Women of the Wars: Is VA is ready for surge of women vets?

[ismnotwasm]

This is an good newspaper article on Women vets;

"WASHINGTON – Two nightmares haunt Robin Milonas. While serving in Afghanistan in 2004 as an Army Reserve civil affairs officer, the Puyallup resident got lost in a minefield while leading a small convoy delivering school supplies to civilians.
Even more troubling is the memory of a man who arrived at the main gate of Bagram Air Base carrying a young boy whose leg had been blown off by a land mine.

“I was an outgoing, energetic, determined good soldier who wanted to make the Army a career,” said Milonas, a former lieutenant colonel. “Now I am broken.”

Last year, the VA treated more than 255,000 female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The number is expected to double within five years.

In some regions, the surge has already arrived. Over the past 10 years, the number of women treated at the VA’s hospital at Am erican Lake in Lakewood has risen 80 percent. The Seattle VA hospital has seen a 42 percent increase.

VA officials say they are better prepared to handle female patients than they were several years ago. But they acknowledge “continual challenges” as they move to open the door to a man’s world where pap smears and mammograms could become as common as prostate exams, and where “military sexual trauma” would be treated as a growing mental health problem, rather than as a subject to be avoided."
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/364246.html

[bliss_eternal]

1. Very interesting issues...

...addressed here. Thank you for linking this.

I'm loopy right now, but will return to comment more. :hi:

[Ellen Forradalom]

2. Isn't it curious that while more and more women

do heavy-duty traditionally male jobs, combat soldier being the most obvious example, there's a growing cultural trend towards coy femininity? Women combat veterans and the Sex and the City women couldn't be further apart. What a disconnect.

[ismnotwasm]

3. I think that's part of the disconnect

We see when defining sexism. I was looking through threads here and found that men and women sexism deniers don't seem to have a clue what sexism really is. Or its connection to misogyny. Woman who are damaged by patriarchy (which would be all women some more, some less) tend to grab the easiest definition of femininity available, embrace the bullshit rather than fight it or make their own rules. Those who try to be sexual mavericks (empowerment through fucking)don't seem to realize there is a large group of women of the been there done that and "that" didn't work either opinion. They're dismissive of or ignorant of, feminist history.

Sad really.