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Key points
- Tucker Carlson’s recent comments about pregnancy flight suits echo previous notions of male supremacy in the military.
- Anthropological evidence suggests that women hunted, contributed to the food supply, and demonstrated aggression in ancient times.
- The evolution of the military has created many different and necessary skillsets today.
Many women in the U.S. military thought the issue of women in the ranks was settled. After all, in 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced the opening of all combat roles to women. Since then, females have performed well, flying jets from the decks of Navy carriers, and taking command of Army infantry companies. As the Center for a New American Security reports, “Women have unofficially served in combat throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and many male colleagues have voiced their support for women after observing their competence and dedication to the job.”
Fox commentator Tucker Carlson then reopened the subject with a vengeance. Upset after seeing a photo of a new pregnancy flight suit, he fumed, “So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It's a mockery of the U.S. military. While China's military becomes more masculine as it's assembled the world's largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine."
To which Pentagon press secretary John Kirby retorted that the Defense Department wasn’t going “to take personnel advice from a talk-show host or the Chinese military.”
Carlson’s rant comes from a long tradition of male supremacy, based on "man the hunter and warrior lore." This figure comes striding out of the fog of prehistory, cobwebs of myth clinging to his broad shoulders. Alert, muscular, sharp-eyed, he carries not only his sharp-pointed spear but the destiny of his species. This evolutionary narrative is used to tell one story of our species: males are the aggressive sex and females the docile sex.
As our ancestors moved from forest to grassy savanna, their diet changed from one of berries, nuts, and roots to one of meat. Meat-eating males were allegedly responsible for the development of our capacity to stand upright, make tools for hunting, develop speech to facilitate the group hunt, and bring provisions back to women and children. These advantages supposedly gave males a distinct advantage that still plays out in the workplace today, giving men an edge in jobs from guiding airliners through the sky to governing a state to fighting wars.
Thanks to this legend, almost-suburban scenes of passive women and children huddled by the campfire, waiting for the hunter males to return home to provide food and protection still linger in our media (and our minds).
That scenario is most likely a myth. Anthropologist Richard Potts, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, examined the assemblages of bones, tools, and rocks on which the "home base" theories were built. He argued that early humans did not dwell in one place for long periods of time, because the remains of large carnivores were found along with the human remains; obviously, humans would not have willingly hung around in the presence of these other carnivores.
And there is growing evidence that women did indeed hunt in prehistory. Anthropologists find that nets were used to capture Ice Age hares, whose remains are plentiful from the Paleolithic era. Many such sites are strewn with the bones of small animals and birds, and some of the bone-tools found resemble net-spacers (used for tying nets).
“This is not the image we’ve always had of Upper Paleolithic macho guys out killing animals up close and personal. Net hunting is communal, and it involves the labor of children and women,” says Olga Soffer, a University of Illinois archeologist.
Inuit women carried bows and arrows, especially blunt arrows designed for hunting birds. Women were a critical source of the food supply throughout our early history, not only by foraging, but through hunting, setting traps, taking part in communal hunts, and sometimes hunting with what were thought to be male-only tools.
And female aggression is a part of evolution as well. In The Woman That Never Evolved, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes that females seek dominance to protect their genetic legacy just as men do. She debunks myths that exaggerate “woman's natural innocence from lust for power, her cooperativeness and solidarity with other women.” Females in many species compete as avidly as males, she reports. And we are finding evidence that women fought more often than we thought.
In 2020, scientists were surprised when they re-examined what they had thought were skeletons of young male warriors. They were in fact women: “Scientists have found physical evidence that female warriors once rode across the steppes of what is now Mongolia, wielding bows, arrows and other weapons that left traces of physical exertion on their bones.” Mulan, the female warrior of the Disney movie, may have been real. She is mentioned in historical texts.”
Today, for better or worse, war is no longer a contest of brute strength in which burly men have at each other with poleaxes. Military sociologist Mady Segal of the Center for Research on Military Organizations has studied women’s roles in the military. As she notes, “Computer technology, the miniaturization of weapons, and the development of air power are all part of the movement into the armed services.”
And a navy pilot says, “Pregnant aircrew who are not flying are still conducting squadron business. They're still instructing classes, working in simulators, giving briefings…It makes a big difference to be able to continue to represent ourselves professionally in a well-fitting uniform throughout a pregnancy."
None of this complexity was included in Tucker Carlson’s tirade. Also, he did not note that military jobs demand higher levels of technical skills than in the past. These conditions reflect social and demographic changes. Genes, Stone Age narratives, and cultural stereotypes fall by the wayside.
When all the extraneous theories are removed, we are left with the critical issues, which have nothing to do with “inherent” differences: the military's need for qualified troops and women's desire to serve. No comments from a TV personality who never served in the military will likely dissuade them.
One female pilot, “Charlie,” told Newsweek that not too long ago, women pilots were news. “Now people talk about you and you’re the fighter pilot—not the female fighter pilot, just the fighter pilot. We’re starting to be just one of the guys.”
