“Men do sort of have an absolute advantage over women in, say, upper-body strength, but the extent to which that really makes sense as an issue, I don’t know,” he says. “My sense is that there are some women who would love to challenge the forces and see if they could get through. And I know some who are so fit that they probably could.”
“The physical requirements are extreme,” concedes Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and the director of the Women in the Military project of the Women’s Research and Education Institute. “But I know some women who could probably meet them, some very strong and fit women. Remember, we used to think women couldn’t go into space.”
Anna Holmes
Anna Holmes is a contributing columnist for the Style section. She is the founder of Jezebel.com.
Archive
Video
Seal Team 6, the team of Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden, are known at the Pentagon as a tier one force - reserved for high priority targets. (May 6)
Manning and Collins make a point of emphasizing that, if and when women are allowed to undergo BUD/S training, they’ll have to be held to the same physical standards as their male counterparts. Otherwise, Manning says dryly, “it would just be the ladies’ auxiliary.”
A matter of time
Of course, one woman has made it through BUD/S: “G.I. Jane’s” Demi Moore. The 1997 film, directed by Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Thelma & Louise”), chronicles the story of a fictional Navy officer named Jordan O’Neil, who is handpicked by an ambitious Texas senator to undergo SEAL training as a sort of test case. (In true Hollywood fashion, Jordan stumbles a bit along the way but eventually triumphs over both the physical challenges and her male peers’ antagonistic posturing.)
“I’ll admit that Ridley and Demi and I engaged in a bit of wish fulfillment when we made the movie,” says one of the film’s screenwriters, David Twohy. “Did we really think it was 100 percent feasible (and desirable) that women serve as Navy SEALs? Probably not. But we did think the time had come for a dramatic discussion of the issue, and we thought it because history was clearly showing us the way.”
Although there’s no record of a woman ever challenging her exclusion from special ops training, it’s probably only a matter of time before that happens. The Military Leadership Diversity Commission released a recommendation that the Pentagon open up all military specialties to both genders. And last September, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told an audience of students at Duke University that he expects the ban on women in special ops forces will be lifted at some unspecified point in the future. (The Navy’s ban on women serving on submarines was rescinded in April 2010; earlier this month, the first female officers selected for submarine duty reported to a Navy base in Groton, Conn.)
The question is: When will the Pentagon lead the way? What’s more likely, says Brenda Feigen, an attorney, film producer (1990’s “Navy Seals”) and longtime feminist activist, is that the ban on women in combat and special ops forces will be overturned by the courts. “I just don’t see the Navy or Air Force or the Army willingly letting this happen,” she says. “The challenge is for someone to step up and say, ‘I’ll be qualified to serve as a SEAL if you agree to train me.’ ” (In the late 1970s, a lawsuit was filed by active-duty Navy women to open noncombatant ships to females; they won.)
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments