BECAUSE COULD IS NOT SHOULD
A man knows the difference between when women could and when women should.

Recently, I had a conversation with someone about women serving in the army.

The contention was that if a female can, then why shouldn’t she? Say the fitness tests didn’t have lower standards for women, say all qualifications were the same, if a woman passes them all, if a woman proves her strength and ability and agility to be on par with men, then let her serve. After all, she could.

Women could serve in the army, perhaps, but not in combat. In general, they don’t actually have the physical fitness to meet the same standards as men. They don’t actually have the same all-around military skillset as men. They don’t have the strength to drag a wounded man to safety. They don’t have the stamina to hike miles and miles and miles with dozens and dozens of pounds of equipment on their backs. They don’t have the same sort of tactical minds and strategic ways of thinking. Perhaps some of this could be taught, but the mindsets are fundamentally different at their core.

But what if there was a woman who could? If a kid was hurt, a woman could carry him miles and miles on her back. Even pregnant, if needed. Women could, and if they want to, they should.

No. No. Could is not should.

While it’s true there are some very strong women, and while it’s true that women have accomplished great feats of strength, these are anomalies most often occurring in heightened or extreme circumstances, where there’s a danger to life or a focused determination arising from a very specific need to get something very vital done. It’s not proof of enduring, reliable strength. It’s not proof of consistency. It’s certainly not proof that women should serve in combat, and everything else that entails, no matter their physical fitness.

Follow this argument long enough and someone will inevitably bring up the female sharpshooters who served in the Russian army during World War II.

True, women can often shoot equal to, even better than, men, but that does not mean women should serve as snipers in war. A job which requires endless hours of stillness, ducking bullets, and relieving yourself in the woods or plastic bottles. Is this what we envision for women? Is this the greatest they can achieve? Becoming predatory, patient, precise, hardened killers? Considering how men struggle with PTSD, why would we willingly subject women to it?

Oh, and as for those roughly two thousand female snipers that Russia sent to war, only about five hundred made it back. In body, at least.

Men have one job, one primary job, and that is to ensure women are nowhere near where bullets are flying. Unfortunately, women get caught in warzones, women get caught in terrible situations, but to deliberately send them out to serve in combat, to feed the beast of war, the thought should be too abhorrent to contemplate past its formation. Because could is not should.

Recently, I was helping to clean up after a social event. I was carrying a bag of garbage in a box out to the front of the house. It wasn’t heavy, and I carried it just fine. I passed from the kitchen through the living room, where a few young men sat on the couch.

“Don’t worry,” I joked to the sitting men, “I got it.”

They glanced up, saw that indeed the box was no issue, then went back to whatever they were doing. And why not? I was older, competent, a woman carrying out the garbage, but a woman who could carry it after all. Obviously, they were not needed.

A couple passed by, herding their two young kids to the car. The wife walked past first, saw what I was carrying, then turned to her husband and told him to take the box. He did so willingly, not because I couldn’t, but because I shouldn’t. So even though it wasn’t heavy, and even though I could carry it, I didn’t argue. I let him take it from me because he should, and if I would fight it, I would mold another man for that line on the couch.

A while ago, I was carrying bags into a local center. A man who knew me since birth was coming down the stairs. I wasn’t struggling, they weren’t that heavy. He was several decades older, but he took them out of my hands, because “a lady doesn’t carry bags.”

Maybe it’s because he grew up in the Midwest. Maybe it’s because he grew up right. Maybe it’s because he grew up before the hammerings of women and society effectively obliterated the distinction between could and should.

For we’ve lost the ability to discern the difference and with it we’ve lost something vital in how men treat women. Because men have incessantly been harangued for holding doors open because women are also strong, because men have been told not to be heroes because women do not need saving, because men have been yelled into accepting that women can do it themselves for we are just as competent as any man, if not more. Truth is, even where the data clearly states the facts to be otherwise, it doesn’t matter the details of what a woman could do but should.

In not being gracious about held open doors and bags taken out of our hands and checks paid at restaurants and the shielding of protective instincts, we’ve created a culture in which women take out the garbage, not because it’s full and the man isn’t home, but because the man sits on the couch and stays out of the way. And there’s a generation now, and more to come, who don’t know this isn’t how it should be. They don’t know that they shouldn’t allow it, because they’ve been angrily castigated into submission by crusading women who want to prove their strength by beating down men, then step on them further in bemoaning the lack of good men. They’ve been led to believe that insisting on carrying the bags, acts of protection, cleaner language, and the like, is belittling, stifling, unmindful of the women who could do it themselves, and just another way to prove them weak. Don’t do unto women what women can do for themselves is the skewed doctrine of current social etiquette ingrained into men. Can’t you hear the raw emotion, the lyricism in their expertly wielded profanity? An incessant insistence that we are no delicate violets has smashed the vase that held the bouquet, and left the rest of us wondering where the flowers went.

No wonder men are angry, jaded, lost, frustrated, and more, because when men are not allowed to know the difference between could and should, then it’s not just women affected, but also the men who can’t show their best selves in the way they treat women. Men are not challenged, demanded to become more when there’s no appreciative women to mandate it be so.

Men carry the bags, hold open the doors, put of the fires, deal in politics, arrest criminals, and even go to war not because of what a woman can or can’t do, but because of what she should. It’s respect and reverence to the women they hold on a pedestal, because that is how men should regard women. There’s no contention that women should be worthy of that treatment through raising men on a pedestal of respect and admiration too. Because women are not either allowed to be their best selves, also stifle their best selves when it is not in encouraging men to be the best they could.

So now that women have insisted that we can do it all ourselves, now that women raised in this world wonder where the men have gone, now that men aren’t allowed the simple fulfillment of being a hero, protector, provider, strongman, did we win? Did feminism fulfill its promise of freedom, as each successive wave eroded the pedestal we women stood upon, so our faux-exalted perch upon its present rubble is a pyrrhic victory at best? Have we won in remaking society by turning men into males because women were turned into men?

The answer lies beyond physical makeup to a fundamental truth, a truth that brings fulfillment, joy, meaning, and a balance of good and holy. It all comes down to a man knowing how vital is his role in discerning the difference between when a woman could and when a woman should.