Hectix777 said:
Colour Scientist said:
"Hairstyles shall not be outrageously multicoloured or faddish, to include shaved portions of the scalp (other than the neckline)"
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/navy/a/navygrooming_2.htm
Apparently they aren't allowed to shave their heads.
It also says that men are allowed to have hair up to 2 inches long.
Well not shaved hair, but crew cuts. The near equivalent to a shaved a head.
I can only speak from experience in the US Army but when you arrive at Basic Training, your head is shaved down to the scalp using clippers. This haircut is maintained by a haircut once a week which, because working for the Government is awesome, you get to pay for personally! Furthermore, while there does exist a generic regulation governing one's hair (it cannot touch the ears or collar and can be no longer than 2 inches on top) any person within your chain of command is free to place tighter restrictions. I've never encountered a commander willing to put up with someone with two inches of hair - that is, all told,
fairly long and, thanks to the constant use of hats when outdoors, forces a soldier to spend a great deal of time correcting their appearance upon transitioning indoors.
By contrast, Female soldiers could have hair of any length provided they were able to secure it in such a way that they could wear any headgear to regulation standard while simultaneously keeping it off the collar and ears. This lead to rather odd scenarios where you'd never notice just how long someone's hair was until you saw them off duty and noted they had hair well past the shoulder. As a personal experience, female soldiers were also rarely held to the exact lettering of the standard and so often there would be a soldier who had such a massive cluster of hair that their beret or patrol cap could not be worn such that it was parallel to the ground.
The question of if this is sexist is relatively easy to answer: yes. They are held to an arbitrarily lax grooming standard enforced for several thousand years for not only purposes of instilling discipline and all that nonsense but because of various health and safety concerns (parasites of all sorts, vulnerability in close combat, etc) with no justification given. They are simply allowed to keep very long hair for no other reason than they are female - all those other concerns still exist.
This is just one of many double standards in the military though. An 18 year old female soldier was only expected to be able to run as fast as a middle aged male. A run time that would achieve the maximum score on the PT test for a female would result in failure (by a wide margin) for an 18 year old male. Achieving the maximum score on the pushup would barely be a pass for a male. It was only in the situp event that there was any parity.
Other examples make more sense - for example, there are differences in uniform regulation across the board. On the Dress uniform, every accoutrement and decoration on a male's uniform was be placed
precisely - an inspection often involves the use of a ruler to determine if the standard has been met. By contrast, the same decorations on a female uniform simply must be eyeballed. This one at least makes a modicum of sense as the female form makes the use of consistent markings in the form of pockets and the like hard to use for judgement and the natural curves on the chest (where such decorations reside) make careful measurement irrelevant as different figures will result in decorations being carried and displayed differently.
Libra said:
Wait... so you guys 'essentially lost [y]our individuality as a person'? And people join the army voluntarily? My god...
This isn't unique to the military of any nation - a military unit must be a team in all things in order to succeed. Part of the long accepted (as in several thousand years of wide acceptance) practice of instilling this teamwork is a process of breaking a soldier down individually and building them as a collective. It should be noted that this is more or less the same process used for any serious team-building enterprise you'll ever encounter. Many of the tricks and techniques used by the military are employed in the sporting world.
