What is the gender ratio on Literotica?

[Hypoxia]

I think it depends on your definition of what constitutes a civilization.

By definition, it means 'city'. Wikipedia sez,

"...any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment."​

Nomadic civilization is oxymoronic. I asked about the protein requirements of a settled civic society. I think more than antelope hunts were needed to feed Cahokia, pop. ~50k hungry mouths, or the Rio Grande pueblos.

Civilization demands a steady, massive food supply. Megafauna provide that, while they last. Domesticated animals and nurtured plants are much more reliable. When you're short on moose and elephants, and the bison aren't cooperative, chickens and squash look awful good -- and don't require he-man super-hunters. But priests usually appear. Ratz. Keeping gods happy is a bother. Especially when the next tribe's gods interfere. Gotta bribe-em all.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Bramblethorn. A lot to think about in there...

Is the fact that culture evolved as an adaption to existential contingencies - the most important being the physical necessity of women to bear the brunt of pregnancy and child-rearing - a just-so story. Sure, but only because it is just so.

Ancient cultural contingencies are based upon physical existential challenges. Why are men statistically bigger and more robust then women?

Is it a just so story to speculate that young males were usually the most expendable members of the culture who could be sent out away from the safety of the fire to hunt for game, while the females stayed closer to the home to ensure the survival of the children?

FWIW, I think those particular explanations are plausible, and if I was required to bet I'd put some money on them being a significant factor (not necessarily the only factor). I'm just saying that we shouldn't be too eager to accept them as "the truth" (and especially, to accept them as the full explanation) without some investigation.

For example... you've suggested that differences in male and female social roles created selective pressure that favoured physical dimorphism. But let's imagine a society where physical strength is equally useful for men and for women. (Perhaps there are no dangerous animals to hunt and no violent neighbours to fight. Perhaps "women's work" is just as physically demanding as men's.) In that society, would we expect women to end up just as strong as men?

Not necessarily! At a biochemical level, it's well understood that testosterone is very important to muscle and bone development. But high levels of testosterone also reduce a woman's fertility. So even in a world where women have just as much need for physical strength as men, it's possible that they would end up with less of it, because of the cost it imposes in reproductive efficiency.

And then... very likely, society would adapt to those physical differences, change the division of labour, and establish roles where men are expected to do more of the muscle work. In this scenario, difference between male and female roles is the effect of physical differences, not the cause - but that may not be at all clear to somebody who shows up thousands of years later trying to make sense of it.

The males who failed (for whatever reason) when confronted in the hunt or in battle tended to be less successful at passing along their genes. Cave paintings, like at Lascaux, have a shitload of information in them that supports just so stories like these.

What part of the Lascaux paintings are you thinking of there?

This is definitely outside my area of expertise, but my understanding is that the art at Lascaux is almost entirely of animals with just one peculiar-looking human figure represented, so I'm not sure how much that has to tell us about gender roles of the day.

Note also that the art does have at least one major omission that we know of. Per Wiki, "There are no images of reindeer, even though that was the principal source of food for the artists" (cited to Gregory Curtis in "The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists". It's very difficult interpreting art even from a few centuries ago without some training in the conventions of the time; we should be very careful how we interpret art of ~ 17,000 years ago.

So do hundreds of archaeological excavations around the world.

Archaeology has a lot to tell us, but again, it needs to be interpreted with care to avoid circular reasoning. Archaeologists interpret what they find according to those biases, which then inevitably creates evidence to support those biases. Case in point:

"One warrior grave, Bj 581, stands out as exceptionally well‐furnished and complete. Prominently placed on an elevated terrace between the town and a hillfort, the grave was in direct contact with Birka's garrison. The grave goods include a sword, an axe, a spear, armour‐piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, one mare and one stallion; thus, the complete equipment of a professional warrior. Furthermore, a full set of gaming pieces indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy, stressing the buried individual's role as a high‐ranking officer. As suggested from the material and historical records, the male sex has been associated with the gender of a warrior identity. Hence, the individual in Bj 581 was considered a male based on the assemblage of grave goods, and the sex was only questioned after a full osteological and contextual analysis that showed that the individual was a woman." [subsequently confirmed with DNA testing]

In other words:
"Everybody knows women weren't warriors."
"How do we know that?"
"Because all the warriors we've found buried were men."
"How do we know they were warriors?"
"Because they were buried with weapons and armour."
"How do we know they were men?"
"Because they were buried with weapons and armour, and everybody knows women weren't warriors."

What you called "psychological" differences between the sexes are often not entirely cultural. Although, it's true that it is difficult to weed out nature from nurture.

Sure, and I don't mean to assert that it is 100% cultural. Only that we shouldn't be assuming that everything is biologically hardwired before considering the possibility of cultural effects.

For instance, it isn't credible to propose that men are more aggressive than women simply because culture, even while the rates of violence varies between cultures. Culture moderates violence, but is not the cause of the obviously hard wired aggressive tendency of the male cohort.

Factors like testosterone certainly do play some part there. I know more than one person who's gone on T as part of gender transition, and I think there's pretty much unanimous agreement that the effects on mood are noticeable.

At the same time, though... one of the things that makes humans so amazingly successful is our ability to use our brains in novel ways, outside the contexts defined by our species as a history. We are descended from hundreds of millions of years of humans and pre-humans who needed air to breathe, and it's no surprise that drowning is a deep-seated and instinctive fear - not just for us, but for any land mammal, and plenty of non-mammals too. And yet, I can put on a scuba set and strap lead weights to myself and jump into deep water without being ruled by that terror. I can do integral calculus, program a computer, or analyse the structure of a story - not because my cave-man ancestors evolved in environments where those abilities were useful, but because they evolved for mental flexibility, and because I put in the work to learn how to do those things.

Other people jump from great heights, walk across hot coals, and do all sorts of other things that are instinctively terrifying. Again, these are primal fears, with as much reason to be hard-wired as any psychological phenomenon could be... but human brains are adaptable enough to think past those limitations.

So, while I accept that genetic factors probably do have a role in higher male tendencies to violence and aggression, I'm not convinced that those tendencies are more hard-wired than all these other instincts that we've managed to overcome. Very often invocation of "hard-wired tendencies" seems more like an excuse made by people who don't want to do the work involved in not being an asshole.

(One of the reasons I get very nitpicky about discussions like this - even more than my usual level of nitpickiness, which is saying something - is that evolutionary arguments are really popular among people who are looking for excuses to be assholes to others. To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that anybody in this discussion is doing that, it's just part of where I'm coming from on this.)

I am curious, though, to read what your scenario would be for the creation of Man and Woman. It's one of the great mythopoetic topics of all time. Every culture from the most aboriginal to Carl Sagan's empiricism knows their culture's Adam and Eve story by rote.

What's yours?

Sorry, not sure I quite understand the question - are you asking metaphysics, or why social roles are as they are, or something else?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Wasn't this one of the big theses of "Guns, Germs, and Steel?" The idea that although Australia was one of the first places colonized by modern humans, they essentially got nowhere technologically because lack of megafauna never led them to acquire nutritional stability or develop skills and weapons powerful enough to kill big, fast animals?

Erm... the premise is mistaken. Australia had megafauna when humans got here, and the reason most of it's no longer around is because those humans were very effective at killing it.

There wasn't anything as large as a mammoth, but among others we had Diprotodon (think a wombat standing two metres high and weighing two and a half tonnes), Dromornis stirtoni (flightless bird about 3 metres tall and weighing half a ton, which may or may not have been a predator), and marsupial lions (similar size to a female lion or tiger, but stronger jaws).

And while the bigger mammals are all gone now - I think the largest remaining is the red kangaroo, which runs to about the size of a biggish human - we still have very dangerous megafauna that will happily kill and eat humans if given a chance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna

 

[Voboy]

Erm... the premise is mistaken. Australia had megafauna when humans got here, and the reason most of it's no longer around is because those humans were very effective at killing it.

There wasn't anything as large as a mammoth, but among others we had Diprotodon (think a wombat standing two metres high and weighing two and a half tonnes), Dromornis stirtoni (flightless bird about 3 metres tall and weighing half a ton, which may or may not have been a predator), and marsupial lions (similar size to a female lion or tiger, but stronger jaws).

And while the bigger mammals are all gone now - I think the largest remaining is the red kangaroo, which runs to about the size of a biggish human - we still have very dangerous megafauna that will happily kill and eat humans if given a chance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna

Indeed. The premise wasn’t mine, and I misstated it.

See post #96.

 

[Hypoxia]

Every culture from the most aboriginal to Carl Sagan's empiricism knows their culture's Adam and Eve story by rote.

Not quite correct. Not all societies possess creation myths, nor gods, demons, spirits past & present, magic & witchcraft, any such hoodoo. Some cultures embrace some supernatural aspects but not others. See Guy Swanson's BIRTH OF THE GODS for an analysis of fifty 'primitive' cultures.

And of course, even in myth-heavy societies, not everyone takes the hoodoo seriously. How many myth systems are batches of lullabies, nursery rhymes, campfire tales, Yo-Mama jokefests, brag sessions, and liars' contests? (Plato's Atlantis tales are the latter.) How many listeners are taken in?

Competition gets fun, too. Genesis contains at least three separate creation myths, not just one simple Adam+Eve tale (they have two distinct origins). Polytheist nations, or even monotheists with factions, may have creationisms face-off in immortal combat. It's messy.

I reject the origin myth that I was found in a cabbage patch.

 

[lustatopia]

On the question of megafauna:

It's not true that the Americas, aye, most of the planet even, wasn't rich with megafauna and all kinds of game during the last million years of the current ice age, up until our interglacial period. The density of megafauna outside of Africa is usually cited as the top reason hominid species left Africa in the first place (following the annual migrations of animals) and certainly accounts for hominid success as they followed game into Europe and Asia.

As the first hominids ventured beyond Africa, they had the unique advantage of hunting game that no other intelligent ape - capable of using fire, making tools or cooperative hunting using language - had ever exploited. Many kinds of game, especially birds and larger grazing beasts, who had never seen a hominid were easy prey for the first people to enter a new region. It's hard for us to imagine the diversity and innocence of the fauna before the "hominid revolution" denuded most major ecosystems on the planet of at least the most easily hunted game. Vague ancient memories of this richness have become antediluvian myths of a bountiful Garden of Eden.

Large megafauna prey was so abundant that in parts of Siberia fortress-like dwellings constructed out of mammoth bones and hides have been unearthed, bone dwellings strong enough to survive attack by super-predators such as saber-tooth cats or cave bears.

In the Americas, game and herds of megafauna grazing beasts were as dense or denser than in Asia. This is why there was a great, probably global, meta-culture of hunting in prehistory. The best studied of these ice-age hunting cultures is the Magdalenian, but evidence suggest broad similarities across all the classic ice age hunting cultures...

It appears from cave paintings and archaeological finds that ice age hunting culture was shamanic and based-upon the awe-fullness (the word 'worship' seems too redolent of modern religions) of a super fecund female fertility principle in tuned with the cycles of the moon. This was linked to the "men's business" of initiating boys to hunter status and assuring the hunts were totemically blessed as well as the beasts they hunted were fertile and abundant. There was also a "woman's business" of sacred rituals that surrounded the mysteries of the female body-moon cycle (menstruation) as well as birthing, breast feeding, child rearing and kinship. All this was wrapped up into a holistic world view of which we can barely guess at today and which there were many local variations of across the planet adapted to local existential conditions, such the kind of ecosystem inhabited and the local hallucinogenic plants available.

Of course, there is much debate about why the megafauna disappeared, but it has to be largely put to the global success of Magdalenian-like hunter culture and the end of the so-named "Wurm" glaciation period about 12,000 years ago, which disrupted the relatively stable climate that had existed for millions of years.

And, as if the end of glaciation wasn't disruptive enough, there was also a shock climate whiplash reversal called the "Younger Dryas" at about 11,500 years ago whose cause is unknown, but it likely severely fucked many ecosystems at a time when human hunting pressure was at its highest. This one-two-three punch might be why most of the world's megafauna species outside of Africa simple vanished into history at this time. The Younger Dryas also marks the end of the classic paleolithic Magdalenian-like hunting cultures around the world.

After the collapse of megafauna populations globally the easy hunting was over and the world was quite literally now populated by people. Migration was limited by your neighbours who tended to object to trespassers. Some how this led to agriculture and more sedentary lifestyles. How it all happened is still fiercely debated, but it happened and from agriculture came towns and towns begat civilisation.

To a large extent the lack of suitable species for domestication in the Americas held back the development of civilization there. For instance, the practical wagon wheel was introduced to the Americas by the Spanish along with the horse, because the Amerindians had no beasts of burden, so no use for the wheel. Interestingly, the Aztecs knew about the wheel, they had toys for children that sported wheels.

Perhaps, a bigger reason for the slower and later development of agriculture and complex urban societies in the Americas such as were common in Asia, is the lack of a complex and continuous cultural cross-fertilization that occurred across the super-continent of Europe-Central Asia-China.

A kind of constant cultural competition, something like today's concept of an arms-race, emerged where peoples as diverse as the Greeks, Persian, Huns, Romans, the Han Chinese and Goths, etc, etc., all in turn sought to build empires inspired by the central meme of Euro-Asian civilisation, that of the ultimate god-king ruling the world. This meme was pretty much absent in the Americas, until quite late in places like Peru and Central America, but never spread continent-wide.

But back to the point in question. Almost all of our physical evolution took place in the 2 million or so years before the end of the Wurm glaciation and the start of the Holocene. Almost all our purely "memetic" cultural evolution has occurred during the current interglacial period, the Holocene. Say, beginning with Çatalhöyük, the world's oldest known city, and Gobekli Tepe, the world's oldest known religious temple.

Yet, perhaps hard-wired within in some deep well in our psyches are the remnant memories of our most ancient grandparents, still forever hunting that last mammoth or Irish Elk on some windswept plain on the edge of a receding glacier.

http://gobeklitepe.info/news.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatalhöyük

 

[lustatopia]

As for Australia, it's a pretty unique continent.

The people who arrived first in Australia found the continent almost as rich in eminently huntable megafauna as Asia and America outside Down-under's vast deserts.

However, Australian megafauna was entirely marsupial and so Australia - like the Americas - lacked species suitable for domestication, until someone imported a couple of dogs about 10,000 years ago. Thus Australia's indigenous peoples stuck with the hunter/gatherer culture even after the larger marsupials went extinct under their hunting pressures right up into the 20th century.

Australia also has ancient, rather infertile soils and unreliable rain, which discouraged the development of agriculture. In response, Aborigines developed "fire stick farming" where they very selectively burnt off sections of the landscape in time with rains and the season to induce increased production of the seeds, flowers and game they gathered and hunted.

 

[Hypoxia]

THE BIRTH OF THE GODS which I mentioned above shows that cultures worldwide do not share common spiritual beliefs. Sociology I've read paints pictures of great cultural differences. My college sociology prof insisted that no "human condition" exists -- we all became human in various ways in varied societies.

Thus I'm skeptical of any general claims about humanity beyond our physical needs for food, sex, shelter, etc. We're social bipedal omnivores of many body shapes and shades and wildly variant ideas and perceptions. And we have a hard time telling just who did what long ago. So maybe women warriors and hunters weren't so rare after all.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

So maybe women warriors and hunters weren't so rare after all.

I’m open to be convinced. Please give some examples of known primitive societies where women fought and did a lot of hunting (small game like rabbits doesn’t count).

Dahomey had female warriors. The Amazons are legendary but might have had some basis in fact. The Soviets used women in combat during WW2, to a small degree, but that was hardly primitive. Outside of that tiny fraction... who? Hundreds, maybe thousands of cultures we know of and I cannot think of more than a handful where women were active in those areas.

 

[Hypoxia]

I’m open to be convinced. Please give some examples of known primitive societies where women fought and did a lot of hunting (small game like rabbits doesn’t count).

As Bramble cited above (#102) warriors in graves were too often assumed to be male until the skeletons were examined more closely. Here is a Wikipedia list of (civilized) women in warfare and here are women wariors in culture. Here is a paper on why primitive fighters are mostly male (PDF) which begins:

In primitive societies, wars, raids and feuds are primarily or exclusively male ‘occupations’ and obligations, although exceptions to this general rule have been documented (e.g. ‘Warrior Queens’: Fraser, 1989). The famous or notorious Amazons of South America and classical Greece are probably not entirely mythical. The female of the species seems to have engaged in fighting or warlike exploits in Angola, Canary Islands, Valley of the Amazon, Patagonia, Central America, California, Hawaii, Australia, Tasmania, Arabia, Albania, and among the Ainu and Apache (Q.Wright, 1942; see also: Davie, 1929; Turney-High, 1949). In most of these cases, however, the role of the women is confined to company, sutler and entertainer, supporter and ‘cheerleader’, prostitute and nurse, for the benefit of the hard core of male warriors. The Dahomean women-soldier garrisons, on the other hand, have been reported to fight more bravely and more cruelly than their male counterparts (e.g. Sanday, 1981).​

Also, in regions lacking big game, ALL hunting is small-game. Wee little yummy woodland and wetland creatures don't require he-man power to trap.

Yes, sexual dimorphism exists, ooh la la. Yes, males in a population TEND to be more massive than peer-group females, with longer bones and muscles. Yes, males TEND to be wired more for mental mapping and aggression, and females for detail work and cooperation. But exceptions abound. And IMHO most of the rest is culture. We do what we do because that's how it's done.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As Bramble cited above (#102) warriors in graves were too often assumed to be male until the skeletons were examined more closely. Here is a Wikipedia list of (civilized) women in warfare and here are women wariors in culture. Here is a paper on why primitive fighters are mostly male (PDF) which begins:

In primitive societies, wars, raids and feuds are primarily or exclusively male ‘occupations’ and obligations, although exceptions to this general rule have been documented (e.g. ‘Warrior Queens’: Fraser, 1989). The famous or notorious Amazons of South America and classical Greece are probably not entirely mythical. The female of the species seems to have engaged in fighting or warlike exploits in Angola, Canary Islands, Valley of the Amazon, Patagonia, Central America, California, Hawaii, Australia, Tasmania, Arabia, Albania, and among the Ainu and Apache (Q.Wright, 1942; see also: Davie, 1929; Turney-High, 1949). In most of these cases, however, the role of the women is confined to company, sutler and entertainer, supporter and ‘cheerleader’, prostitute and nurse, for the benefit of the hard core of male warriors. The Dahomean women-soldier garrisons, on the other hand, have been reported to fight more bravely and more cruelly than their male counterparts (e.g. Sanday, 1981).​

The Trưng sisters and their mostly-female army are still legendary in Vietnam, almost 2000 years after their rebellion against the Han.

One difficulty with trying to build a culture around "men do the fighting, women stay home where it's safe" is that you don't always get to choose where the fighting happens and who gets dragged in. If most of your men are off at war somebody might get ideas about raiding your home. So even in cultures where women aren't going out looking for a fight, training and equipping them for combat provides defence in depth. Hence, things like the ko-naginata patterned specifically for use by women, especially samurai's wives, and the Order of the Hatchet.

 

[Hypoxia]

One difficulty with trying to build a culture around "men do the fighting, women stay home where it's safe" is that you don't always get to choose where the fighting happens and who gets dragged in.

We also have histories of stragglers or losing fighters thrown to the victors' women to be nastily dispatched. I suspect that in many pre-civilized societies, most everybody knew how to use deadly implements.

A note on strength: Wander through the SouthWest, lying between Las Vegas Nevada and Las Vegas New Mexico east-west, and Durango Colorado and Durango Mexico north-south. Gaze at those tall, massive missions, especially the fortress-like Dominican enclaves. Huge constructions... built by hand, by Native American women and children, while their men were forced to fieldwork. Every last fucking huge stone block or tight brickwork, from hands otherwise making little street-size tacos or decapitating chickens.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

The Trưng sisters and their mostly-female army are still legendary in Vietnam, almost 2000 years after their rebellion against the Han.

One difficulty with trying to build a culture around "men do the fighting, women stay home where it's safe" is that you don't always get to choose where the fighting happens and who gets dragged in. If most of your men are off at war somebody might get ideas about raiding your home. So even in cultures where women aren't going out looking for a fight, training and equipping them for combat provides defence in depth. Hence, things like the ko-naginata patterned specifically for use by women, especially samurai's wives, and the Order of the Hatchet.

No argument whatever, but for every Boadicea, there have been 100 like Vercingetorix. For every woman like the Trungs, there have been 100 Sanada Yukimuras. For every Jeanne d'Arc, there have been 100 Arthur Wellesleys.

There are exceptions to every rule, every trend, but they are exceptions. Very often, what makes such individuals famous is their sex, not superlative martial skills.

Again - not better, not worse, just different.

 

[lustatopia]

Not quite correct. Not all societies possess creation myths, nor gods, demons, spirits past & present, magic & witchcraft, any such hoodoo. Some cultures embrace some supernatural aspects but not others. See Guy Swanson's BIRTH OF THE GODS for an analysis of fifty 'primitive' cultures.

And of course, even in myth-heavy societies, not everyone takes the hoodoo seriously. How many myth systems are batches of lullabies, nursery rhymes, campfire tales, Yo-Mama jokefests, brag sessions, and liars' contests? (Plato's Atlantis tales are the latter.) How many listeners are taken in?

Competition gets fun, too. Genesis contains at least three separate creation myths, not just one simple Adam+Eve tale (they have two distinct origins). Polytheist nations, or even monotheists with factions, may have creationisms face-off in immortal combat. It's messy.

I reject the origin myth that I was found in a cabbage patch.

You are using the term "myth" in the layperson's dictionary sense, as in a falsehood or folk tale or obvious fiction popularly believed.

I tend to use the idea of myth as defined by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, et al and as used by anthropology. All societies are "myth heavy" to use your term, including our own modern secular Western culture.

A more precise definition for a mythology is a story that attempts to explains the fundamental existential questions that all human beings are hardwired to require to know the answer to in order to fully function as productive members of their culture.

The questions that everyone needs know the answers to are:

Who am I? Who are we? Why are we here? How did we get here? What should we do? How should we behave? What time is it? Where are we? and Where are we going?

Every culture answers these questions differently and in different styles, but you would be amazed at how similar the answers are when you boil them down. This has been known for a long, long time. See Frazer's Golden Bough

For instance, in Christian mythology the answer to "How did we get here?" starts with a description of the creation of the universe. God said, "Let there be Light."

That's sounds a whole fucking lot like our modern secular mythology which goes something like this when translated from mathematics into English:

In the beginning before time and space existed there was a meta-nothingness far more empty than any vacuum, but then the Big Bang happened, for reasons unbeknownst, and our universe expanded from a mere point in the meta-nothingness, unfolding energy, time and space faster than the modern speed of light, and it was so hot that nothing but a glowing plasma could exist for millennia at first...

Yeah, so let there be light. OK. It's the same fucking story, different ways of telling it. One seemed the latest word on the matter 4,000 years ago in the language used around oasis campfires by people watering camels and the other made popular just recently by physicists, who are our modern secular priest/wizards.

Sure, there are significant difference between astrophysics and ancient mythology, but not so much in the way they are received the lay public. Both are creation myths. If you think one is more true than the other, good on you.

It doesn't matter which mythology you believe, only that you have a mythology that you believe. Most of us do believe in something. A mythology is a memetic structural lattice, for instance, like our x y z Cartesian grid (our modern secular mythology sez the universe is flat) upon which humans hang their identities and orient their existence and manage everything from childbirth to death... Without a working mythological compass a person is adrift in a universe of shape-shifting meanings and values.

Do not doubt for a moment that you live in a culture every bit as saturated with mythological epistemologies as the ancient world. The ancients, just like us, also believed their mythologies were literally true. Nevertheless, both now and in the past there existed and still exist today people who understand the relationship of knowledge to reality. It's not as simple as you were taught at school.

 

[lustatopia]

One difficulty with trying to build a culture around "men do the fighting, women stay home where it's safe" is that you don't always get to choose where the fighting happens and who gets dragged in. If most of your men are off at war somebody might get ideas about raiding your home. So even in cultures where women aren't going out looking for a fight, training and equipping them for combat provides defence in depth. Hence, things like the ko-naginata patterned specifically for use by women, especially samurai's wives, and the Order of the Hatchet.

I like your skeptical turn of mind, Bramblethorn!

It's good to think for oneself and to question everything. Check out every proposition.

You're right there is much we do not know about the past, but it is fun to speculate and as authors, some of us are obviously producing work that take place in the past. It's fun to comb the science journals for clues to what might have gone on, as well ideas to incorporate into our stories or even to elaborate as whole plots.

I'm always amazed at the new discoveries being made every day that often shed entirely new light on past situations, something that's not hard to do because we know so little about deep history.

As for female warriors, I love strong female characters and wouldn't write a fantasy fiction of a warrior society that didn't include at least one female warrior, if not a queen with an entire regiment of female elite shock troops.

Individual women can be whatever they choose to be. No one is claiming otherwise. I wish more people had done a course on statistics and probability at university so that we could avoid the error of thinking statistics mean anything on the individual case level.

Shield maidens, Valkeries, Dahomey Amazons, the Amazons, Zenobia, Boudica, Joan d'Arc, etc, are well known examples of female warriors. (Well, maybe the Themiskyra Amazons aren't real, but who knows? As for Valkeries. I'm a believer ;-)

Nevertheless, female warriors are the exception that proves the rule.

 

[Hypoxia]

For instance, in Christian mythology the answer to "How did we get here?" starts with a description of the creation of the universe. God said, "Let there be Light."

Except that's not how the Judeo-Xian-Muslim story begins. It starts with, "In the beginning, gods made heavens and earth," with the plural for deities in the original Hebrew. Genesis contains at least three different origin stories. Xian mythology goes anywhere it needs to grab converts. Thus, some folks will believe anything.

Nevertheless, female warriors are the exception that proves the rule.

A quibble here: 'Prove' in this context means 'test', as with proof prints. Any seeming exception tests whether a rule is valid, as 'proof' tests a liquor's alcohol content. In reality, exceptions DISPROVE a rule. If it don't work, the rule is bogus.

The generality: Most warriors were men. That's disproved by finding evidence of women warriors. Thus thesis, antithesis, synthesis: Some warriors were and are women. Whatever it takes to survive, hey?

 

[TarnishedPenny]

The generality: Most warriors were men. That's disproved by finding evidence of women warriors. Thus thesis, antithesis, synthesis: Some warriors were and are women. Whatever it takes to survive, hey?

A quibble in turn. Finding evidence of some women warriors hardly disproves the thesis that most warriors were men.

As I said earlier, in a sample size as big as humanity, one can find examples of absolutely anything. Such outliers do not disprove the basic thesis.

 

[SimonDoom]

A quibble in turn. Finding evidence of some women warriors hardly disproves the thesis that most warriors were men.

As I said earlier, in a sample size as big as humanity, one can find examples of absolutely anything. Such outliers do not disprove the basic thesis.

Agreed. One doesn't need a strong scientific background to observe that men on average are significantly bigger, faster, and stronger than women, and also are more aggressive. What's more, the biggest, fastest, strongest men are bigger, faster, and stronger than the biggest, fastest, strongest women. This holds true everywhere in the world. Given the extremely high rate of infant mortality in pre-modern societies and the need for women to bear and raise children to keep a population going it wouldn't make a lot of sense for women to make up the ranks of the warrior class. There may be exceptions, but they're exceptions.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Post-script...

It's true that women are more verbal. I do not believe that it's true that men are more visual.

Looks like you might have something there:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...to-be-turned-on-by-sexual-images-as-men-study

The belief that men are more likely to get turned on by sexual images than women may be something of a fantasy, according to a study suggesting brains respond to such images the same way regardless of biological sex.

The idea that, when it comes to sex, men are more “visual creatures” than women has often been used to explain why men appear to be so much keener on pornography.

But the study casts doubt on the notion.

“We are challenging that idea with this paper,” said Hamid Noori, co-author of the research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. “At least at the level of neural activity … the brains of men and women respond the same way to porn.”

Looks like the previous research may have relied too much on self-reporting, which tells us more about what people will admit to than about what they actually like.

 

[Hypoxia]

Finding evidence of some women warriors hardly disproves the thesis that most warriors were men.

But we won't know till more warrior graves are tested. Otherwise, we're assuming.

An analysis I might have cited above TL/DR holds that males and females were roughly equivalent in pre-agricultural days, with males as hunters and females as gatherers and nurturers. With agriculture, anyone can plant and harvest, and males are no longer exceptional, so they must become 'warriors' to bolster their male status. When the Great Pumpkin provides, who needs hunters?

 

[KeithD]

In fiction, of course, it can be anyway you want it and are consistent in presenting it.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

In fiction, of course, it can be anyway you want it and are consistent in presenting it.

Bingo

 

[ElectricBlue]

Very interesting question, I thought about it, now I'm curious too. Where can I find any user statistics?

For Lit account holders? There are none that I'm aware of, and no reliable indicators of gender ratios either, given that gender nomination is optional on your profile, and some folk might not be truthful in what they declare.

 

[TxRad]

For Lit account holders? There are none that I'm aware of, and no reliable indicators of gender ratios either, given that gender nomination is optional on your profile, and some folk might not be truthful in what they declare.

Not even the non-gender horse we used to have wandering around here.

Fiction writers are by trade liars with typing skills.