{"id":6220,"date":"2014-09-03T01:33:09","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T05:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6220"},"modified":"2014-09-03T01:35:42","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T05:35:42","slug":"reality-is-viciously-sexist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6220","title":{"rendered":"Reality is viciously sexist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/blogs\/2014\/09\/female-viking-warriors-proof-swords\">Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female<\/a> insists an article at tor.com.  It&#8217;s complete bullshit.<\/p>\n<p>What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn&#8217;t say what the article claims.  What it establishes is that a hair less than half of Viking <em>migrants<\/em> were female, which is no surprise to anyone who&#8217;s been paying attention.  The leap from that to &#8220;half the warriors were female&#8221; is unjustified and quite large.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a deeper problem the article is trying to ignore or gaslight out of existence: reality is, at least where pre-gunpowder weapons are involved, viciously sexist.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It happens that I know a whole lot from direct experience about fighting and training with contact weapons &#8211; knives, swords, and polearms in particular.  I do this for fun, and I do it in training environments that include women among the fighters.<\/p>\n<p>I also know a good deal about Viking archeology &#8211; and my wife, an expert on Viking and late Iron Age costume who corresponds on equal terms with specialist historians, may know more than I do. (Persons new to the blog might wish to read my <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1185\">review<\/a> of William Short&#8217;s <cite>Viking Weapons and Combat<\/cite>.) We&#8217;ve both read saga literature.  We both have more than a passing acquaintance with the archeological and other evidence from other cultures historically reported to field women in combat, such as the Scythians, and have discussed it in depth.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m calling bullshit.  Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.<\/p>\n<p>Supporting this, there is only very scant archeological evidence for female warriors (burials with weapons). There is almost <em>no<\/em> such evidence from Viking cultures, and what little we have is disputed; the Scythians and earlier Germanics from the Migration period have substantially more burials that might have been warrior women.  Tellingly, they are almost always archers.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m excluding personal daggers for self-defense here and speaking of the battlefield contact weapons that go with the shieldmaidens of myth and legend.  I also acknowledge that a very few exceptionally able women can fight on equal terms with men. My circle of friends contains several such exceptional women; alas, this tells us nothing about woman as a class but much about how I select my friends. <\/p>\n<p>But it is a very few. And if a pre-industrial culture has chosen to train more than a tiny fraction of its women as shieldmaidens, it would have lost out to a culture that protected and used their reproductive capacity to birth more male warriors.  Brynhilde may be a sexy idea, but she&#8217;s a bioenergetic gamble that is near certain to be a net waste.<\/p>\n<p>Firearms changes all this, of course &#8211; some of the physiological differences that make them inferior with contact weapons are actual advantages at shooting (again I speak from experience, as I teach women to shoot).  So much so that anyone who wants to suppress personal firearams is objectively anti-female and automatically oppressive of women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It&#8217;s complete bullshit. What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn&#8217;t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6220\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Reality is viciously sexist<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-martial-arts","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6220"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6225,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6220\/revisions\/6225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}