Reality is viciously sexist
<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>
<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>
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
