Norway's Radical Military Experiment

Norwegian Armed Forces gives us a 50/50 gender integration experiment involving...everything shared...including living quarters...
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The 50/50 division was key: with the men no longer in the majority, their behavior didn’t set the tone. All cavorting on base is banned, as are locker-room talk and pinup posters. The female soldiers interviewed by Hellum told her that for them, the cohort of women was positive. If there had been only a handful of females in the battalion, one of them told Hellum, “I would have had to become one of the boys.” When Hellum individually showed male and female troops pinup posters, their reaction was, “That would never be allowed here.” Hellum also observed less crude joking about women than she has seen in other Norwegian units; indeed, immigrants were more often the subjects of insensitive jokes. Among the men there was some joking about women, Gillebo told me, “but the girls sometimes joked about the boys, too.”