Wik
First Post
Never, ever, EVER, use "its" to describe a human being.
Have whatever opinions you want, because you have the right to do that. But calling another human being "it"? That says less about them and everything about you.
D&D 5E 5e's new gender policy - is it attracting new players?
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Never, ever, EVER, use "its" to describe a human being.
Have whatever opinions you want, because you have the right to do that. But calling another human being "it"? That says less about them and everything about you.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Have you taken a look at the Viking Norse? The women (some of them, anyway) tended to fight alongside the men there, if the records are to be trusted, and a few became leaders. It's not very clear, however, whether the female leaders and warriors were the same actual individuals.
Lanefan
TheCosmicKid
Hero
I've run into somebody whose preferred pronoun was "it". Yes, usually it's very definitely not preferred, but maybe don't presume to speak in such absolutes on behalf of other people.
Ignorance of etiquette != "openly hostile". There was far, far more hostility in Wik's post.
I can't tell whether you are misunderstanding how statistics work, or shifting the goalposts wildly.
Even if we grant without any argument all of the usual claims people make about why men are on-average better at combat, and ignore all of the counterarguments...
The vast majority of people are solidly within the overlap of the ranges. If you think of the tallest, fastest, and strongest people you have ever met, there is almost certainly (>99%) a woman out there who is taller than the tallest man you've met, or faster than the fastest man you've met, or stronger than the strongest man you've ever met.
Furthermore, training and skill dominate in most combat. Sure, if you're fighting someone who weighs half what you do, has muscles atrophied from spending months in a coma, and has severe asthma, you have a pretty good chance even if they're more skilled than you are. But for more realistic comparisons? Skill trumps the usual range of variance you see between people in terms of height, reach, strength, or whatever else. Solidly.
So:
1. A completely average strength/height woman with years of training will utterly dominate men with under a year of training in combat.
2. An above-average woman will be stronger and faster than average men.
If you select the most effective combatants from a population which at least allows women to be trained combatants, you might well find that the majority of the best are male... But it is not at all reasonable to assume that they will all be male. That is not how population statistics work! And it really comes across as though you are consistently comparing merely-average women to a highly-selective sample of above-average men, and that's not actually particularly interesting.
You might argue that a really skilled woman is only going to be able to reliably beat about 95% of men, and 98% of other women. So what? >90% is still pretty solid, and no one wins every fight every time; skill and natural talent only get you so far, luck is always a factor, and that is why people tend to travel with friends.
In short, if you want to write a woman who's a good fighter, do it, and it will be significantly more realistic than your current stance, which is biased heavily towards insisting that only things which are commonplace can happen.
This is a good point, I know one such person, but I am pretty sure I've never seen anyone who preferred "his/her/its".
I wouldn't agree that it was more hostility, honestly. And I would say that failure to learn even the most basic and obvious rules of etiquette is a kind of negligence which expresses contempt. It is not hard at all to find any number of sources that will tell you that it is nearly always exceptionally rude to refer to humans as "it", and that this is particularly commonly done by transphobic people when talking about trans people. There's no way I could believe that someone made any effort at all to avoid giving offense and ended up there, and failure to make any effort at all to avoid giving offense, when the topic under discussion includes repeated assertions that many people give offense, strikes me as a declaration of willful hostility.
There's a reason that people talk about things like "dehumanizing", and failure to even make the effort to avoid doing so is pretty insulting in and of itself.
There are historical examples among the Celts, medieval Europeans, China, India, Persia, Arabia, Khmer, Dahomey, Vietnam, native America, Hispania, the Bulgars, and many, many others. They're not difficult to find. Add the fictional and mythological ones - we are talking about a game with fictional and mythological aspects - and there's even more.
TheCosmicKid
Hero
I've heavily researched the Norse. It is a mixed bag. They talk of Viking Shiedmaidens. The Norse seemed to allow females to engage in warfare. They have found tombs of females buried with weapons. Unfortunately being buried with weapons does not necessarily mean you were a warrior. If you were a great leader, they would lay weapons in your tomb as a show of loyalty in the afterlife.
They do have some women warriors in their myths like Lagertha and Brynhildr. I believe it was Lagertha that killed her husband Ragnar. The Vikings show seems to be based on their legend. There are some accounts by foreign historians noting women fighting with the Viking men, but not in great number. I imagine there had to be a few Brienne's of Tarth among the Vikings. I've seen some of their women doing feats of strength that make me go, "What the hell?" I would not be surprised if there were not some crazy strong Scandinavian women. Those women were not attractive. Sadly, even writers often have to write a female character as physically attractive to attract commercial success. I could throw commercial interests to the side and make her some big woman of relatively average attractiveness and not care what readers might think. I might do that. I also find myself not enjoying writing a female character as a main character I don't find physically attractive. It's hard to put aside that personal bias.
It's so hard when as a heterosexual male you have the chance to create a fantasy woman, that you want to create one that isn't physically attractive as well as extraordinary physically and mentally. I consciously know I'm choosing to make her extremely physically attractive, while at the same time knowing that a woman with a beautiful face and womanly physique would not make the best warrior woman. A woman that could fight a man would be larger than a standard woman, more muscled and strong alike to man, probably have bigger hands and feet, and be built for enduring physical punishment like men are built for it. That's why Martin's Brienne of Tarth is more believable than so many warrior women I've read about. He chucks physically attractiveness out the window and makes her a huge girl that has the physical power and size necessary to compete with men on the field of battle. Those are traits male readers might not find attractive. Though when they cast Brienne of Tarth, Gwendolyn Christie is more attractive than Brienne is in the books, though I do love the casting.
I could make her like some of the Scandinavian dairy farmer women I've seen. Some of them are some strong women carrying 100 lb. metal milk urns two at a time like they're hauling flower baskets. Big, thick women with manly hands and a strength that would scare even me. I imagine more than a few women of that type took up arms in Scandinavia.
I wonder if female readers care how physically attractive the main characters are. Seems in romance novels for female readers, the men are made physically attractive as well as powerful. Twilight is a prime example of a female writer engaging in the same kind of fantasizing that men are accused of making two attractive males as the main love interests of the main character Bella, herself an attractive female being saved by the two main male characters. I wonder if the majority of female readers care about the attractiveness of the female characters in a work of fiction. Would they identify with some huge woman like Brienne? Though Martin does include the attractive Sand Snakes as female warriors as well and then there is the unearthly beautiful Daenerys and her Dragons. The strange concerns you must take into account when creating characters for a commercial work of fiction.
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Statistics are irrelevant in this discussion given there are zero statistics about the ancient world and females in single combat.
This is not true. Not true at all. The fact that you wrote this shows that you took no time to investigate. A man with under a year of training would dominate a woman in a fight with ten years plus of training due to the physical size/strength difference. For example, you could take an average height/strength man with under a year of training in hand to hand combat. Not casual training mind you, but not even the greatest training, and toss him in the ring with Rhonda Rousey, you would find the man had a good chance of winning based only on size and strength.
This is true even of men. You could take a tiny man with twenty years of training. Toss him in the ring with a guy with under a year of training that is physically stronger than he is and he will have problems with that guy. This has been demonstrated again and again.
This is also not true. I took the time to investigate women in the military competing against men in the same events over time. It was very rare for women to be able to compete with men in feats of strength. Look up the pull up as an example of the extreme differences in physical ability between men and women. There is currently an issue in the Marine where women are proving to have serious problems completing body weight pull ups equal to men. This is average women and average men.
http://archive.marinecorpstimes.com/article/20140703/NEWS/307030068/Marines-delay-female-pullup-requirement-again-time-until-end-2015
You really don't seem to accept the vast physical gulf between men and women. The difference is vast. As in the very best female warrior in the entire world would have trouble fighting even an average man with less training. Whereas she would have zero chance of competing against a top level male warrior.
She would not be able to beat 95% of men. You are wrong about that. It shows you've done no research on this subject. And don't understand how hard I've tried to find what you claim exists.
I could write some female warrior that can fight. If I were writing it realistically, she'd die the first few times she decided to enter into combat with males.
I even looked at female athletes. You know Venus and Serena Williams? The two best female tennis players in the world. Even they can't serve as hard as a unranked male tennis player because even an unranked male has more physical power than the best female tennis players in the world. I went this far during my research.
I looked up female weightlifters. The top level female weightlifters that use steroids and equipment are about 60% as strong as a male. That makes them not even as strong as an average male non-professional athlete that lifts weights. You could find High School male athletes that don't use roids or equipment that lift more weight. This is the best women weightlifters in the world.
If you are relying on realism, the best female warrior in history might survive a few fights with Joe Blow male soldier of average height-weight, maybe. She would be able to beat down men that didn't train at all. Soon as she ran into even a moderately above average male warrior of even moderately above average size, she is likely to die. Do you think that is an easy thing to write in an realistic manner? it isn't. Do you think that female warrior would make for an interesting key character? It doesn't. No one wants to read about a female warrior getting her ass kicked. The best way to do it is throw out the realism as so many writers do. I'm trying to find a happy medium.
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