: Gynocentric societies throughout history have controlled men’s bodies and forced them into the horrors of war. A leading twelfth-century Byzantine intellectual expressed poetically the gynocentric sense of males being intended from birth to bleed in battle:
The newborn baby is of the male gender; male, O earth and sun! Did you see him right away as he slid out, full of blood and tainted by gore as if coming from war and battle? [1]Overcoming gynocentrism and achieving gender equality in military service requires recognizing that men aren’t naturally destined to labor to provide goods for women and children and to fight and die in wars. According to a declamation of the sixth-century public speaker Choricius of Gaza, the Trojan king Priam long ago affirmed that women’s nature is no obstacle to Amazons and other women dying in battle just like men.





