Should girls be allowed to play fighter characters

[Angcuru]

Hmm... There are two ways to look at this IMO, assuming that the question is for whether a female character can play a paladin and not the player.

A - The DM is running the game very close to most historical precedences, and trying to make it as historically accurate as possible(forgetting for a moment all the magic and different religions and suchlike). As such, society looks down harshly upon women who don't "stay in their place", and be mothers and housewives and such. Perhaps women are exclusively spellcasters because that doesn't necessarily put them in such a combat-oriented position, as spellcasters would mainly be support characters in such a setting. This is probably the only logical situation (or something similar) where this would not be a no girls allowed-type rule.

B - The DM was not himself at the moment of denial *insanity defense.


As for the position of real-life "Should women be allowed to be soldiers?" question, I find myself mirroring Celvatian's points. IMO, the only reason society as a basic functional machine needs so many men is to do the hard labor, kill off the other societies' men in battle, and keep the gene pool from stagnating. As we have seen in post-Women's Rights Movement, women are entirely capable of doing most anything a man can do , but the line seems to blur when it comes to the issue of life-and-death situations. Sure, women, given the same training as men, are fully capable of being soldiers, but that doesn't mean that they should/need to be.

I state right now that I have equal if not more respect for women as a gender as I do for men, but I am simply uncomfortable with the idea of women as land-based soldiers. Solely because of the physical danger they would be in. They are just as capable as men, maybe even more so, as women are generally more level-headed and quick-thinking than men, but that doesn't change the fact that they could be riddled with bullets or shredded by explosives during their time as soldiers. Men have been dying in battle for thousands upon thousands of years, and so humans are naturally psychologically accepting of this, but not so with women. The concept of a woman dying on the battlefield just seems...inherently abhorrent to me. Sorry if I seem a bit, I dunno...something, but that's the case. I believe it fitting to have the women be the technicians and tacticians/officers and such, making the tactical decisions and keeping the male fighters in order.

 

[Trainz]

Hot lil witch ?

*looks under rug*

...

*looks in cupboard*

...

Witch ?

...

Why do I have this sinking feeling that there's a lot of wasted 1's and 0's on a hard-disk somewhere ?

 

[BSF]

Endurance (definitely another aspect of "durability") by itself is not a factor of size, but once you start looking at endurance while carrying a particular load, it's a completely different matter. The 200lb 6' tall guy is going to be able to keep going with a 70lb pack a good deal longer than a 130lb woman.

When training is nearly equal, this is true.

Speaking as the high school distance runner that weighed in at 135 for quite a while, I will tell you that I could easily outpack many of the 6'+ 200+lb football players with a 70lb pack on my back. Not to knock on football players, but if you want to claim any sort of endurance, you have to train for it.

Still, what does this have to do with Fantasy? Let the player play any sort of PC he or she wants. If there is an in-game restriction on a PC gender/class combo, fine.

 

[rkanodia]

Still, what does this have to do with Fantasy? Let the player play any sort of PC he or she wants. If there is an in-game restriction on a PC gender/class combo, fine.

Am I the only one who sometimes finds it mildly disturbing, or at least suspension-of-disbelief undoing, when people play characters not of their own gender?

 

[Shadowdancer]

My dm says that girls can only play wizards and clerics and classes like that. I want to play a paladin, but he says that only guys can be paladins. Help is that true?

Nice icon. I've seen it somewhere before.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I've debated this many times, often wondering why in the past military leaders chose to withhold women from combat while sending men, even weak men, in droves to die. I've come to the conclusion that women were not withheld from combat for physical reasons, but for for societal and biological reasons.

1. They form the foundation for the home, including child rearing, more specifically breast feeding and the like. Making a social standard where women go to war is asking to dismantle the fabric of the family and home, which is in essence the child rearing mechanism of society.

2. Population replenishment. If women were killed in significant numbers, that would mean the death of the society. Just as killing all the men and taking the women as the spoils of war is the ultimate conquering and assimilation of another society. Sending the women to war is like asking your society to be destroyed.

It's simple biological math. A woman can reproduce a child roughly every 9 months. A man can fertilize an egg in a few minutes. Ten women and one man can produce 10 children in 9 months Ten men and one woman can produce 1 child in 9 months. Women are more valuable to the propagation of society, and wasting them in war would be a greivous error on the part of any population that wanted to continue its existence. All the other population would need to do is withhold their women, replenish their population, then fight again to beat a society that willingly and wantonly sent their women to war. To answer a question posed in the movie G.I. Jane, is a woman's life more important than a man's life? The answer to that question for human society is a definitive and irrefutable yes for any society that wants a long term existence.

While I agree with many of your points, I would like to point out that there are some real-world examples of societies allowing their women to be involved in front-line combat, and surviving.

The Soviet Union during World War II. When Germany invaded, it was whoever could do the job, get in there. Gender had no bearing. Women fought as infantry, drove tanks, flew fighter planes, whatever it took. There was a squadron of female only fighter pilots who flew night interceptors. The Germans hated them. There were sniper units that were all female, made up mostly of women from Siberia and other far eastern locales who grew up firing weapons, and could shoot better than many men. When the Russians started to push the German armies back, commando units were dropped behind enemy lines to coordinate attacks with partisan units. Many of these commando units had female members.

When Israel became a country, it's military had women in front-line combat roles as well. It is my understanding that women were later removed from front-line infantry roles (and maybe other front-line combat roles as well) not because they couldn't do the job as well as the men, but because the Israeli army learned that when the enemy knew they were facing units which contained women, it fought harder and to the death, not wanting to be "disgraced" by being defeated by a woman.

The U.S. Navy and Air Force now allows women to fly combat missions. Female pilots face the same risks of being shot down and killed during combat as male pilots do. They fly the same missions in Afghanistan and Iraq as the men.

While there may be sociological reasons for keeping women out of front-line combat roles, there are no arguments of physical limitations that have stood up to actual combat experience.

The problem is not that women can't do the same job as men if they have the same training, but that men are psychologically not ready to deal with the idea of women being killed in combat. Would the news media, the military and the country have made such a big deal out of Pvt. Jessica Lynch's rescue in Iraq if she had been a man? I don't think so.

 

[Dark Jezter]

When Israel became a country, it's military had women in front-line combat roles as well. It is my understanding that women were later removed from front-line infantry roles (and maybe other front-line combat roles as well) not because they couldn't do the job as well as the men, but because the Israeli army learned that when the enemy knew they were facing units which contained women, it fought harder and to the death, not wanting to be "disgraced" by being defeated by a woman.

Not true. The Israeli army removed women from front-line infantry positions because their research found that women were less physically-suited for the rigors of infantry life than men were.

The military study found that men could handle marches of 55 miles in length, while women had difficulty with distances over 32 miles. The difference was attributed to a 10% higher level of hemoglobin in men, which allows them to feed more oxygen to their muscles and aids in their ability to undertake extended physical activity.

The study also found that the average man could carry 55% of his body weight, while the average woman could only carry 40% of her body weight. This percentile difference combined with the fact that the average military-age woman weighs 33 pounds less than the average military-age man results in a 44-pound load difference when carrying equipment and supplies.

When the studies were concluded, the Isreali military made the decision to remove women from front-line infantry duties. Women were also barred from serving in tank crews, where each member of the crew must be capable of carrying out the loader's duties if needed. They may also be barred from serving in artillery crews or engineering units that deal with heavy equipment.

Women continue to serve in numerous other roles in the Isreali military such as pilots, navigators, naval officers, radar operators, intelligence officers, and light infantry units along peacetime borders.

 

[Snoweel]

Not sure if this post is authentic, but in case it is...

LOLOLOL!!!!!!!1!!1

I love this. "...but in case it is..." lolololololololol!!!!!1

Why are so many people just dying to believe crap like this is true?

I've got about half-a-dozen young, female .alts all over the net and it doesn't matter what random, inane rubbish I post (certainly as bad as Hot_Lil_Witch's shtick), the only boards who are ever fooled are the geek topic boards - supposedly the smartest people in the universe.

lol

 

[S'mon]

It's simple biological math. A woman can reproduce a child roughly every 9 months. A man can fertilize an egg in a few minutes. Ten women and one man can produce 10 children in 9 months Ten men and one woman can produce 1 child in 9 months. Women are more valuable to the propagation of society, and wasting them in war would be a greivous error on the part of any population that wanted to continue its existence.

I think this case tends to get heavily overstated when we're talking about essentially monogamous sedentary farming societies. Sure, one man _can_ fertilise 1000 women, but that's not what acually happens in any western society. I do think it's an important point when considering nomadic historically polygamous tribal societies such as the Mongols or Sioux (AFAIK) - in eg Mongol society the 'replenishment rate' of male warriors would be almost unaffected even if 95% of the men were killed in battle. Those are societies with low population densities compared to agricultural societies, where almost every male is expected to be a warrior. Sedentary-agricultural societies suffer far more often from overpopulation than from underpopulation*, and historically lose far more people from disease than war - I think it's almost unheard of for such to "run out of people" in the sense that women-are-too-valuable-to-risk arguments imply.

*Of course small military-elite castes in a larger agricultural population can indeed 'run out of people' - eg the Spartiatei of ancient Sparta, or the officer castes of the western powers in WW1. That's a separate issue though from a lack of available manpower in the population at large.

 

[S'mon]

I'm 99.99999% certain the original post was a troll, of course. I was only 99% certain the first time I read it, though. You never know...