With the news coming out today that the sole remaining female Marine has dropped out of the Infantry Officer’s Course (CNN, Marine Corps Times*) it seems like a good time to look into why women in the military are having so much trouble meeting physical fitness requirements. According to the CNN video below from January of 2014, the reason women lack upper body strength is women aren’t taught how to do pull ups. Here is the relevant exchange between CNN Anchor Don Lemon and CNN Pentagon correspondent Chris Lawrence:
Chris Lawrence: What they’re gonna do now, is… looking at better ways to train women to do these push-ups [sic]. There is a feeling that from the time they are girls, girls don’t do push-ups, even women who workout religiously and are very physically fit are not working those kind of muscles and trying to build up that bigger upper body by doing pull-ups. So, what they want to do is go in and really teach women better ways to train to do this particular exercise.
Don Lemon: Yeah, working the upper body that’s a guy thing, right? And I mean, guys you see at the gym with skinny legs, big upper bodies.
Chris Lawrence: It’s the beach muscles. It’s the beach workout.
Here is the video, starting with the exchange between Lemon and Lawrence:
All of this is of course a smokescreen in an effort to pretend that standards aren’t being lowered in the process of further integrating the armed forces. Something has to give, and even if we have a Republican in the white house next year the Obama administration’s decision to open all combat roles to women won’t be rolled back. Part of being conservative means conserving feminist progress, so the only question now is how fast and how far the standards will be lowered in order to finally complete the construction of our new feminist military.
*H/T The Question
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