATRARCHY that has always done this.

On the beach

‘My mother, grandmothers and the family women before were all armed in their own homes. They all had their .22 or .410 (shotshells) … and no-one ever thought anything odd about that.’

Cool. Tell that to people like LEGO, not me. I’ve got lots of stories like that in my family too. Given the circumstances, opportunity and, where needed, weapons, women are tough survivalists – in war and peace.

‘The story of how women 'won the West' in Australia .. is rarely told and very rarely recognised. That is not the doing of 'men'. That is the doing of middle class feminist ratbags and interests preserving their victim status…’

I’m afraid it IS the doing of ‘men’ – i.e. the male-controlled media – who want to preserve their ‘frail little lady’ stereotype so that men can go on thinking they have to protect (and thus control) women.

Look more closely at how the media only confines its gender coverage to male gender violence (brutish men versus frail little ladies) and women’s work-life-balance choices (because frail little ladies have nothing better to think about, I guess).

Hi Killarney

I am opposed to Mike Bird's opinion, because I do not believe that women should be part of a professional army at all, unless they are in rear area positions. I accept that the sort of men who are their nations professional killers should be more respectful of females, but I can hardly tell the sort of men who are prepared to kill other people on official orders that they are morally reprehensible.

Can I now examine the weakness of your position? You seem to have an ideology which presupposes that females are the equal of males in every way. I hope that I am not misrepresenting your position, and I would welcome clarification on this point if I am.

I do not oppose female equality on most things, unless they clearly violate the laws of biology and psychology. I do oppose the concept of absolute female equality, and I am using the topic of front line soldiers as a clear example of why your position is wrong.

I have now made several posts in which I have explained biological reasons, psychological reasons, and sound military reasons, as to why women can not be front line fighters. Your response to these reasons has been to ignore them, and to keep chanting an ideological mantra that women must be equal to men. Your position is not based upon a sound argument, it is based on ideological conviction, which you can not support with a reasoned argument.

All you could do was to toss a fairly outrageous question at me riven with inaccuracies and demand I explain why it is wrong. Killarney, that tells me right away that your position is untenable. You can't counter my arguments, and you can't submit a reasoned argument to support your own peculiar social theories.

All that you have is an ideology, and you run around OLO finding the odd example that might be used (with a little pushing and shoving of the truth) to conform to your cherished new Aquarian age thinking. It is time to switch on your objective reality circuit.

It isn't 'men' who have placed girls on pedestals as fragile flowers who must always be protected, cosseted and given a leg-up for life lest they miss out on a plum job.

I do not know how far your life experience extends back, but post-WW2 girls were raised as princesses by their doting mothers who did everything for them and did not even ask girls to assist with the minor chores made easier by electrical appliances. It always was that way and there is no change. Give mothers and female teachers a girl until she is six...and she will whinge forever.

On the other hand, there always were women mountain climbers, solo travellers, pilots and so on. While there were constraints, it must also be said that the very large rump of women avoided risk and challenges. The larger rump were content not to try and yes, their doting mums raised them to be like that. Girls are made of all things nice. But boys are made of truly horrid stuff, snails and docked dogs' tails. So boys were always expected to make way for themselves, to take care of themselves physically and mentally and 'STFU', and from a very early age. Women, mothers with the voted overwhelmingly to sent male youths who could not vote to Vietnam too.

The media is always blameworthy for steotyping, but women journalists have been given a heavenly run by editors since Whitlam. Maybe that dream run is the problem, otherwise there wouldn't be so many feminist hacks constantly writing about themselves, vaginas and fifty shades of B.S.

Feminism is a lobby run by and for an elite of humanities educated middle class women whose interest in such subjects as the ADF only extends to bolstering the mantras that keep them where they are: on top and forever preoccupied with their own comfortable, materalistic lifestyles. Not a bad gig for some, decades living high on the hog in the same sinecures while voicing the same old, same old, carping criticisms of men. They could easily have been replaced years with a Xerox machine.