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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13481 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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Women in the military

I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.

It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.

Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?

And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.

Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.

The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.

Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.

But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.

The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.

The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.

Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.

I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.

I've only seen a few episodes of Avatar and it's been a long time, but if I recall, being a "warrior" in the world of Avatar is more like being a DnD Adventurer or a Knight of the Round Table than it is like being an actual soldier in a real-world war. Warriors rarely die, when they do they die heroic and meaningful deaths, everyone's fighting for a meaningful cause, etc. In a world like that, where war is fun, it feels unfair to exclude girls from the fun so they are obliged to include them. Even Tolkien had a few badass girlboss warriors in LoTR. In the real world, and in more realistic or gimdark fictional settings, it makes more sense to exclude women from combat.

I don't believe that Tolkien generally has female characters campaigning with men. My impression is that outside of a few extreme outliers such as Galadriel, women in Tolkien's works are mainly apt to fight only when left undefended, such as when their men are away at war, or perhaps in a situation where defeat means annihilation of their people anyway.

Definitely don't get the impression that Tolkien's works are full of girlboss fighters who run around being warriors most of the time. Rather, like reality, they contain a few outlier women who are somewhat capable of standing their ground in desperate moments, but would really prefer not to unless absolutely necessary.

It helps to remember that the movies changed this up a bit; a lot of Arwen's badassery in the movie was actually Glorfindel in the books.

Luthien's an odd case to be sure, and I've never been quite sure what to make of her as a character. In any case she's definitely an extreme outlier.

My impression is that outside of a few extreme outliers such as Galadriel, women in Tolkien's works are mainly apt to fight only when left undefended, such as when their men are away at war, or perhaps in a situation where defeat means annihilation of their people anyway.

Time to pull out that quote from "Laws and Customs Among The Eldar"

In all such things, not concerned with the bringing forth of children, the neri and nissi (that is, the men and women) of the Eldar are equal – unless it be in this (as they themselves say) that for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri. There ae, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a nér can think or do, or others with which only a nís is concerned. There are indeed some differences between the natural inclinations of neri and nissi, and other differences that have been established by custom (varying in time and place, and in the several races of the Eldar). For instance, the arts of healing, and all that touches on the care of the body, are among all the Eldar most practiced by the nissi; whereas it was the elven-men who bore arms at need. And the Eldar deemed that the dealing of death, even when lawful or under necessity, diminished the power of healing, and that the virtue of the nissi in this matter was due rather to their abstaining from hunting or war than to any special power that went with their womanhood. Indeed in dire straits or in desperate defence, the nissi fought valiantly, and there was less difference in strength and speed between elven-men and elven-women that had not borne child than is seen among mortals. On the other hand many elven-men were great healers and skilled in the lore of living bodies, though such men abstained from hunting, and went not to war until the last need.

Luthien is a demi-goddess, her mother being a Maia. She has authority to act, and it's not by physical fighting (riding around on horseback waving a sword) that she overcomes enemies, it's by magic and the innate spiritual strength and rightness she possesses. She puts Melkor to sleep using what is basically magic, though that's a complicated concept in Tolkien's work, not by fighting him to a standstill.

She does throw down Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but that is after Sauron surrenders it to her, so once again that is "I have legitimate authority here and by my innate spiritual/magical abilities I can cast this down".

And then she gives all that up for love, and becomes mortal, and dies and leaves the Circles of the World.

This analysis pleases me.

Thank you, kind person!

While we're on the tangent of Tolkien's works, what finally clicked for me about the difference between GRRM and JRRT is this part from "The Last Unicorn", which I only thought about today, where Schmendrick the incapable magician is captured by a band of outlaws. Their leader, Captain Cully, aspires to the whole 'Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the greenwood' trope but in an ironic/deconstructionist way: he wants to write his own 'folk ballads' about the heroic Captain Cully and his dearest ambition is to have them collected by a travelling folklorist and included in something like the famous Child Ballads. The other members of his band point out the disconnect between the folkloric Robin Hood and the reality of being outlaws in the woods.

So far, so grubby realism GRRM: there are no heroes, all the stories are fantasies, the reality is mud and violence and grinding poverty and trying to scrape by, and the ones who claim to be the noble heroes as of old are liars and fantasists.

But then Schmendrick manages to pull off some real magic, without intending it, without knowing what will happen. And he evokes Robin and Marian and the Merry Men, and the outlaws run after them, calling them to stop and come back. Cully tries to bring it all back down to the grubby reality which is the only reality they can have, but Molly Grue tells him no. People want the fantasy and the heroism. In a sense, that is what is truly real, not the grubbiness of his petty ambitions. So far, so JRRT 😁

Long excerpt follows:

The outlaws grumbled and scuffed, kicking at stones. A hoarse voice bawled from a safe shadow, “Na, Willie, sing us a true song. Sing us one about Robin Hood.”

"Who said that?” Cully’s loosened sword clacked in its sheath as he turned from side to side. His face suddenly seemed as pale and weary as a used lemon drop.

“I did,” said Molly Grue, who hadn’t. “The men are bored with ballads of your bravery, Captain darling. Even if you did write them all yourself.”

…An aging rogue in tattered velvet now slunk forward. “Captain, if we’re to have folk songs, and I suppose we must, then we feel they ought to be true songs about real outlaws, not this lying life we live. No offense, Captain, but we’re really not very merry, when all’s said —”

“I’m merry twenty-four hours a day, Dick Fancy,” Cully said coldly. “That is a fact.”

“And we don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor,” Dick Fancy hurried on. “We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back—most of them—and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. We don’t rob the fat, greedy Mayor on the highway; we pay him tribute every month to leave us alone. We never carry off proud bishops and keep them prisoner in the wood, feasting and entertaining them, because Molly hasn’t any good dishes, and besides, we just wouldn’t be very stimulating company for a bishop. When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at the archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.”

…“And as for righting wrongs and fighting for civil liberties, that sort of thing,” Dick Fancy said, “it wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, I’m not the crusader type myself, some are and some aren’t—but then we have to sing those songs about wearing Lincoln green and aiding the oppressed. We don’t, Cully, we turn them in for the reward, and those songs are just embarrassing, that’s all, and there’s the truth of it.”

...He opened his eyes. Most of the outlaws were chuckling and tapping their temples, glad of the chance to mock him. Captain Cully had risen, anxious to pronounce that part of the entertainment ended. Then Molly Grue cried out in a soft, shaking voice, and all turned to see what she saw. A man came walking into the clearing.

He was dressed in green, but for a brown jerkin and a slanting brown cap with a woodcock’s feather in it. He was very tall, too tall for a living man: the great bow slung over his shoulder looked as long as Jack Jingly, and his arrows would have made spears or staves for Captain Cully. Taking no notice at all of the still, shabby forms by the fire, he strode through the night and vanished, with no sound of breath or footfall.

After him came others, one at a time or two together, some conversing, many laughing, but none making any sound. All carried longbows and all wore green, save one who came clad in scarlet to his toes, and another gowned in a friar’s brown habit, his feet in sandals and his enormous belly contained by a rope belt. One played a lute and sang silently as he walked.

“Alan-a-Dale.” It was raw Willie Gentle. “Look at those changes.” His voice was as naked as a baby bird.

Effortlessly proud, graceful as giraffes (even the tallest among them, a kind-eyed Blunderbore), the bowmen moved across the clearing. Last, hand in hand, came a man and a woman. Their faces were as beautiful as though they had never known fear. The woman’s heavy hair shone with a secret, like a cloud that hides the moon.

“Oh,” said Molly Grue. “Marian.”

“Robin Hood is a myth,” Captain Cully said nervously, “a classic example of the heroic folk-figures synthesized out of need. John Henry is another. Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl. Not that it isn’t a remarkable trick, of course.”

It was the seedy dandy Dick Fancy who moved first. All the figures but the last two had passed into the darkness when he rushed after them, calling, hoarsely, “Robin, Robin, Mr. Hood sir, wait for me!” Neither the man nor the woman turned, but every man of Cully’s band—saving only Jack Jingly and the captain himself—ran to the clearing’s edge, tripping and trampling one another, kicking the fire so that the clearing churned with shadows. “Robin!” they shouted; and “Marian, Scarlet, Little John—come back! Come back!” Schmendrick began to laugh, tenderly and helplessly.

Over their voices, Captain Cully screamed, “Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!” But the outlaws, wild with loss, went crashing into the woods after the shining archers, stumbling over logs, falling through thorn bushes, wailing hungrily as they ran.

Only Molly Grue stopped and looked back. Her face was burning white. “Nay, Cully, you have it backward,” she called to him. “There’s no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!”

Then she ran on, crying, “Wait, wait!” like the others, leaving Captain Cully and Jack Jingly to stand in the trampled firelight and listen to the magician’s laughter.

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