In all the fuss about women in combat, I've noticed something.

[conuly]

Commenters decrying this development (which they ignorantly choose to believe is totally new, but let's ignore that) claim that soldiers need to carry 45 pounds on their back all day, every day. Or maybe it's 60 pounds. Or 75, or 100, or 200, or the weight of all their fallen comrades at once. No evidence is ever given for these assertions, a fact which even without the mysteriously changing numbers should be your clue that people aren't acting in an honest and upfront manner.

I could just google for the number, but I'd probably get more made up information, and for all I know none of it is true at all and soldiers never have to carry anything because the government secretly has invented hovercraft while we weren't looking.

So I'm going with option b, which is to ask if anybody has any idea which of those numbers approaches accuracy. I cannot believe it is all of them.

On a side note, for those seriously lowballing the weight required, I would like to introduce them to some more hardcore baby wearers. Carrying a sick three year old and the week's groceries up a hill, which I have done, has got to total more than 45 pounds. Sure, the groceries part wasn't all day, but if I'd been sufficiently determined I would have built up my endurance.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

Hell yeah. My friends with toddlers are impressively strong and tough. I suggest that evolutionary arguments might support the idea that women have to be. Too bad none of the "sex-linked differences" people seem to have noticed.

[dragonwolf]

I don't think evidence is really required at least for the assertion that it might be necessary to carry a fallen comrade, as it's just basic reasoning. According to the NPR, the total pack weight of a typical foot soldier is around 100lbs (pack + kevlar/armor + gun/ammo).

If we go by the fallen comrade and assume it's a max weight, you're talking upwards of about 300lbs at the extreme top end, but you're also talking a full-body lift. Well-trained female atheletes can squat around 1.5x and deadlift around 2x their bodyweight, so the biggest sex-based disadvantage that women in general have is that women tend to be smaller, which requires a higher strength to weight ratio to life the same amount of weight. Not impossible, but potentially more challenging.

What I find more sad is the crap misinformation that spreads among women that discourages many of them from learning how to do any kind of heavy lifting. I think people would be more willing to "believe" that women are capable of keeping up with the guys if the women themselves weren't so damn afraid of such nonsense as "bulking up" like She-Hulk if they lift more than 5lbs.

[conuly]

One comrade, sure, but to hear some people talk if you don't have a penis and cannot personally lift the entire army on your shoulders, nobody who is female should ever be allowed to try. Or something.

Thank you for the information, btw :)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I was a hardcore baby-wearer - my kidling rode in the backpack till she outgrew it; probably did 200-300 miles in the thing over about three years. I was still routinely piggybacking her around till she was ten - not all the time, of course, but often enough, including up and down some mountain trails. The year she was in second grade, we were living in a single-wide on the Union River, which flooded right up to our door - I had to build us a long concrete-block causeway, and even so, the water was higher than her little boots, so I had to piggyback her over it to the bus stop every morning, and back from the bus stop every afternoon for more than a month, both of us in all our heavy winter clothes.

I don't see that carrying a 50-lb. pack all day every day would be any more difficult, and there are a whole lot of women bigger, stronger, and less-broken than me. Also, a pack full of gear doesn't kick, wiggle, or throw up in one's hair.

[conuly]

Nor decide that trucks are the most fascinating things in the world and that every sighting of one has to accompanied by gleeful shrieks of "truck, truck, truck, yook Connie a truck!" right in your ear in case you hadn't noticed.

"Your child is screaming on your back."
"Is she? Is she really? I hadn't noticed."