But conditions aren’t equal are they? Because men are conscripted and women aren’t. You seem to think I’m pro conscription, I’m not. I have also been on anti-war marches, and I am anti-conscription entirely.

My point here is that the situation hasn’t occurred to you, or to other people as a feminist issue - because it doesn’t directly affect the lives of women in a negative way. Trying to get you to see it in any other lens than ‘how does this affect women?’ is proving difficult. This is the same problem women face with men on issues like public safety on transport etc.

You have chosen to centre the entire discussion around the rights of women, the danger to women, and the lack of benefit to women if they were conscripted… but you haven’t addressed it as an issue based in equality of the freedom to avoid military servitude based on sex characteristics alone. You haven’t seen it as a benefit granted by sex, or if you have then it’s one you’re prepared to defend to the hilt.

The lack of outcry when half of Ukraine was conscripted was interesting given how almost everything is now given scrutiny through the lens of gender fairness.. I suspect if war breaks out and it happened here in the U.K., there’d be the same public response. I’m sure it would. There are men who see it as their duty to protect women and children - something seen as patronising and patriarchal in other aspects of modern society. Those same attitudes create the ‘poor little woman, I must help her’ mentality that provokes ridicule…. But there weren’t international feminist voices calling out the lack of fairness in Ukraine…. And that’s difficult as the article highlights. I have three female Ukrainian refugee friends who l love dearly, but they are all in their twenties, all fit as a fiddle and evacuated here to London where they have got jobs, integrated well and are having a good time (enjoying London as best they can under the circumstances) - two of them have boyfriends, same age, same background, same level of qualification both were conscripted.

You can be anti-war, we both are, you can be anti-rape, we both are…. But being tacitly fine with one half a country being called up to war because they have a penis as the only requirement is not feminist. You can only really have two positions on this - nobody should be conscripted (my position) or everyone should be conscripted (Norway/Israel’s position). That is because both of these options are based on equal starting point. Have women only battalions, train them separately but don’t wave through anti-feminist legal positions because it favours women. That’s the Schrödinger’s feminist position.