11 thoughts on “Manning Submarines”

  2. Notice how the NYT is careful, when quoting a representative of the opposing point of view, to find someone who sounds like a Neanderthal:

    Chief Petty Officer Doug Wilson disagrees….”I went to submarines to get a breather from my wife and her mother. Especially her mother. Now I have to spend 60 days underwater with women? You know how long they take in the bathroom.”

    Ha ha! See? Imagining there might be practical and reasonable reasons for a single-sex institution is merely the vaporings of knuckle-draggers stuck in the 1950s…er, oops, except of course for female-only gyms and colleges…anyone who would object to those is some kind of fascist and probably a peeping Tom to boot.

  6. Geez, B cubed, speaking of Neanderthals, the Times could have quoted you.

    Seriously, I’d punch you out if you suggested my daughter would fire nuclear Armageddon on the world just because she was feeling bitchy, a little bloated down there, had a blinding headache…or was being threatened with bodily harm if she did not.

    Our women do not lack in guts or judgment, friend. But only a dreamy-headed naif would ignore the sexual dynamite the fuse of which you light by shoving 100 fit, healthy, hormone-crazed, mostly single boys ‘n’ girls in their early 20s into the equivalent of being marooned on a desert island for two months.

    Maybe New York Times reporters are neutered when they join up, to help them keep the proper neutral gray viewpoint, so this point escapes them. No, that can’t be right, because it doesn’t explain their passion for a certain type of political fellatio. It must be they revert to the behaviour of female chimps in a primate band: they’re perfectly asexual in dealing with each other, or beta males, but they positively hunger to be mounted by the obama — oops, er, alpha male.

  7. Yet another stupid PC, let’s “feel” good about ourselves idea. Call me old fashioned, but women do not belong on ships, unless it’s an all female crew.

    In the early ’80s I spent a month working TAD on a tender in Norfolk that had a “mixed crew” as they called it then. 800 guys spent half their time trying to cozy up to the 50 or 60 females and I saw two fights, over females. On the tender I was stationed on, one of the guys from the P&D Office struck up with one of the female dept heads. They got married, without consent, when she got pregnant and they transferred her to Japan. The whole thing just caused a bunch of trouble in the office.

    My son is career Navy. He says this kind of crap goes on all the time now.

    A ship, even a bird farm, is too small a community, with too important a mission, to willfully add that element of distraction into. Yes, I’m a neanderthal, but I’m honest about it.

    Just for the record, I think Don’t ask, Don’t tell is a stupid system too. There were gay guys at every command I was ever attached to. I’m sure that there were some who went undetected also. But I never heard anyone say a word about it. It was a null topic.

  8. I find the idea of an all-female sub intriguing. The problem as I see it though is that you need to train them. That means a mixed crew at some point.

    The jokes write themselves here. I was about to write the phrase “since the experienced hands were male” above, but something wasn’t quite right.

  9. Dang, guys… read the article carefully. Note the date.

    Or at least look at what categories Rand chose to file this under.

  11. Note the date? Are you kidding me? Didn’t anyone besides me notice that the “New York Times” website had relocated to http://www.subsim.com and that it was written by “Seymor Conch”??

    I think the best part though were the related coverage and suggested news alerts at the bottom:

    Past Coverage
    Submarine crackdown (March 29, 2008)
    Lipstick and periscopes; “The two don’t mix” (March 28, 1960)
    Bush takes on the terrorists with computer game (April 1, 2005
    USS Princess Diana – the Navy in uproar (April 1, 2006)

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