Women-Only Airsoft Teams: A Good Social Experiment?

By: Sherry Rashad

If you ask me, the idea of a female-only Airsoft club has already been out of the bottle - and has been painting the town red - for some time now. The concept was probably bolstered when Spain's Defense Minister Carme Chacon spoke to the press about Spain's armed forces adopting a more female-friendly redesign of military uniforms worn by women who serve in the Spanish armed forces back in September 4, 2008. Though it might seem odd to make the event press-worthy given that women have been an integral part of the world's armed forces for a better part of the 20th Century. Until you find out that the Spanish armed forces did not begin to admit women recruits until 1988. Thus female-friendly military uniforms being adopted by the Spanish military would be perceived as a Civil Rights victory for gender equality for Spain in the eyes of the increasingly progressive West.

As the spiritual home of chauvinism - based on everyone's perception of Spain's centuries-old somewhat Papist-leaning culture - this could be viewed as the Spanish nations most progressive Civil Rights movement to tackle gender bias in the workplace. It wasn't that long ago that a Spanish Civil War-era feminist movement called Mujeres Libres - or the Anarchist Women's Movement to us here in the English-speaking world was deemed to radical for the Franco-ruled Spain. Thus the "anarchist" tag of the Spanish gender equality movement.

In societies where the "Mother Tongue" requires a very gender specific grammatical structure, feminism will always be deemed as a radical political movement. Look at the current list of assassination victims of human rights advocates in Russia, don't you find it just a little bit odd that almost all of them were women. Maybe women are deemed to "dangerous" when it comes to revolutionary struggles, thus making a women-only Airsoft team not only an interesting and novel pastime, but also makes for very interesting warfare simulation scenarios as well.