Battlefront is no place for women

The current fighting in Syria has brought a steady stream of pictures of fighters to our screens and newspapers. For some reason, there seems to be either more attention given to female fighters battling the ISIL, I think as a counterpoint to their misogyny. Or might it actually be a war in which women get equal billing to men?  

The British defence secretary said in May that women would join men on the frontline.

Kenya is already ahead of the British in that regard. Three years ago, the newspapers published photographs of women in the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) on the frontline, locked and loaded, ready to shock and awe Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

However, I am still agnostic about having women in the trenches alongside men.

Kenya used to have a Women’s Service Corps, but it was disbanded for being an empty, isolationist, apartheid-style separation. Nowadays, women march lockstep with the men all the way to the trenches.

Two years ago, we were told that the highest ranking woman in the army was a colonel. It is likely they have made headway since then. One day, we will have a woman heading the military, or even a woman commander-in-chief, for that matter.

Women are beating men at all levels of educational achievement in Europe and North America. We have had women presidents, premiers, and pilots.

No one doubts that women are men’s equals. In fact, if we consider American college enrolment rates, they are better than men when it comes to brain matter.

The reason I object to having women on the frontline is physiology and culture, not chauvinism.

For example, in mixed martial arts, Ronda Rousey is the most accomplished United Fighting Championships women’s champion there has ever been.

Only one of her fights has gone past the first round. Her last bout lasted a whole 16 seconds before she had her opponent unconscious. 

The undefeated bantamweight champion has broken arms in the ring and finished all who have stood before her. She is too good, it seems, for the women’s division, but no one in their right mind would suggest that she jumps over to the men’s division. Sending her to face the veritable murderers’ row in men’s bantamweight would almost guarantee a loss.

Pound for pound, men are stronger than women. And in situations where sheer force is required, men have an inherent advantage.

Women need to work much harder to achieve levels of fitness that men of a comparable weight may have. The high levels of fitness required of the infantry (which many men, myself included, have not achieved) locks even more women out.

It is not a generalisation to state that there is a gap in levels of aggression between the sexes. A simple census of those arrested for assault at your nearest police station cell will confirm that.

At the Coast General Hospital, I remember being told that the men’s trauma ward was larger than the women’s partly because men were “more likely to get involved in a fight”.

A woman would also take more provocation than a man to respond with force, which I guess is a good thing if you are looking for a peacekeeper, but not if you are keen on a storm trooper. 

A 2010 study in the US on suicide rates of women who had served in battle zones found that service women’s suicide rates were three times that of the general female population.

Enlisting in the army increased chances of suicide for women by 200 per cent. For men, joining the army increased their chance of topping themselves by 40 per cent in comparison to civilians.

The report went on to say that younger unmarried women had an even higher incidence of suicide among women in the army. The grunts of the army are more likely to be unmarried women. 

The battlefield seems to affect women war veterans in a more detrimental way as compared to men.

Let us not kid ourselves; women are more biologically important to society than men.

Sperm is produced in the billions; eggs take more energy to make and are fewer.

A society is able to experience a cataclysmic occurrence that decimates the numbers of men and still thrive since (permit me to be crude) all you need to get 100 women pregnant is one man.

The opposite is a trickier proposition. In humans, the ability of a society to reproduce itself is directly proportional to the number of fertile women.

This is why a mass army of young women is an unacceptable proposition to any society with its eye on the future. 

In his book, On Killing, which examines the psychological toll murder has on soldiers, David Grossman writes that after putting women in the battle field, “the psychology of war changes from one of carefully constrained ceremonial combat among males to unconstrained ferocity of an animal who is defending its den.”

Men stop taking war as a game of blood, iron, and cordite and it becomes personal when women are involved.

In the 1948 war of Palestine, the Israeli army included mixed sex combatants on the front line. The guys running the war noticed that a funny thing happened whenever a woman was injured in combat. The men almost always took on more risk than was advisable in trying to save the women. Or they broke down and were unable to continue combat.

Those who saw women die almost all became “uncontrollably violent” towards the enemy, jeopardising the mission.

Perhaps before sending women to war, we must slough off the lingering paternalistic feelings men have for women.

Another obvious problem is cultural, or rather, that of stupidity. Some ISIS fighters in Iraq, for example, believe that if they are defeated by women, they will go to hell.

In the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Arab men would have rather faced death than surrender to women, even when outgunned. 

It is likely that sending women to fight will harden enemy positions and reduce their likelihood of flying a white flag just like it might make them flee the battlefield for fear of eternal damnation.

War is nasty and brutish. To include more women on the frontline would imply lowering the physical qualifications required for a soldier. To do that would be to endanger women and their platoon.

The frontline is still nasty and brutal, and fighting there a slog.  There is still a premium on physical fitness and speed on the frontline, particularly when carrying injured mates to safety.

Women have fought side by side with men in guerilla wars. With guns available, you cannot claim that they are any worse at killing people. In fact, due to their patience and better ability to endure cold and cramped places, women make better marksmen than men.

However, putting women and men on the frontline leads to an increase in risk without an immediately obvious offsetting increase in efficiency. 

War still favours heft and haste. We need to have our strongest and swiftest at the front. The brutality, aggression, and physicality in a battlefield still favours men.

Putting women at the front seems like a very zeitgeisty, very informed, gender-blind, very I’m-with-it decision.  It is an exercise in box ticking, all inclusive gender sensitivity that may cause more harm than good.

The job of the military is to defend countries, not address social inequality.

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If you have a communicable disease, you have a duty to ensure that we don’t all get it

In May, a man was arrested for refusing to take TB medicine. It was the third such case I had seen since 2012.

I think we should be more proactive when it comes to communicable diseases.

If you have cancer, you have the right to refuse treatment, but a hacking cough must be addressed immediately for all our sakes.

We must robustly police drug use among communicable diseases, particularly those spread through the air. We humans are losing to the planet’s oldest organism when it comes to infection. We cannot tolerate unwitting collaborators with these microbes.

It fills me with dread to be in a matatu as the passenger next to me coughs his lungs out, leaving me to wonder what dreaded pathogen he is carrying.

Also, businesses need to give workers more sick days off. Those with colds who are forced to work through the sneezes often end up infecting workmates, who then pass the disease along, leading to more people asking for days off and greater charges on the company’s medical scheme.

Would it not be better, and cheaper, if you just asked those with the sniffles to sit it out?

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