Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced today that all combat roles will be opened to women, with no exceptions. This has lead to a reply from many conservatives that women should have been careful what they wished for, as now there is no longer any reason to exclude them from the draft.

I pointed out the delusion of the idea in the comments at Instapundit. The idea that women will ever be drafted into combat against their will is pure fantasy. All women who want to avoid being drafted need to do is fail the physical test. When they do, everyone will point out that women and men are different after all. Men in theory could also fail the physical tests, but in practice this will come with a stigma for men that women will never face.

Two other commenters at Instapundit described how this worked for men in the past. Comanche Voter explained:

Dalrock points out that all the woman has to do is fail the physical test. I have a friend whose granddaughter was in basic training at Ft. Sill. Came the end of basic, she failed the physical test. And was promptly given an honorable discharge. And she had volunteered and wanted to be a soldier. Back in my basic training days (1969–I want to be an airborn ranger and live a life of danger in Viet Nam and all that) if you flunked the physical, they put you in a special training company until you could pass the physical. For guys who were seriously out of shape that might take some time–and in some cases the only way out was to get a truly disabling injury. These days with an all volunteer army (sorry libtards but the current military’s education achievements and intellectual level is above the national average) if you can’t cut the physical requirements/PT test at the end of basic, they simply discharge you. I suspect a lot of women are going to get discharged—unless they lower the standards.

MTByrne followed up with a more recent example of the mechanism used to ensure that men had strong incentives to not fail out:

When I went through Marine Corps Recruit Training in 1998, they weren’t discharging physically unfit recruits if they failed the PFT (which was about 8 weeks into boot camp.) Those recruits were recycled into a platoon just starting the training cycle. Same with the “unks” on the rifle range. It was a good incentive to make sure you passed or hey guess what, you get to do it all over again.

We may see selective service changed to include women as well as men. We may even see a situation where women are drafted alongside of men. What we won’t see, ever, is a situation where women have high or even significant pressure applied to motivate them to pass physical requirements if they don’t personally want to be there.

What this is about, and what this always has been about, is envy of men. It is about eradicating the idea of masculine virtues, and more importantly, erasing all sentiment of gratitude for what the men in the military do. To a feminist feeling gratitude to men is unbearable. This is why every unit, especially elite forces and combat infantry, must include women. When Seal Team Six took out Bin Ladin feminists were forced to bear the unbearable; public officials expressed gratitude for the “men who risked their lives to accomplish the mission”, and feminists couldn’t chime in with “and women too!”

Never again.

Since the goal is to erase the concept of masculine virtues, the new bargain the introduction of women into combat represents isn’t to have women join equally or even seriously in the fighting and dying. The new bargain is that men will continue to be the ones who fight and die, but they must not feel a sense of masculine pride in either doing this or having this obligation. Registering women for selective service alongside men serves this goal, as does drafting women and letting those who don’t want to be there fail out. The imagined downside for feminists is only a fantasy.

March 2019 Update: Revisiting the subject of women and the draft.