The feminists have browbeaten our armed services into a suicidal attack on combat effectiveness

Heather McDonald writes at National Review,

...The feminists have browbeaten our armed services into a suicidal attack on combat effectiveness, mostly out of careerist self-interest (combat service is a prerequisite for the highest reaches of the Pentagon hierarchy) but also out of a preening, fictional ideology. They insist, against all evidence, that the female frame is equally physically suited for the grueling, skeletally punishing ordeal of long military sorties as the male one, and that a 130-pound female will be able to drag her wounded 200-pound comrade, weighted down with 40 pounds of equipment, out of enemy fire. They deny the inevitable destructive force of eros in integrated combat units. But it will be the feminists who push the hardest to protect female soldiers from any risk of rape or other uniquely female abuse, a prospect all the more real in America’s future theaters of combat: the Third World and Islamic territories.

However galling such a double standard is, it would be worse for Western civilization if males actually took feminists at their word and snuffed out any last vestige of chivalry in themselves. A proper respect for female difference is one of the great civilizing disciplines; a society that truly treated males and females as equal, interchangeable parts would be not worth living in.