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LES ECHOS

Women In Submarines? Cue That Sinking Feeling

The French navy has announced it will allow women to work in submarines starting in 2017. A Le Temps columnist contemplates whether that takes gender equality too far.

French women will be able to work in submarines.
French women will be able to work in submarines.
Rinny Gremaud

-Essay-

GENEVA — The French navy has announced that it will allow women to work in submarines starting in 2017. Goodness, I thought to myself when I heard, are they all losing their minds? You can’t confine a woman with a hundred crewmen nonstop for more than two months.

In nuclear subs, a routine exercise usually lasts 10 months. And where can you feel more locked up than in this closed-door machine? To understand this, you just have to watch The Hunt for Red October, K-19: The Widowmaker or Crimson Tide.

What kind of woman — enraged, gullible or perverse — would want to expose herself to such a situation? We don’t want to admit it, but isn’t there a natural limit to gender equality?

And then I stopped for a moment to think about my opinions. Because what came to my mind at first was how men are all like animals in breeding season, slaves of their sexual organs and incapable of behaving correctly with a woman in the professional field.

The worst is not that certain men think this is the truth and even say it loud and clear. The worst is that I am so consumed with common preconceptions that I can’t move beyond them. I hear “women in submarines” and suddenly think about the risk of them being sexually assaulted.

As if every woman was doomed to disturb any group of men unintentionally. As if men behind closed doors never stirred each other. And as if submarines were not ranked and extremely codified places, where social control is intense.

I remember when I was young, I spent a month alone on a container ship between Europe and Asia. It had nothing to do with a nuclear submarine — but still. I found out that the merchant navy is actually a respectful environment of individuals.

Women have been working there for years and make up almost 25% of the staff in some shipping companies. But they are never transferred in oil tankers, as I was told one day. Why? Because oil tankers make few stopovers. Meaning: When the tanker stops, the crewmen can pay other women to relieve their stress.

The sailors and submariners’ life is quite strange. In movies, these characters are so romantic. But in real life, I am always wondering what type of person would do this job. And by “type” I also mean “gender.”

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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