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Eh, the strength difference between men and women with the same general fitness level is really huge. And in any case they wouldn't be competing against goons but against similar peasant men. The argument about just having more people is a good one though, another one that works for the Scythians if they relied more on swarm tactics.
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Feb 5, 2023 09:12
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Weka posted:I think you're looking at it wrong. One man and one woman will more often beat one man. It's not a series of individual combats. Women could make a difference in combat even if for the sake of argument they were worse at it for whatever reason. Yeah this is probably the main thing. Local numerical superiority, logistics, equipment etc are all hugely important compared to how strong the actual bodies are. I don't think that changes if you're bashing people with sticks or running them over with tanks
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Feb 5, 2023 09:18
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Antonymous has issued a correction as of 11:27 on Feb 5, 2023 |
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Feb 5, 2023 11:25
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Weka posted:I think you're looking at it wrong. One man and one woman will more often beat one man. It's not a series of individual combats. Women could make a difference in combat even if for the sake of argument they were worse at it for whatever reason. army size was a serious limiting factor for campaigning until what, the late 15th century? you can't practically double the size of your force by adding women, or you'd just add more men. it would work for defense but it's not like any of these ancient or medieval societies had standing defensive armies to train women
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Feb 5, 2023 12:36
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I’m reading Herodotus for the first time and man, if you haven’t read it I highly recommend it. Just a ton of fun, a lot of goofy stories, anecdotes, asides. Some jokes. It’s like hanging out with this weird dude for hours on end— his personality really comes through.
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Feb 5, 2023 13:49
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indigi posted:army size was a serious limiting factor for campaigning until what, the late 15th century? you can't practically double the size of your force by adding women, or you'd just add more men. it would work for defense but it's not like any of these ancient or medieval societies had standing defensive armies to train women In medieval Europe, sure. But people in East Asia and I think the Americas were warring with armies in the hundreds of thousands.
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Feb 5, 2023 16:26
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pidan posted:Eh, the strength difference between men and women with the same general fitness level is really huge. And in any case they wouldn't be competing against goons but against similar peasant men. I don't think it's so much the strength as it is reproduction that's behind most settled societies taboo against women in the battlefield. However this goes out the window when the population has nothing left to loose like we see in Chinese peasant revolts where women children and old men were organized into squads of unarmed human shields to soak up arrows for the equally doomed men behind them. With nomads they don't have any fortified areas to protect anything, at least not in the summer, so I wonder women would be exposed to a lot more than even the camp followers in a European army who would rather circle the wagons than disperse and regroup like the nomads. War and Pieces has issued a correction as of 17:23 on Feb 5, 2023 |
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Feb 5, 2023 17:12
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ma i married a tuna posted:In medieval Europe, sure. But people in East Asia and I think the Americas were warring with armies in the hundreds of thousands. they'd still rather bring more men, the limiting factor wasn't "there are no more men to recruit"
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Feb 5, 2023 17:19
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The numbers I've seen for steppe burials of warriors say that they're something like 25% women. There's also a question with burials that we're previously detailed to science where the person inside was described as a man but not on any examination of the remains, just the archaeologist assuming that they were male because there were weapons inside and writing up the description as such. So I guess in a culture where everyone is raised to ride horses and hunt with bow and arrow, are the top 25% of women better archers and riders than the bottom 25% of men? I'd bet yes, but we won't know for sure until I find out if the History Channel likes my pitch and orders at least 13 episodes.
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Feb 5, 2023 17:58
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Frankly it's woke nonsense to suggest women were doing anything at all until the camera was invented
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Feb 5, 2023 18:14
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Slavvy posted:I'd argue edged weapons and spears make your strength irrelevant compared to skill, tactics and equipment. That being said maybe endurance comes into effect when it comes to large bodies of men/women in a pitched battle. yes and no. women beat men in HEMA all the time. But they will also say strength does factor in when you are talking about punching through armor, forcing through a bind, etc. its an advantage, just not the insane one some people think of when they get mad that a woman has a sword in a movie. its technically an advantage, but any theoretical egalitarian army could have addressed it by just having strength requirements to be in frontline spots or whatever. War and Pieces posted:I don't think it's so much the strength as it is reproduction that's behind most settled societies taboo against women in the battlefield. However this goes out the window when the population has nothing left to loose like we see in Chinese peasant revolts where women children and old men were organized into squads of unarmed human shields to soak up arrows for the equally doomed men behind them. this is one of the main issues. men are expendable, women are not. If 1/4 of your dudes get killed when a battle goes wrong, you can make more of them. When 1/4 of the women in your village die, you now have a population crisis. While large cities and agrarian societies had the populations to limit that problem, it is still a consideration and its an established taboo already. Steppe nomads fought mostly on horseback, so it was very unlikely that you would ever see mass death to begin with. The other thing is it is really just a manifestation of how gender was seen in most pre modern societies, with a few of them like the scythians as outliers. If you let the women fight you also have to start giving them other rights since now they have the means to address their inequality via violence. its a lot tougher to enforce arranged marriages on people when they are veteran warriors, and call up their friends who are the same.
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Feb 5, 2023 18:33
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I'm gonna be honest, the question of "so what's going on with the gendered division of labor" is one of those really tough, tricky questions with seemingly no bottom, and C-SPAM's attempt to figure it out via Joe Rogan level logic is not really impressing me.Azathoth posted:The numbers I've seen for steppe burials of warriors say that they're something like 25% women. There's also a question with burials that we're previously detailed to science where the person inside was described as a man but not on any examination of the remains, just the archaeologist assuming that they were male because there were weapons inside and writing up the description as such. There's also several layers of complication on top of that. The first is that physical remains are not gender, the second is that grave goods are not living goods. For the first part, one of the few things we can say about gender in the far past is that it was generally more diverse. 21st century gender norms are not that far off from Roman or Greek ideas because of self conscious decisions made by people who view those societies as their rightful and correct ancestors, but whenever I've read Hittite or Sumerian discussions of neighboring or subject peoples, it rapidly becomes clear that basically every group of like 1000 people speaking a sub-language of whatever local language had at least slightly different ideas about gender than everybody else. Hence why Hittite and Sumerian law is so frequently ungendered (up to and including Sumerian law allowing you to adopt women as your son for inheritance purposes). So its not unambiguous that a person with "this type of hip bones" who happened to fight was a "warrior-woman." Like for a very recent example, see "sworn virgins," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sworn_virgins, which is functionally its own gender but English sources are generally quite consistent about describing them as "women with a special legal status" which just makes it harder to talk about people whose gender role and expression are quite specifically "not woman." This is a failing of 20th and 21st century English speakers to understand the people they're describing. Second, grave goods are just that: grave goods. A woman I know was buried in Yankees memorabilia. You and I know well enough that she wasn't a member of the NY Yankees, she was not even especially athletic. But I could imagine some archaeologist centuries from now finding her remains and saying that this is evidence that women played baseball at high levels so long as they were members of the Jeter clan (after all, why else would she be buried in a jersey with a famous last name on it?). We've found Norse graves with arabic coins and buddhist statues. This doesn't mean that the person buried with those was familiar with how to read arabic, or was a devout buddhist. They could have been, but the grave goods don't confirm that at all. In ancient Egypt, people are frequently buried with Ushabti, and fortunately we have enough literary sources to know that ushabti are specifically intended for burial, they are substitutes for human sacrifice and symbolic markers of how the person should have servants in the afterlife, not an indication that the person was a fan of playing with dolls while they were alive. So, similarly, somebody being buried with a bunch of weapons doesn't mean they used those in life. They could have simply been an enthusiast (how many gun nuts do you think plan to be buried with a gun they've never had to use in combat?), or the weapons could just be abstract markers of prestige, or the buried person could be a weaponsmith or bowyer and they're buried with some of the things they made, or maybe they were popular among warriors who contributed their weapons as signs of love/devotion during the funerary process, or any of a number of things that really, really need some literary sources explaining the context of the funerary rights in order to say with any confidence. Anyway I think this is cool I just also think its very easy to be way, way too confident about.
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Feb 5, 2023 18:40
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If we wanted to talk about this stuff for real we'd all be draining in student debt from grad school
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Feb 5, 2023 19:33
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War and Pieces posted:If we wanted to talk about this stuff for real we'd all be draining in student debt from grad school I think at least half of us are lol
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Feb 5, 2023 19:39
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I
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Feb 5, 2023 19:40
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WoodrowSkillson posted:yes and no. women beat men in HEMA all the time. hema is a completely fake thing made up by dorks
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Feb 5, 2023 20:30
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i just googled hema and that is a very embarrassing hobby. at least it's exercise?
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Feb 5, 2023 21:00
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if i already have the suit of armor and the bardiche whats wrong with fooling around with my bros with both still mad that they wont let me be historically accurate and use it as a musket fork though, cowards
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Feb 5, 2023 21:08
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Malleum posted:if i already have the suit of armor and the bardiche whats wrong with fooling around with my bros with both nothings wrong with it it just means you're a fuckin dork bigtime
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Feb 5, 2023 21:13
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Heaven forbid the ancient history thread have dorks within
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Feb 5, 2023 21:30
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Tulip posted:Anyway I think this is cool I just also think its very easy to be way, way too confident about. This is a really good post, as are some of the others. This is just an area where it's really easy to see what you want to see, whether that's tradcath gender roles everywhere or an infinite rainbow of transgender people and warrior women in every place other than 19th century England.
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Feb 5, 2023 22:04
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maybe its u refusing to see the obvious truth lol
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Feb 5, 2023 22:34
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Love that European historical armor reanactors are just tubby nerds but Chinese historical armor reactors are fit patriot who go to the same parks as the vaguely anti-CCP martial arts and tai chi people to show their support for the Chinese state by passive-aggressively reinacting next to them.
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Feb 5, 2023 22:59
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the chad three kingdoms reenactor vs the virgin falun gong tai chier
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Feb 5, 2023 23:19
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Tulip posted:I'm gonna be honest, the question of "so what's going on with the gendered division of labor" is one of those really tough, tricky questions with seemingly no bottom, and C-SPAM's attempt to figure it out via Joe Rogan level logic is not really impressing me. A female chimp would absolutely destroy me in matched combat
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Feb 5, 2023 23:59
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I can see Historical Chimpanzee Martial Arts becoming a thing among a subsection of Joe Rogan's fanbase.
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Feb 6, 2023 06:21
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you all do realize that chimpanzees with martial arts training would be literally unstoppable?
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Feb 6, 2023 11:39
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They'd probably rule the earth. And I imagine it would be called Planet of the Chimps.
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Feb 6, 2023 11:48
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Cerebral Bore posted:you all do realize that chimpanzees with martial arts training would be literally unstoppable? Wait until you see my orangutan with a gun
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Feb 6, 2023 12:50
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That's not what I call my penis btw
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Feb 6, 2023 12:50
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JesustheDarkLord posted:That's not what I call my penis btw makes sense that it wouldn't qualify as a great ape
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Feb 6, 2023 12:53
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Tulip posted:Anyway I think this is cool I just also think its very easy to be way, way too confident about. In the case of the Scythians we have near contemporaries reporting they had female warriors as well. indigi posted:army size was a serious limiting factor for campaigning until what, the late 15th century? you can't practically double the size of your force by adding women, or you'd just add more men. it would work for defense but it's not like any of these ancient or medieval societies had standing defensive armies to train women You can make two armies and they can go to different places. The Romans probably had armies in the hundreds of thousands. Charlemagne could probably put 100,000 men in the field. Plenty of western Europeans even have had standing armies. It seems you could do with being more of a dork!
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Feb 6, 2023 13:09
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JesustheDarkLord posted:Wait until you see my orangutan with a gun Mr Beast: We have this troupe of Bonobos $20 million and a controlling interest in a major superPAC
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Feb 6, 2023 13:19
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Weka posted:In the case of the Scythians we have near contemporaries reporting they had female warriors as well. standing armies or bandit gangs who you are lucky enough to be able to pay on time
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Feb 6, 2023 14:35
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Weka posted:In the case of the Scythians we have near contemporaries reporting they had female warriors as well. Two caveats: Greek sources about Scythia are still Greek sources, and even more so than most literary sources our Greek ones tend to parse things in a very culturally local way (e.g. referring to non Greek gods by the name of Greek equivalents) making them necessarily suspect when understanding other cultures gender norms, and also most of the caveats I brought up about grave goods still apply. Even if we were confident that some percentage of Scythian women were warriors, I don't think that their grave goods can get us to that number. It could be higher or lower by quite large margins, after all not that many people got elaborate burials. Also trap sprung, Romans almost always campaigned with armies of about 20,000 because higher than that with premodern agriculture requires stuff like prepared caches because you can't forage for an army of 100,000, that was the upper limit for flexible operations for a long time for reasons even deeper than general administrative capacity.
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Feb 6, 2023 15:20
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Weka posted:In the case of the Scythians we have near contemporaries reporting they had female warriors as well. indigi posted:they'd still rather bring more men, the limiting factor wasn't "there are no more men to recruit"
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Feb 6, 2023 17:02
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Cerebral Bore posted:you all do realize that chimpanzees with martial arts training would be literally unstoppable?
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Feb 6, 2023 22:28
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Ghostlight posted:nah, they'd only be good for fighting other chimpanzees with the same training. What if we trained one of them wrong, as a joke?
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Feb 6, 2023 23:54
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Dameius posted:What if we trained one of them wrong, as a joke? Chimp Hitler Chimpler
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Feb 6, 2023 23:58
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Dameius posted:What if we trained one of them wrong, as a joke? chimpanzee dan hibiki would still kick any human's rear end
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