Bands of BROTHERS

Exclusivity is Kind of the Point

In which I describe the dynamics and the social incentives of teams of men tasked with difficult and dangerous work. There’s a cultural effort to push inclusion in this area, but it’s shallow and disingenuous, and so it can be extremely damaging to organizational morale and effectiveness.

Sitting around, discussing gendered language, and inclusion

“Women relate face to face. Men relate shoulder to shoulder.”

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother…

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

-William Shakespeare

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.

-Eric Hoffer

During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died.

-Sebastian Junger

I don’t really buy the narrative about veterans and PTSD.

Before I go on, I think it’s worth it to point out that any pretension of analytical rigor or empirical consistency in psychology is a laughable charade. As someone who’s been diagnosed with a substance use disorder (SUD) I’ve come face to face with this reality, a thousand times. Medical and mental health providers have their labels, their medications, their diagnostic criteria… and what are the results? Maybe 5-10% of the patients who find their way into the treatment system (detoxes, rehabs, therapy, MMT, IOP, etc.) find a cure while being treated, and most of them will point to some factor aside from the ‘treatments’ that principally assisted them: meetings, mentorship (sponsorship), God. Whatever you might want to say about addiction medicine, it’s not science. Would salving and dressing the bedsores of the 600-pound food addict confined to her bed be considered ‘treatment’? Perhaps, but it’s not a treatment of the primary issue. Addiction medicine is a bit like that.

But much of psychology/psychiatry is as well. If you present with anxiety, what are the treatments that are available? Meditation, exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy (reframing, noting stimuli, progressive conditioning) - all of these can be useful, and you usually won’t find them in medical offices. What can the providers offer you? Pills (anxiolytics - benzodiazepines, beta blockers, SSRI’s - the most effective of which will result in physical dependency with daily use, which means rebound anxiety and insomnia and withdrawals upon cessation) and therapy. That’s pretty much it. It’s almost as if they want to keep people sick, as if they’re ignoring the simple and obvious (and inexpensive) treatments, in order to focus on the profitable ones.

Much of today’s therapy follows a self-indulgent ‘maintenance’ model, in which people (usually women) find a professional (also usually a woman) that they can trust to help download their daily words and decisions and behaviors. The therapist asks probing questions and helps the patient recognize cognitive distortions and blind spots and emotional triggers. 100 years ago, we would’ve called this an intimate conversation with a friend. Now it’s a medical treatment modality, scheduled and billed out by insurance companies. And are the people enjoying this treatment any happier? Are they making progress? Do they seem especially wise and serene to you? Or are these patients just lonely, self-absorbed modern people who need someone to speak to regularly about their lives? As I said, this sort of thing used to be encoded into the very structure of our communities and our social bonds. Now we pretend that it’s medical treatment, but - just like addiction medicine - data seems to indicate that it’s of uncertain efficacy, at best. Why wouldn’t it be? Are the therapists themselves happy? Successful? Wise? If they’re not, then how can they help instantiate these qualities in their patients? Are we all just play-acting? Not entirely, I don’t think… but certainly far more than the mental healthcare providers would like to acknowledge. Anxiety. Autism. Trauma. Personality pathologies. Depression. PTSD. An entire galaxy of disorders without reliable treatments, much less cures. And we’ve had tens of millions of people working on these problems for over a century. Perhaps this puzzle is missing a few pieces.

So I don’t believe that the VA or academic psychology or the medical system has a grasp on the etiology of combat-related PTSD, or any other psychological problem. They’re well-meaning people but their entire enterprise is one of chronic, fumbling ineptitude. I have a different theory.

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Let’s engage in a though experiment: let’s imagine that men and women are fundamentally different - not just socially, but biologically. Let’s imagine that their hormonal profiles and brain structures and their dimorphic frames (bones, muscles, nervous systems) interact with the social roles they’re given to create two fundamentally different ways of being. These two categories include separate reproductive incentives, separate psychological priorities, and separate identities. The two categories can bleed into each other to some extent, especially in the modern world (where the pressures and constraints of nature are farther removed and neurosis and psychological confusion and ennui can all flourish unimpeded) but they are separate categories.

I don’t actually believe that this is confined to a hypothetical scenario. I believe that this is our reality, but a large swathe of contemporary academia (gender studies, sociology, women’s studies, literature studies) would disagree. They embrace the blank slate philosophy, in which all human social traits are purely socially constructed (and can therefore be deconstructed and reconstructed). Arguing with this metanarrative is outside the scope of this essay (and evolutionary psychology has already offered many workable refutations anyway, in my opinion) so I won’t try to argue. I will merely point out that the world (biology, human psychology, society) is never constituted in a certain way simply because that way serves your ideological prejudices. If you believe that sexual equality is so important that it must necessitate a scheme in which men and women are very socially malleable, then all you’ve done is formulate a wish, not a claim. Sexual equivalence isn’t correct because it accords with progressive ideals. Sexual equivalence is only correct if sexual equivalence is correct.

Back to our thought experiment…
In this reality, men and women would perceive problems differently. They would cooperate and communicate differently. They would use different factors to evaluate decisions and choose mates. They would form teams differently, for different purposes, and with different deliberation mechanisms and hierarchical structures (and hierarchies are, regardless of what anyone tells you, universal among humans and among all social animals). Men’s teams would be different than women’s teams. What might happen if you tried to force women into men’s teams, or if you tried to change the men’s teams to better accommodate women? This seems like an important question.

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I recently moved into a house and so I now have the bevy of streaming services at my disposal. Like many men (and many fewer women), I greatly enjoy shows and films about men working on challenges together: natural disasters, battles, athletic competitions. Anyone who tells you that they don’t notice a difference in the kinds of stories which tend to appeal to male versus female film goers is lying. The idea on the left is that these preferences are socially constructed, but no one is trying to change the viewing habits of women. Women certainly aren’t. That would be shaming and social pressure, and we’ve been told that these are very bad things, unless they’re being used to advance a progressive agenda. No one is trying to write romantic comedies or period dramas to appeal to men, just as no one is trying to get more men to become nannies or babysitters or kindergarten teachers. The desired changes (imposed from above) to our cultural notions of sex run entirely in one direction: more female heroes, more female inclusion in masculine teams, and (from the other end, towards the same goal) many more male characters who are simpering and agreeable and ridiculous. Recently, I’ve watched 13 Hours, the Amazon Prime series Landman, and Only the Brave.

Only the Brave tells the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, 19 (out of 20 total) wilderness firefighters who gave their lives on June 30, 2013, while battling a blaze outside of their hometown of Prescott, Arizona. The archetype of skilled and toughened men risking (and sacrificing) their lives in order to protect women and children stretches far back into our primate history. Erode those teams and try to tinker with the norms and structures of those groups (by introducing inclusivity or support or emotionalism) and you won’t have inclusive teams of tough individuals. You’ll have no teams, at least none that are hyper-effective. Men are instilled with the idea of honor, of laying down their lives for women and children (even in the form of abstractions like nation and government) and, especially, for the man next to them. Women, generally, are not. We can try to reverse this and instill an ethic of toughness and sacrifice and honor among girls and women. What we can’t do is pretend that these values have no meaning in the modern world. They had meaning, they have meaning, they will always have meaning. That meaning is central to these organizations. It’s the understanding of honor and self-sacrifice that binds these teams together. Without them you just have a bunch of employees in matching uniforms.

The progressive vision of managerial technocracy might be understood as a world in which no honor or sacrifice is ever necessary. I don’t think I want to live in such a world, but right now that’s a moot issue. That’s not currently the world we live in.

Two of those (13 Hours and Only the Brave) are true stories, and therefore not amenable to the feminization of roles, and the other (Landman) was almost certainly written by a conservative. If the stoic and businesslike masculine and silly, emotive feminine characterizations don’t give it away, then the long soliloquys about the folly of ‘green energy’ should. They all feature what could be considered the traditional masculine archetype: teams of men, highly trained and interacting with each other in the joking, fraternal, stoic way that such groups of men always do (and groups of women do not). These teams prize competence and action above all else, and the risk of a sacrificial death in service of the team hangs over them at all times. Cowardice, surplus emotion, selfishness, and emotional manipulation aren’t so much not tolerated as simply nonexistent.

There’s a narrative that masculinity has been imposed on boys (and therefore men) and that this mode forbids displays of emotion or sympathy or introspection. This may have been true 50 years ago but it’s less so now, and I doubt that this was ever the complete story. Emotional displays aren’t a problem to be solved in these groups of men so much as they’re a non-issue. Even the toughest men sometimes show emotion, but it’s reserved for very important times, in recognition of the deleterious effect that displays of emotion have on esprit de corps. It might simply be the case that boys and men don’t want to show emotion as often and in the same way as girls and women, and that no amount of realistic social engineering could change this. Perhaps this isn’t a social pathology or an innate flaw. Perhaps this tendency is a useful feature for people who are likely to often be tested and endangered, as a group.

For many men, their masculine nature is simply too strong, and there’s a selection effect: the kinds of men who become military contractors for the CIA or roughnecks or hotshots tend to be high in masculine traits: confidence, aggression, competence, competitiveness, emotional reserve (and also sometime impulsiveness, defiance, nonconformity, addictive tendencies, inattentiveness). Those valuable qualities are valued by society (and despite all the political rhetoric are even today encouraged and rewarded by women in their mate selections) but they probably have a biological substrate. In our thought experiment we must concede: groups of women might never be able to replicate these traits and social dynamics, even if trained to from childhood. When you understand that women have no incentive to embody these qualities (men do it to gain respect from other men and attention from women), and that there’s no real effort to imbue women with traits like stoicism or competitiveness or physical assertiveness, you begin to understand how foolish is our effort to pretend that the two categories don’t exist. No one is trying to turn girls and women into roughnecks. There’s merely a cultural complex that pretends as if they already are, and reacts to implications that they’re not with howls of outrage. Review Pete Hegseth’s Congressional confirmation hearings if you doubt this. Sitting senators react to the idea that women are generally unsuited to infantry combat or combat arms roles with amazement and offense.

We cannot have an expeditionary military that can fight America's battles around the world, or even maintain national security around the world without the women.

-Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill

Meanwhile, in two shows that I surveyed at random (they looked decent and I was curious whether my guess would be proved correct), the new cultural narrative is present in the first episode of the first season in both of them. In Severance, the corporate supervisor is a woman who, while talking to another woman (a new employee) tells her that a male coworker annoys her too, and jokes that she has wished to strike him often. In Silo (a dystopian political thriller), the main character, who performs hard manual labor as a kind of engineer/machinery maintenance person (the Trump voters of the dystopian future), is a woman. These are isolated dialogue and character choices in fictional stories, so we shouldn’t make too much of them. But can you imagine a male supervisor in a streaming series chuckling to his male subordinate about how he has wanted to strike a female employee many times, while it’s played for comedy? The changes are everywhere, if you care to look, and they only go one way. The pressure is nowhere stronger than to integrate women into those traditionally masculine teams. It’s a pressure that’s extant in shows and films, but it’s also alive in research science and in corporate trainings. It’s the ideology of our civilization, and the fact that it’s fantastic and unworkable is no barrier to its power.

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Why does all of this matter? I suspect that these teams of men who are willing to risk death only do so willingly because of the social rewards in terms of status and honor (which is much the same thing). If women are handed this status, in a false and performative way, men will be less willing to run the risks. There’s also the matter of recognition and advancement. No one really believes that women can really make up teams of firefighters or roughnecks or rifle squads. Instead, the pressure is on these teams to include women, and then promote them out of danger (and away from tasks that are especially difficult for them). In response to the exchanges in Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing I would avoid pointing out the obvious objections regarding female strength and stamina and aggression and competitiveness. I would point out the ‘team dynamics’ issue. Infantrymen are a team above all else (until you get to the levels of Delta Force, and very few people are seriously suggesting that women should participate in that) and adding women irrevocably changes the group’s operations and atmosphere. Forget the clear increases in sexual tension (sexual harassment allegations have crippled probably thousands of American military units at this point; commanders have no answer and everyone pretends that this is not a problem, or that it can be solved by slideshow presentations once per quarter) and forget the fact that most women are less motivated by status competition or the desire to appear tough around her buddies. People are motivated to do the things that make them look good and win them status. For men, this involves making money and appearing brave and physically assertive and competent and being funny and charming. For women, this involves making money and earning status and being physically attractive and socially receptive. Do you notice what’s missing in the social incentives for women? I bolded it for you. Of course women would prefer to be regarded as brave and competent as well, but these are simply not important status gainers for them, and so they mostly ignore these qualities. For a masucline team, the humor changes when women are around. The competition changes - it becomes more self-conscious and bitter. Men will tend to sacrifice themselves to save a female comrade in trouble. Israel has run decades of studies on unit dynamics and injuries and combat outcomes but even in that country there is substantial utopian pressure to ignore constraints and implement a scheme of utopian equivalence. In dangerous jobs, team dynamics matter. How curious that a group of people who promote the special quality of expertise (progressive reformers) should ignore the expertise of 100,000 professional infantrymen and a million firefighters when it’s convenient.

Most teams of men aren’t military units, but the dynamics (the propensity for risk, competitiveness, desire to appear strong and capable around your buddies, emphasis on minimal complaining and a shared avoidance of emotional displays) are reflected everywhere, from high school baseball teams to the Navy SEALs. It’s not that women can’t contribute to many of these efforts - it’s that pretending that women are the same as men and warping selection and promotion and training criteria to support this pretense destroys the team. In many cases it probably is the case that women can’t contribute, or that including women will do more harm overall than good. The fact that this is an uncomfortable thing to point out these days speaks to our cultural discombobulation. Promoting women who’ve not paid their dues or run the risks or suffered the same burdens of active service causes men to become cynical, resentful… and it causes them to leave. Policymakers know this, of course. The issues with army recruiting (especially among the demographics that generally furnish active duty infantrymen - young white and Latino males) during the Biden administration weren’t a secret, even if they were treated as such by the media. The effort to erode and change masculine teams is a group effort, after all. Many people (journalists, military officers, congresspeople, television writers, professors) have a part to play in the grand project of making progressive abstractions real, no matter the cost.

Matt Osborne

:

December 2024 was “the most productive December in 15 years” for US Army recruiting. Altogether, ten new basic training units will be established this year to take in the new recruiting class.

Janice Fiamengo

, writing about firefighting and the U. S. Marine Corps:

Under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, and advocacy groups, men have had little choice but to participate in recruiting women, training women, and in redesigning firefighting manuals, equipment and facilities at an extraordinary cost to taxpayers.

“Women Firefighters: The Gender Boondoggle” (2008), an investigative essay by law and crime reporter Christine Pelisek, detailed the effort, long before the Los Angeles fires, to get women into frontline and command firefighting positions in that city, including the fast-tracking of women through the ranks and the lowering of standards (at one point, the LA Fire Department had a no-fail policy for female recruits in training).

For their still-not-sufficient efforts, many of the fire chiefs and captains were excoriated as sexists. Of the small number of women successfully brought into the departments, many bailed out on extended stress and injury leave.

The cost to male morale, Pelisek demonstrated, was incalculable. As Captain Frank Lima commented in interview for that essay, “It is hard to go into a fire with someone when you know from drilling she can’t lift the ladder.” Work-arounds to accommodate weaker women often involved men doing double-duty, making the fire teams less efficient. Captains who documented female trainees’ lack of strength or pushed them to be better found themselves facing lawsuits for sexual harassment, sex discrimination, or hostile working environments. Pelisek detailed a plethora of injury suits and harassment claims, noting that while less than 3 percent of Los Angeles city fire personnel were women at the time of her investigation, “that tiny group accounted for 56 percent of the often multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the LAFD between 1996 and 2005.”

Clearly, it’s not just in the boxing ring, the sports field or on the fencing mat that women’s inferior physical capacity results in damage to female bodies. A 2015 study by the United States Marine Corps was explicit: in addition to under-performing their male colleagues in most tasks, including the handling of weaponry and evacuation of casualties, female trainees were injured at more than six times the rate of their male counterparts. As the report stated bluntly, “The well documented comparative disadvantage in upper and lower body strength resulted in higher fatigue levels of most women, which contributed to greater incidents of overuse injuries such as stress fractures.”

Agreed, It’s Not Fair for Female Athletes to Compete against Men

Is this the full picture? Probably not, but how strange is that none of these objections and counterfactuals can even be mentioned in polite company. How many researchers or Democrat congresspeople do you think would be willing to discuss these points?

All of these changes have been imposed from the top down. The men doing the work have never really been consulted, either by reformers or commanders or journalists. Now we live in the stage of ‘cultural mop-up’, when the changed norms and values are legitimized and affirmed by films and television shows and science and music and comedy and academia and the growing unreality of the online world. Unfortunately, as the cultural efforts grow and become more earnest and bizarre, the entire project is appearing more and more absurd and destructive to many observers. At what point will progressives acknowledge that their ideas didn’t work? It’s an interesting question, but I have a century of eugenics and towers in the park municipal design and recovered memories data to demonstrate my suspicious that progressives never acknowledge that their ideas didn’t work. They simply quietly try to forget their past enthusiasms, and go off to find new ones.

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Back to PTSD: I don’t buy the narrative about veterans and PTSD. Sure, PTSD exists, and combat can push you towards it. There’s no doubt that foot patrolling or driving MSRs in Ramadi or Tal Afar day after day for 15 months can establish a condition of hyperarousal and that this can combine with traumatic events and adrenalized moments and losses to trouble one’s dreams and psyche. There seems to be quite a lot of science indicating that blast injuries (TBI’s - traumatic brain injuries) can worsen these effects and keep the body and brain from healing and recovering as it often would. There are many thousands of veterans who escaped from the sandbox (or the jungles, mountains, etc.) physically unscathed whose lives will never be the same due to the psychological effects of their service.

However, I don’t buy the idea that 10%, 15%, or more of veterans suffer with PTSD. Combat ain’t that common, and PTSD usually clears up on its own after a year or so. I don’t believe that the ongoing epidemic of veteran suicides and I don’t believe that most of the anxiety and impulsivity and sleep problems and depression are due to ‘PTSD.’ I didn’t believe it even around 2010, when I got off active duty. As I wrote, long ago:

…the loss of structure, the loss of camaraderie, the loss of purpose, and the disastrous over-prescription of psychotropic medication by the VA have certainly made our challenges with PTSD and survivor guilt and the trauma of killing (for which we do not have a name as a society) worse, but each of those initial factors is more important than PTSD.

So, what then? Why do veterans often suffer profound sleep troubles and anxiety and depression?

The reason veterans (nearly all of them men) struggle with ‘PTSD’ is because they have been removed from their team. The men who stay in uniform do much better, psychologically, and that has less to do with medical ‘support’ and more to do with the fact that they retain a schedule, a tribe, an identity, a purpose. Take those things away (the national guardsman returning from Title X deployment, the police officer cast as society’s villain and forced to pull back from dangerous neighborhoods or do desk work, the army Ranger who ETS’ed last year) and many men are lost in the modern world. Progressives see this and recommend even more ‘modern world’, for everybody. They wish to impose modernity on the world of masculine teams, a world they know nothing about. They see the status and respect, and they feel that women deserve those things as well, just as much and for the same reasons as the men. But men and women are different.

That’s why I wrote this. If Los Angeles wants to deprofessionalize and inclusivize and defund its fire department then that is the concern of the citizens of Los Angeles (or at least it should be). If a presidential administration wants to pretend that combat units should better reflect the wider society, and that these changes won’t (can’t) have any deleterious effects as to readiness then that’s an issue that I will vote on but, again, it’s not my decision. If sitting Congresspeople want to pretend that they know what makes an excellent soldier or a capable fire team and they want to act as if the Biden administration wasn’t urgently working to punish all doubters and suppress all dissent on the issue of DEI in the military then they alone will end up looking faintly ridiculous. But I have very pronounced opinions as to the proper role of men in a healthy society, and I see us collectively drifting away from it.

Progressives are both disdainful and deeply envious of male honor culture (a common combination in human psychology - the two sentiments often accompany one another). They want the status and acclaim which was purchased with the blood of heroes, but they don’t believe in honor culture (they can’t) and they have nothing to substitute in its place. They badly want the quality of toughness and resilience and team cohesion, for themselves and (often) for their sex (or their group) but these aren’t universal traits. You don’t get to have them simply because you desire them. Ultimately, they require a willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s brothers, and this isn’t a quality that progressives can approach, even in their imaginations. They want to see women as risk-taking, badass heroes (because that’s where the status is, after all) but that status is only awarded to people who are willing to sacrifice their lives. Women, except in the most dire situations, are too biologically important to go around throwing away their lives for their male battles buddies. The answer to this riddle is to understand that the functions of women (choosing and taming men, instilling femininity in society, and bearing children) are the most important functions that anyone can fulfill for humanity’s future. If our society was healthy and grounded, we would grasp this intuitively. Instead, far too many people want to be lauded for toughness and bravery without paying their dues. Far too many leaders want the trappings and status and power of office, without surrendering any accountability or bearing any risks. There’s an entire crop of recent female ‘leaders’ in this mold (Karen Bass, Claudine Gay, former President Jill Biden). You can dilute a role or a function for one or a few iterations… but eventually you destroy that role or that function, all in order to squeeze a little temporary acclaim for yourself. How selfish.

The idea that groups of men might work together, train together, and fight/compete/react together without women is deeply offensive to many modern thinkers. But human nature isn’t our plaything. It’s not under our control. Men evaluate each other in a certain way. They communicate in a certain way. They compete in a certain way, and most women do these things in different ways and for different reasons. Trying to shove women into masculine hierarchies cannot help but erode those hierarchies over time, and as the culture changes and it becomes widely recognized that captains and commanders and leaders are political plants rather than warriors the ethos leaves and, in many cases, so do the best and toughest men.

The more dangerous the job, the more important competence and initiative and training and poise become. The more dangerous the job, the more crucial it is that team dynamic be preserved. It’s only in the past few decades that modern people, unfamiliar with the realities of danger and sacrifice and even physical labor, have decided that inclusivity is equally or more important than team dynamics and status hierarchies and competition, and have tried to slice off some of the exorbitant social status that we lend to heroes and potential heroes and redistribute it. Much like wealth, though, status cannot be redistributed in this way. It can only be destroyed. We honor soldiers and firefighters and police officers because they perform functions that put them at risk of death, even slightly. Men are particularly well suited for such activities, and that advantage only increases when you consider the dynamics of teams of men. Men do these things and endure the discomforts and risk so much because they’re rewarded by society (with status) and psychologically (with honor). If we try to include women in these roles, the status immediately diminishes, and the honor becomes muddied and confused. I suspect that many men would be comfortable with the idea of dying alongside a close-knit team of their fellows for a great cause. Dying alongside a close-knit group of men and women simply wouldn’t feel the same. I can’t explain exactly why that is, but it is the case… and who are we to tell the people risking their lives for us the manner in which that sacrifice should be made? As I already wrote: what you wish were true is irrelevant. It only matters what is true.

No large, advanced human society in history that I know of has asked its women to undertake risky and violent tasks, because women are simply too valuable for that. The only thing that has changed is the political preoccupations of a relatively small number of educated people in the rich world. Human nature hasn’t changed, and the balance will be restored, sooner or later. The only question is whether it’ll be restored while we still have American soldiers and firefighters and police… or will our follies and failures make this grand experiment unworkable? In which case, we’ll be replaced by a people better suited to the never-ending challenges of reality.

A mentally ill vagrant recently approached a frightened female police officer and took her drawn gun while she fled and hid and whimpered. The responding male police officer shot and killed the man.

I wouldn’t hold your breath to see this story covered on the news or turned into a Netflix series.

Long ago, I was an infantryman in Afghanistan. I was certified as an EMT in New York City, and took the civil service exam to join the FDNY… but the results were tossed out and hiring was held up for years due to the racial inequities of the test results (an early taste of DEI). But I don’t have to refer to firefighters or infantrymen to make my point. Most men are neither.

When I worked in a metal warehouse there were perhaps 3 women on the floor (out of around 150 workers). They stayed in a little corner, feeding small pieces of metal into machines. They didn’t load trucks or operate lift machines or buddy carry orders. Even in that job I saw a number of injuries. One man had his hand partially crushed in a press. Back injuries were common and driver accidents were something that happened a few times per year. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous job, as they come, but most of the men who worked there conceptualized their job as a kind of service, in support of girlfriends, wives, children, etc. They used their labor to earn value because that was all they had. Unlike women, men don’t have inherent social value. Men only have as much value as we can produce and provide and protect. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’re not asking for set asides, or sympathy. We don’t even really mind all of the nonsensical, supercharged, masculinized female characters in media (although the fight scenes can be a bit painful to watch), other than the fact that we want to watch a good war movie or a Tolkien adaptation from time to time and all we see is trash. Unlike progressives, we’re not concerned with artificial status or language or quotas. Those efforts are a perfect encapsulation of why “only the brave” can flourish in certain conditions. Real warriors don’t much care about rank or label, and they’re certainly more concerned with their reputation among the team. The newcomer police and firefighter rookies and probies, hired during inclusion drives, who have then turned around to complain about training or unit culture or who’ve sued departments or nursed injuries aren’t really in the fight, no matter what they might tell people. They’re play-acting. That’s okay. Even the indignity of serving with such silly people won’t be enough to deter many young men from joining or older ones from staying.

But eventually the team dies. The organization might survive with its old, (now dishonored) name and its zombie traditions, but few will risk their lives for it and the worthwhile members will have left long ago. But you’ll never see a drive to win respect or acclaim or privileges or concessions for men by men (simply because they’re men). We just don’t operate that way. Mostly, we just want people to get out of our way, and let us do our jobs.

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The psychological crisis of our veterans has far more to do with the emptiness and shallow nature of modern life than it does with the effects of combat (which, in most cases, happened more than a decade ago now). Male veterans and males in general are struggling in a world without masculine hierarchies to join. The answer isn’t to abolish the masculine hierarchy, which will be the unavoidable effect of allowing women into many of them, unfortunately. The answer is to re-establish them and strengthen them and allow them to flourish. It won’t be necessary that women be restricted from all of these jobs, but they will have to be from the most difficult and dangerous ones. Exclusivity is a trait of all excellent and fearsome teams. Somehow, I don’t think that inclusivity and exclusivity can be reconciled, even linguistically. Exclusivity is kind of the point. There’s an entire legion of boys out there waiting for a challenge, and a large cohort of men who are willing to work their fingers to the bone and risk their lives for their families. There’s a smaller group of aggressive, risk-taking men who can be trained to lay down their lives, along with their friends, for some greater purpose. Is this dark? Yes, but it’s necessary. It’s the basis for our entire conception of glory and it cannot be erased. The trick is to give these men teams of men who are like them, and to give them a cause worth dying for. The modern progressive vision simply is not a cause that anyone is willing or could ever be willing to die for. I suspect that they know that.

Thanks for reading!