Sending in the Marines (to Recruit Women)
April 21st, 2008Via: New York Times:
THE Marines are looking for a few good women.
Actually, they will take as many as they can get. Faced with the difficulty of recruiting during a long and unpopular war, the United States Marine Corps has started marketing itself to women in a concerted way for the first time. It is running ads in magazines like Shape, Self and Fitness, which appeal mainly to female readers, as well as through more mainstream outlets like “American Idol,” where the message is a unisex one of patriotism rather than macho swagger.
The Marine Corps still runs its traditional ads — during National Basketball Association and National Hockey League games, and in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Men’s Fitness — often showing male recruits parachuting from airplanes, wielding big guns, driving heavy tanks and stampeding across the ground.
But now it is also showing a softer side. In the latest campaign, a print ad shows a female marine striking a martial arts pose in front of a crowd of men who are looking up to her as their leader. The tag line: “There are no female marines. Only marines.”
Related: How About Pink T-Shirts?
This is rich.
Women aren’t wanted in the military – at least it seems to me – especially in Iraq- unless some feller wants a forced poke at an orifice.
Sure, they’ll take as many as they can get.
I don’t think it matters whether male or female. When these adds stop providing cannon fodder for the war machine, can you spell DRAFT?
The U.S. already has a draft working visa vie its STOP LOSS program. Yea, any day now, i look for the Bush or Cheney to pull the plug on the pretension.
We need fresh meat to fight our never ending crusade of self delusion.
No thanks…not only do I not want to become cannon fodder, I’m really not interested in getting raped by my co-workers.
My smart cousin from working class background joined the Air Force for college benefits, even though we all recommended that she shouldn’t and offered tuition help. She got a top score on the ASVAB and they told her she’d go to NASA in Florida, but we doubted this. She ended up lasting one day in boot camp before onset of an unexplained health breakdown involving 3 weeks of hospitalization then a full discharge: her lung capacity went to 30%, they wanted to remove her gallbladder then decided that wasn’t the problem. They never diagnosed what disease she had caught in the first week there. In the military hospital they allow one book and no TV news or newspapers so we had to mail clippings in letters.