Womyn in combat...

(Tim, w/thanks to Scott) Our national president of shrews, Eleanor Smeal, sent an e-mail out earlier today exhorting her constituents to protest the don't ask, don't tell policy. She's desperate to see it repealed before the Republicans take over. Smeal made the point that this policy is a particular hardship to her sex because women comprise a disproportionate number of the 13,000 soldiers discharged for sodomy in the past sixteen years. (And yes, historically, "sodomy" includes copulation against the order of nature.)

Smeal reports that, in 2009, although women were only one seventh of Army soldiers, they were half of those discharged for the same-sex perversion. Similarly in the Air Force, although only one out of every five airmen was a woman, one out of two discharged was a woman. In the Navy, one out of every eight sailors was a woman...

while one out of every four discharged was a woman. And in the Marines, one out of every twenty Marines was a woman while one out of every four discharged for this perversion was a woman.

These stats seem to indicate something common sense would tell us: namely, military service has a unique appeal to lesbians. There could be other explanations. Officers might be more zealous to weed lesbians out of the service than gay men. Or maybe the segregation of the sexes causes women to turn to other women for physical intimacy when normally they would have turned to men? Likely, the explanation lies in a combination of factors. But I'm betting the most important one is that lesbians find the military more attractive than gay men do.