WHAT IT TAKES TO WRITE MILITARY HISTORY:

Just as one shouldn’t have to be gay to write a history of gay Americans or a woman to do women’s history, he argued, “if you think personal experience is an essential criterion for doing history, then you invalidate any inquiry into a period before your own life experience.” He called for an end to such arguments, lest historians be reduced to memoirists.

Illustrating his point, O’Connell detailed a conversation he’d had with Harvard University Press leading up to the publication of Underdogs in 2012. Whereas he’d clearly indicated that he was a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve inside the book, he said, the press wanted that biographical detail on the outside, ostensibly to sell more copies.

Well, these days the ability of men to write about feminism, and straights to write about gays, is sharply limited by identity politics.