I am a member of the United States Marine Corps, one of the most meritocratic organizations in the world. From day one of boot camp, you are evaluated compared to your peers and judged accordingly by higher-ups who know what to look for. Sounds like utopia, right? Well, aside from the constant yelling that occurs when you screw up, it's pretty awesome. If you're a stellar person, you get rewarded with promotion and better treatment. If you're an idiot, you stay at that same rank and treated badly until you either leave or shape up.

Or, at least, this is how it used to be.

Unfortunately, like every other organization that prides itself on meritocracy, political correctness comes into play. The most blatant form is toward female Marines. Back in high school, (secondary school for those outside the US) I was slammed again and again with propaganda that said, "Women are just as capable as men and can do the exact same jobs just as well." Some feminist in some ivory tower wrote those words forty years ago, and they have been taken to heart by everyone. If You Think You Can, You Can. Since I had no actual experience of that being false, I kept my mouth shut and at least paid lip service to that idea. After all, if you don't believe that, you're a sexist misogynist pig. Who are you to say that a woman can't do X?

All that changed when I joined the military. I went to Parris Island, South Carolina for boot camp; there are four training battalions. 1st through 3rd are male, and 4th Bn is female. We used the same training apparatuses and equipment, for the most part. But there were definitely signs that there was a double standard. The most salient example was a certain obstacle on the Confidence Course, where you had to climb up a wall using a rope to pull yourself up. There were two walls, one with small ledges, the other one smooth. Since we were only going on the smooth wall, I asked the drill instructor why there were two of them.

"Oh, that one's for the females. They can't pull themselves up the rope, so they get ledges to push their legs off of."

Awesome.

I did gymnastics for seven years before joining the Corps; every female gymnast that I knew could do at least fifteen pull-ups and climb a rope without using their legs. But here I was, climbing a smooth wall with the Junior Version right next to me. I knew for a fact that females are at least capable of climbing a rope. Why is there a double standard?

I quickly forgot about it until I got stuck in combat training with about thirty female Marines. Combat training is four weeks of running around the woods of North Carolina with seventy-pound (around 30 kg if you're a wimp and use the metric system) packs, shooting all sorts of weapons and freezing out in bivouacs. Most of the time, we were hiking six miles a day or more going to different ranges. Guess who was falling out of the formations? Hint: they didn't have Y chromosomes. After all that propaganda from well-intentioned teachers, it was disturbing to see that no, Thinking You Can doesn't actually mean you can. If I were to fall out of a hike or a run, I would have been called a bitch and a pussy and asked if I needed the Waaaambulance to carry me. But these females were just shrugged at and told to catch up during the water breaks.

We pointed out this double standard to one of our combat instructors, who said, "Yeah, I hate females. They can't do shit. But I can't do anything about it because if I chewed one of them out, they'd go cry to the Equal Opportunity Officer and I'd get in trouble for not being sensitive enough."

And so it goes, on and down the line. The Marine Corps is a man's job. Can a female do a man's job? Definitely. Can most females do a man's job? Definitely not. I've met females who were built like brick shithouses and could probably eat bullets and shit gunpowder. But the vast majority of females just aren't cut out for the strain of constant physical labor. And that's fine, as long as they are evaluated accordingly. There are plenty of guys who can't do it, but their lives are miserable until they improve.

If you look at any formation of Marines on a run, and take a look at who's falling out the back and getting yelled at to keep up, that Marine is 7 times out of 10 going to be female, even though females consist of less than 10% of the Corps. Are there females who can keep up? Most definitely, and they are respected. But the vast majority of them are below average.

The response has been to lower the physical standard that females are held to in contrast for males. One of the keys to getting promoted is to have a high PFT (Physical Fitness Test) and a high CFT (Combat Fitness Test). The higher your scores at these two tests, the higher your composite score is. The higher your composite score, the more likely you are to get promoted. Meritocracy at work, right? Well, for the males, yes. But take a look at what the requirements of a male PFT are:

 

Max score: 300

• Pull-ups: 20 (minimum 3)

• Sit-ups: 100 (minimum 44)

• Three-mile run (slightly less than 5k): 18:00 (minimum 28:00)

• Now take a look at the requirements for a female PFT:

• Max score: 300

• Flexed-arm hang: 70 seconds (minimum 15 seconds)

• Sit-ups: 100 (minimum 50)

• Three-mile run: 21:00 (minimum 31:00)

I can run a 20:30 three-mile. Maxing out on my pull-ups and sit-ups, I get a 285.

Now, take a female and have her run a 21:30 three-mile. Even though I beat her by a minute, she gets a 297, making her score much better than mine. So even though she's less fit than I am, she's more likely to get promoted because her score is higher. Not to mention that pull-ups are far harder than a flexed arm hang.

It's even more ridiculous for the CFT, (you can look the requirements up if you want) but I've made my point - the standards are lower for females than males.

But God forbid that you point this out to a female Marine. "Our bodies are different." True, but our jobs are the same. Why are you held to different standards than us?

Answer: Because some do-gooder got mad that females weren't being promoted as fast, so he lowered the physical standard.

Sure, that gets females promoted faster. But it also creates a lot of resentment toward females who get promoted over males who are fitter. And it's not even their fault that people resent them; it's the system that lowers the bar for them. In the end, everyone loses. The Marine Corps gets less capable people in higher ranks, and females who actually are good are forced to prove again and again that they aren't garbage. This is the Marines - we're supposed to be an organization where a guy can embrace a complete stranger from the other side of the country and call him his brother, his comrade in arms. And thanks to this lowering of standards, the female Marines miss out on it; they're basically told, "I'm not going to respect you until you prove that you're not like the rest of them." Wow, that's a great atmosphere for people who are about to risk their lives together.

If you want an environment where everyone respects people for who they are, regardless of gender, then treat everyone the same. Equality means equality. You can't have it both ways; you can't just have equality when you feel like it. Either you commit fully to it with all of the responsibilities that doing so entails, or you choose not to commit and say that you want to be held to a lower standard.

Alas, most people who champion "equality" are actually trying to avoid responsibility. To them, "equality," or rather talking about equality, is a means to an end. Lots of people are looking for the easy way out. And what better way to do so than claim that you're entitled to it, that it's your right to have the easy way out? Most of the time, they succeed, and then they wonder why no one respects them.

Make up your mind.

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