ITEM Imagine: Music is playng on your car radio. An announcer’s voice interrupts: "We have a special bulletin from the president" (For some reason, you decide not to switch stations.) The president announces. "Since 1.2 million American men have been killed m war. as part of my new program for equality, we will draft only women until 1.2 million American women have been killed in war."
In post offices throughout the United States, Selective Service posters remind men that only they must register for the draft: "A Man’s Gotta EX) What a Man’s Gotta Do." If the post office had a poster saying "A Jew’s Gotta Do What a Jew’s Gotta Do". . Or if "A Woman’s Gotta Do. . ." were written across the body of a pregnant woman. . .
The question is this. How is it that if any other group were singled out to register for the draft based merely on its characteristics at birth — be that group blacks, Jews, women, or gay-s — we would immediately recognize it as genocide, but when men are singled out based on their sex at birth, men call it power?
The single biggest barrier to getting men to look within is that what any other group would call powerlessness, men have been taught to call power. We don’t call male-killing sexism; we call it glory. We don’t call the one million men who were killed or maimed in one battle in World War I (the Battle of the Somme2) a holocaust, we call it serving the country. We don’t call those who selected men to die murderers. We call them voters.
Our slogan for women is "A Woman’s Body, A Woman’s Choice"; our slogan for men is "A Man’s Gotta Do What a Man’s Gotta Do.”