In the last year of the Korean War, when the old What’s My Line? game show was signing off, the panelists did something that seems inconceivable now. They always signed off by saying goodnight, one to the next, beginning with whoever was first on the left on the panel, usually the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, and ending with the moderator John Daly wishing goodnight to the audience and thanking them and all the viewers. The show’s time slot was 10:30 PM EST on Sunday, so plenty of people would, in fact, be going to bed soon after. But at some time in 1953, Arlene Francis, one of the regulars on the panel, added, with a big and heartfelt smile, “And goodnight, boys,” meaning the boys in uniform overseas. That caught on with the other panelists, as they remembered, with gratitude, the boys who had left their homes to serve in the army, and especially those who would see action. She really did mean “boys,” too, not “boys and girls,” and her use of the word “boys” was affectionate and grateful.

After all, it hadn’t been a decade since other American boys fought in Europe, Africa, and Asia against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan and their allies. Roughly 250,000 to 400,000 American soldiers died in World War II at a time when we had but half the population we have now. The whole nation followed the events of the war—in the papers, on the radio, in newsreels, and from stories told by the millions—because everybody knew boys who were there. At my old church in Rhode Island, a large memorial bears the names of all the parishioners who died in that war. There were plenty and you could tell which family’s losses were especially severe. Yes, people wanted the boys in Korea to come home safe and sound, and their hearts were with them.

It’s a long time since, and we have gone insane about men and women, boys and girls. The madness has set down roots in the military too, with a plan to “draft our daughters,” as its proponents proudly put it, on the horizon. It is mad, and every man knows it is, but social pressure—and in some cases self-interest—keeps many from uttering a word about it. Women athletes themselves have of late been compelled to face the truth, that they cannot compete against men even in sports like track that do not put a premium on brute strength. Whenever strength does come into play, all bets are off. People with heavier bodies naturally exert more force than people with lighter bodies do. Reality is not a track meet. Women overmatched by teenage boys on the track are grossly overmatched by men on the battlefield. For all practical and large-scale purposes, there is no overlap, not when you have healthy young men whipped into the best physical shape in their lives; and the draft is for the average and not the exceptional, to bolster large numbers in the infantry, not for specialized jobs.

The real question is why anyone would want to draft girls. I can puzzle it out in my mind, but my heart rebels. The conclusion seems unthinkable, but I cannot for the life of me come to another. There is no advantage on the battlefield. There is instead only a disadvantage that can mean death. If your son is badly wounded on the field, you had damned well better hope that the soldier next to him is not, so to speak, his sister, but his brother—someone who can carry him with all expedition. Since the boys must be there—you can have no army without them—it would seem that all considerations aside from victory should be aimed at their welfare; what would boost their morale, as Arlene and her friends aimed to do, what would clear their days of confusion or distractions, and what would best bind them to their fellows as a fighting force. But Arlene Francis was a grateful woman, and gratitude is not something the modern woman has been encouraged to cherish, not if it is meant for the other sex generally. And men have responded in kind. You cannot corrupt one sex without corrupting the other.

My conclusion: people who demand the draft for girls are pleased to see the boys put out. Rather than acknowledge reality, rather than be grateful for boyish aggressiveness and strength, they prefer to weave a fantasyland at the cost of the army’s purpose and the cost of lives both male and female. The young women would die as martyrs to the cause, and the young men would die from bad luck. Their deaths do not much matter.

I would be shy of this conclusion if it seemed to be an anomaly in an otherwise sane though fallen world. It is not. I will give an example from my church, the Roman Catholic. All my life, I have heard feminist Catholics cry that women should be ordained as priests. The results of this innovation in other Christian denominations are not promising. Take it all in all, such women do not inspire men in numbers that keep a congregation from withering, let alone that cause it to thrive. As for the boys, they get the impression that religion is a feminine thing, and this impression is not dependent on their politics, because they still may say, well-trained as they are, that women should be priests. But they have no intention of obeying such priests. Their souls are not stirred. We lose the boys, which means we lose the men they will become, which means that we lose their families. When I point this out, I never hear in reply that women priests would inspire boys with the fervent desire to fight for the faith. Instead, I meet indifference. It does not matter if they check out. Let them, if they want to.

This is a response I do not understand. But it is analogous to the indifference the boys receive in school—and the resistance against teaching them either the subjects or the works that would inspire them. I have not the space to get into the details here. I ask the reader to consider how different a history class might feel, for the boys, if it focused not on identity politics and typical narratives of oppression, wherein the boys must bear with shame the absurd and reality-detached accusation that their sex has always and only been miserable to the other, but rather on the considerable part of history that is made by armies, engineers, inventors, explorers, merchants, and pioneers: Pershing, Fulton, Westinghouse, Muir, Carnegie, and Daniel Boone, to name a few Americans. I wonder sometimes whether indifference is the right word to use. What about hostility? Let them fail in school. Let congregations die.

Ingratitude, as the poets and the theologians saw, is the deadliest form of pride. It stabs love to the heart. It is the inversion of a life of giving and receiving. Each sex should look upon the other as a sheer gift, responding, “How good it is that you exist!” When women demand to be soldiers—or rather when women in positions of power demand that girls be drafted along with the boys—they cannot possibly be thinking about the welfare of their brothers, or even about their brothers as such, because then they might have to acknowledge a gift. And that is something that the sexes in our time have been taught never to do, and unfortunately, this is especially the case with women. It is not, as some claim, that men do not acknowledge the gifts women bring. It is rather that such women do not even acknowledge that men have any gifts to bring at all, nor do they intend to benefit the men to whom they purport to bring gifts.

We are a world away from Arlene’s. She was a happily married woman who loved her husband and her sons dearly, and that moved her to say goodnight to those boys, who appreciated it in turn. It is not hard, really, to get a half-decent boy to want to move heaven and earth for a girl who praises him. Arlene—Mrs. Martin Gabel—was normal and healthy. We are not.