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 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'm a big fan of breaking down the barriers between genders. there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway, so it shouldn't really matter on the tabletop, either

That is just a big fat lie. There are MASSIVE differences between men and women in terms of physical capability. For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap (and that was a study of college kids, not trained athletes where differences would be even greater).

Men have larger hearts and larger lungs, which means that they can sustain high degree of effort for longer.

Men have different muscle insertions, especially in the upper body and shoulders. This means that they can exert larger forces in terms of punching, grappling and carrying.

Lower body structure is also significantly different. Structure of the hips and knees in particular means that women are more capable of e.g. sideways movement, but men are better and more efficient at running and jumping. And this increased range of motion women have is not necessarily a good thing, as it leads to more injuries.

All and all, it is frankly a better idea to employ early pubescent men in combat than it is to employ adult women.

And if you say "but this is fiction"!!! Yes, it is. But if you think that is a permission to do anything, why would it matter that Space Marines are all male? You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

Having talked this over with you in previous threads, you believe that there shouldn't be women even serving in the Imperial Guard. I disagree, plainly put. Your evidence is lacking in scientific rigor and analysis, and relies on extrapolating current trends to 42 millennia in the future.

Also, that study was 20 men vs 19 women.

Hardly a massive sample size to base that statement on.

Also

"We had them fill out an activity questionnaire," Morris says, "and they had to score in the 'active' range. So, we weren't getting couch potatoes, we were getting people that were very fit and active."

So it is not correct that the weakest hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest hitting female as a blanket statement, as they did not include inactive men and women, which would likely drag the bottom of each sample down.

Also, the person who did the study didn't say "weakest hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest hitting female". Aldarion has inserted that "far" into the findings themselves.

Also,

We also compared overhead pulling force between males and females, to test the alternative hypothesis that sexual dimorphism in the upper body of humans is a result of selection on male overhead throwing ability. We found weaker support for this hypothesis, with less pronounced sexual dimorphism in overhead arm pulling force.

The advantage that males have is markedly reduced as soon as we introduce tools to assist in fighting/hunting, such as throwing weapons like spears.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'm a big fan of breaking down the barriers between genders. there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway, so it shouldn't really matter on the tabletop, either

That is just a big fat lie. There are MASSIVE differences between men and women in terms of physical capability. For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap (and that was a study of college kids, not trained athletes where differences would be even greater).

Men have larger hearts and larger lungs, which means that they can sustain high degree of effort for longer.

Men have different muscle insertions, especially in the upper body and shoulders. This means that they can exert larger forces in terms of punching, grappling and carrying.

Lower body structure is also significantly different. Structure of the hips and knees in particular means that women are more capable of e.g. sideways movement, but men are better and more efficient at running and jumping. And this increased range of motion women have is not necessarily a good thing, as it leads to more injuries.

All and all, it is frankly a better idea to employ early pubescent men in combat than it is to employ adult women.

And if you say "but this is fiction"!!! Yes, it is. But if you think that is a permission to do anything, why would it matter that Space Marines are all male? You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

Having talked this over with you in previous threads, you believe that there shouldn't be women even serving in the Imperial Guard. I disagree, plainly put. Your evidence is lacking in scientific rigor and analysis, and relies on extrapolating current trends to 42 millennia in the future.

I believe that for a very good reason, and I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

Your "scientific rigor and analysis" is shorthand for "I want to ignore reality for sake of my <<insert whatever>>". And I am not extrapolating *any* trends "42 millenia in the future", I am merely pointing out the fact that humans are humans and we are limited to reality, and there is no reason to believe that basic biological makeup of 40k humanity is significantly different to that of modern humans.

The only reason people want to force "female Guardsmen" and "female Space Marines" are current-year politics. Which is even more dumb since Imperium was supposed to be a pseudo-medieval fantasy theocracy in a space age setting. Feminism and other current-year stuff has no place there.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Also, that study was 20 men vs 19 women.

Hardly a massive sample size to base that statement on.

Also

"We had them fill out an activity questionnaire," Morris says, "and they had to score in the 'active' range. So, we weren't getting couch potatoes, we were getting people that were very fit and active."

So it is not correct that the weakest hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest hitting female as a blanket statement, as they did not include inactive men and women, which would likely drag the bottom of each sample down.

Also, the person who did the study didn't say "weakest hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest hitting female". Aldarion has inserted that "far" into the findings themselves.

Also,

We also compared overhead pulling force between males and females, to test the alternative hypothesis that sexual dimorphism in the upper body of humans is a result of selection on male overhead throwing ability. We found weaker support for this hypothesis, with less pronounced sexual dimorphism in overhead arm pulling force.

The advantage that males have is markedly reduced as soon as we introduce tools to assist in fighting/hunting, such as throwing weapons like spears.

True, but none of that invalidates the fact that this:

there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway

is simply plain wrong.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'm a big fan of breaking down the barriers between genders. there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway, so it shouldn't really matter on the tabletop, either

That is just a big fat lie. There are MASSIVE differences between men and women in terms of physical capability. For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap (and that was a study of college kids, not trained athletes where differences would be even greater).

Men have larger hearts and larger lungs, which means that they can sustain high degree of effort for longer.

Men have different muscle insertions, especially in the upper body and shoulders. This means that they can exert larger forces in terms of punching, grappling and carrying.

Lower body structure is also significantly different. Structure of the hips and knees in particular means that women are more capable of e.g. sideways movement, but men are better and more efficient at running and jumping. And this increased range of motion women have is not necessarily a good thing, as it leads to more injuries.

All and all, it is frankly a better idea to employ early pubescent men in combat than it is to employ adult women.

And if you say "but this is fiction"!!! Yes, it is. But if you think that is a permission to do anything, why would it matter that Space Marines are all male? You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

So without getting into the specifics of what you say (other than the frankly hilarious statement about hitting power, which is easily disproved by getting one of my colleagues to punch you), sexual physiological differences have had near zero relevance to why women have been kept out of the military, which is far more about culture and traditional views. Otherwise all sorts of applications would be made of female physiological advantages (smaller frames, less calorie requirements, etc.).

It also completely and horribly misses - and this winds me up whenever topics of who makes good military personnel comes up - what the armed forces actually want. And funnily enough strong apes is a minority requirement. Military's are systems, applied to problems. You need different people, weapons and SOPs for a counter insurgency in a city compared to a near peer fighting across Germany.

We even have our own tongue in cheek paper which turns it on its head and tries to envisage reasons to allow men into an all female military noting all the problems it will create.

Anyway - a historical note. In the UK wargaming was a popular middle class activity for both genders. This possibly reflected ideas about the empire and militarism as post WW1 while interest dropped amongst both men and women, it dropped off a cliff for women. That would suggest culture views are important, alongside having a product that appeals. Have societal ideas around war and its accessibility changed in a way where it is of interest to all, and is the product itself now attractive? On the latter I think the pulp books GW churns out are more accessible, with the HH books doing better, anecdotally as they offer more than boys own adventure gratuitous bolter action, but the game itself remains rather narrow in its implementation.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
The only reason people want to force "female Guardsmen" and "female Space Marines" are current-year politics. Which is even more dumb since Imperium was supposed to be a pseudo-medieval fantasy theocracy in a space age setting. Feminism and other current-year stuff has no place there.

Stuff like feminism absolutely does. But not overtly, instead it should be part of the basic culture. The Ad mech embody this - really is the pile of circuits and flesh male or female? Who cares, they are beyond that. It is meant to be an alien, horrific, dystopian future. Stuff like people being ground down in horribly ways by uncaring overseers regardless of gender should be standard. All meat to the system. It can come out in 'enlightened' societies where now you have different forms of class, gender, and genetic purity control taking place which is no less 'grim dark'.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

Why? The physical transformation from human to space marine is so ridiculously large that the differences between male and female humans are basically nil compared to the differences between human and space marine. As such the baseline really shouldn't matter that much as the technology required to make the transformation from human to space marine in the first place makes transforming a female into a male childs play in comparison.

I'm pretty sure the reason women weren't involved in war isn't due to the fact they can't jump or culture.

The issue is that suffering significant losses of your tribe's/kingdom's/country's young men is a tragedy - but suffering significant losses of your young women means you rapidly cease to exist.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

Why? The physical transformation from human to space marine is so ridiculously large that the differences between male and female humans are basically nil compared to the differences between human and space marine. A such the baseline really shouldn't matter that much as the technology required to make the transformation from human to space marine in the first place makes transforming a female into a male childs play in comparison.

It is also much less than the differences between recruiting stock used by Chapters in the current lore, with roughly the same output in Marines.

Chapters recruit from a range between well-nourished nobles in formal military academies (Macragge) to irradiated mutant waifs barely clinging to life (Baal) with everything in between. I don't think it is controversial to say that the majority of well-nourished females in a military academy will be stronger than irradiated mutant males that barely survive...

Tyel wrote:
I'm pretty sure the reason women weren't involved in war isn't due to the fact they can't jump or culture.

The issue is that suffering significant losses of your tribe's/kingdom's/country's young men is a tragedy - but suffering significant losses of your young women means you rapidly cease to exist.

Even that only applies to skirmishing - plenty of societies when facing extinction mobilised women as well, something Tolkien reflected in LotR. Even what we consider rational and logical has a whole load of cultural implicit assumptions and bias in it. We for example consider women to be legal independent entities and not property. All these background changes in assumptions around male and female roles and status play into whether or not you use them in militaries and how you use them in militaries.

Tyel wrote:
I'm pretty sure the reason women weren't involved in war isn't due to the fact they can't jump or culture.

The issue is that suffering significant losses of your tribe's/kingdom's/country's young men is a tragedy - but suffering significant losses of your young women means you rapidly cease to exist.

This however is an issue only if the military represents a massive percentage of your overall population.

In a setting where soldiers can end up fighting anything from a horde of alien bugs to a walking skyscraper to an immortal daemon serving an actual evil god, I'm not sure men being able to bench-press a bit more than women is really relevant in the grand scheme of things...

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Even that only applies to skirmishing - plenty of societies when facing extinction mobilised women as well, something Tolkien reflected in LotR. Even what we consider rational and logical has a whole load of cultural implicit assumptions and bias in it. We for example consider women to be legal independent entities and not property. All these background changes in assumptions around male and female roles and status play into whether or not you use them in militaries and how you use them in militaries.

I feel plenty might be pushing it. I'm not saying there have not been female soldiers - but mass mobilisation on the scale used with men seems exceptionally rare historically. Unless you have several examples I'm missing?

I'm not really sure your point on whether women are considered property follows. Should we have expected say the Romans to be more or less in favour of mobilising women for war than any country in say WW1 or WW2? Should we have expected the US have drafted them for Vietnam? Slavery has a long and sordid history - but slave soldiers have often had their own issues.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
I believe that for a very good reason, and I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

No you don't.

 JNAProductions wrote:
FemMarines
Misters of Battle
The recently announced lady Custodes

General thoughts and feelings on the various genders of 40k forces?
Split off from a news and rumours thread to avoid too much sidetracking.

With where 40k is at right now there only seems to be four factions left that have or in terms of Custodes, had, specific gender bias (as far as I'm aware):

1. Custodes: Most people tend to just lump Custodes in the Space Marines and the whole all Male genetic template thing. However, they are so far beyond and opposite to Space Marines, that while the misconception is understandable, it's also completely wrong. Each Custodian is selected individually and goes through a very personal genetic modification program. Unlike the mass scale Space Marine program that was streamlines by applying it to a single gender (smong many other things), there's no reason the Custodes program needs to be this way. In fact from some lore context about Malcador and Big E debating if the Primarchs should have been female, that certainly implies that they know from experience that you can genetically ascend woman in a similar way, likely from their work with the Custodes.

From what I could dig up in the lore, there were only two references (outside of VERY old lore that has mostly been retconned already) which state Custodes as being specifically male, one of them refers to a region of Terra offering up their "sons" to the program and the other is a colloquial usage similar to "hey guys" referring to a group which doesn't prelude women. Even the first example is only talking about one induction group, so even with a non-retcon interpretation, you could just say that was only one induction group.

Regardless of that though, I would personally think that they are in general more rare than men and after so much genetic modification, you'd get a similar experience to Dwarves in LotR. "It's true that you don't see many Custodes Women, and they're so alike in voice and appearance, that they're often mistaken for Custodes Men. This has given rise to the belief that there are no Custodes Women." That kinda thing.

2. Space Marines: While currently it's templated that they can only be men, it's already been established that Cawl is going far and away above and beyond the original Space Marine template design. There's no reason he couldn't make the ascension process work for women too. Does the hobby NEED it, debatable, but I don't think we loose anything by having it, so why not. Again in a similar vein to Custodes, after so much genetic modification and indoctrination, I don't see them behaving all that different from male Astartes, or even using a different armour set. At most, it would be some head swaps and done.

3. Sisters of Battle: This one is not genetic, but in the setting, is surprisingly more fixed than Space Marines. While you can hand waive some techno mumbo jumbo to get Cawl to make female Space Marines, the sisters are a little trickier. Because their order is based on Faith, and having been established for so long, part of their power comes from the belief that only they can do what they do. Dramatically changing anything about them, would shake those foundations.

That being said, it's not impossible. There have always been male support members to the Sisters of Battle, confessors, crusaders, and others, even though they are in the minority. You'd just need a reasonably sized lore even where one of these characters fights with the Sisters and is very visibly seen tapping into the same faith based power, they become ad hero and then they could then get some kind of sub order within the Sisters that could slowly grow to be a main part of the army. It's a longer road, but certainly doable.

4. Orks: While culturally masculine by human standards, Orks don't really have gender as we know it, and that's fine. Keep them alien. Yeah they may be called Boyz, but I've never heard anyone complaining that this is an issue in any way. These "boyz" are fine just they way they are.

AldarionTelcontar wrote:You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

No, they aren't, and you know that.

Unless you also accept that Custodes and Space Marines were the same prior to the new retcon?

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'm a big fan of breaking down the barriers between genders. there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway, so it shouldn't really matter on the tabletop, either

That is just a big fat lie. There are MASSIVE differences between men and women in terms of physical capability. For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap (and that was a study of college kids, not trained athletes where differences would be even greater).

Men have larger hearts and larger lungs, which means that they can sustain high degree of effort for longer.

Men have different muscle insertions, especially in the upper body and shoulders. This means that they can exert larger forces in terms of punching, grappling and carrying.

Lower body structure is also significantly different. Structure of the hips and knees in particular means that women are more capable of e.g. sideways movement, but men are better and more efficient at running and jumping. And this increased range of motion women have is not necessarily a good thing, as it leads to more injuries.

All and all, it is frankly a better idea to employ early pubescent men in combat than it is to employ adult women.

And if you say "but this is fiction"!!! Yes, it is. But if you think that is a permission to do anything, why would it matter that Space Marines are all male? You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

Having talked this over with you in previous threads, you believe that there shouldn't be women even serving in the Imperial Guard. I disagree, plainly put. Your evidence is lacking in scientific rigor and analysis, and relies on extrapolating current trends to 42 millennia in the future.

I believe that for a very good reason, and I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

Your "scientific rigor and analysis" is shorthand for "I want to ignore reality for sake of my <<insert whatever>>".

I want you to read this back, aloud and try again.

 morganfreeman wrote:
...and, if we're being honest, Sisters of battle. They're built on male power fantasies of being soldier that're supposed to appeal to little boys who like playing soldier.

I have no words.

But i'm bugged that every article keeps using the word gender instead of sex when it's not what they mean.

A.T. wrote:

 morganfreeman wrote:
...and, if we're being honest, Sisters of battle. They're built on male power fantasies of being soldier that're supposed to appeal to little boys who like playing soldier.

I have no words.

But i'm bugged that every article keeps using the word gender instead of sex when it's not what they mean.

Really? I think there's a case to be made for it. Teenage boys like girls. Teenage boys like playing soldier. Here's a line of girls in sexualized outfits playing soldier.

I don't know if that's the intention, or if the intention was something else, but I don't think it's a particularly strange interpretation of the SoBs.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I don't know if that's the intention, or if the intention was something else, but I don't think it's a particularly strange interpretation of the SoBs.

eh, i'll just direct you back to page 10 for the full post in its full big manly men who do manly things for men context rather than speculate myself.

I consider SoB to be like the woman warrior in the cover of Heavy Metal. She’s a badass, but it’s not women she appeals to.

Found an amusing comic on this topic. Hopefully something both sides of the debate can enjoy:

A Town Called Malus wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

Why? The physical transformation from human to space marine is so ridiculously large that the differences between male and female humans are basically nil compared to the differences between human and space marine. As such the baseline really shouldn't matter that much as the technology required to make the transformation from human to space marine in the first place makes transforming a female into a male childs play in comparison.

Haighus wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
I also believe female Space Marines make no sense for a very good reason.

Why? The physical transformation from human to space marine is so ridiculously large that the differences between male and female humans are basically nil compared to the differences between human and space marine. A such the baseline really shouldn't matter that much as the technology required to make the transformation from human to space marine in the first place makes transforming a female into a male childs play in comparison.

It is also much less than the differences between recruiting stock used by Chapters in the current lore, with roughly the same output in Marines.

Chapters recruit from a range between well-nourished nobles in formal military academies (Macragge) to irradiated mutant waifs barely clinging to life (Baal) with everything in between. I don't think it is controversial to say that the majority of well-nourished females in a military academy will be stronger than irradiated mutant males that barely survive...

Excellent points. The "but girls can't be soldiers," arguments in the guardsmen thread fell pretty flat. But in the context of transhumans where 99% of your physical strength is the result of the transformation, the 1% of your strength that may or may not have carried over from your time as a human is basically irrelevant.

People can make the point that retcons are awkward in the same way that retcons are always awkward, but trying to use bad science to insist that women can't be guardsmen or marines or custodes always come off as cringe.

BobtheInquisitor wrote:I consider SoB to be like the woman warrior in the cover of Heavy Metal. She’s a badass, but it’s not women she appeals to.

Probably a hot take, but I personally never found sisters to be especially sexualized? Sure, they have boob plate and corsets (do corsets even work as corsets over the top of power armor?), but I don't recall ever seeing them give "fanservice" vibes the way that, for instance, female superheroes often do in comics.

A.T. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I don't know if that's the intention, or if the intention was something else, but I don't think it's a particularly strange interpretation of the SoBs.

eh, i'll just direct you back to page 10 for the full post in its full big manly men who do manly things for men context rather than speculate myself.

He’s already read and responded to it, and didn’t find issue with what you did.

For the record, as I’ve said, I’m a grown man who likes 40k; just like I was a little boy who pretended sticks were guns and liked to play with action figures and legos. Also a teenage boy who enjoyed 40k. In much the same way that I was a child / teenager who enjoyed a variety of video games and IPs, most or which I’m still into.

Saying something is targeted at a specific group is not an insult. It’s an acknowledgement. Be proud in your hobbling.

I also very intentionally used the term gender rather than sex, as the various hostilities which women face in hobby spaces are magnified ten fold for trans persons in those same spaces (much like how my minority group faces a shocking amount, but women face far more descrimination than I).

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Probably a hot take, but I personally never found sisters to be especially sexualized? Sure, they have boob plate and corsets (do corsets even work as corsets over the top of power armor?), but I don't recall ever seeing them give "fanservice" vibes the way that, for instance, female superheroes often do in comics.

SoB are absolutely sexualized. Boob plate in and of itself is a huge indicator, but there’s many more things like form fitting power armor, garter insignias, tactical heels, so on and so forth. And that’s without touching on repentia.

So yeah they’re not as sexualized as comic book super heroes, but Starfire isn’t exactly a good bar for when sexualization becomes problematic.

I disagree that the concepts of Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods are inherently wrong and need changing. Nobody in the real world cares about making female buddhist monks or male nuns. Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence aren't Space Marines, and they shouldn't be. And Space Marines shouldn't be Sisters of Silence or Battle either.

And I also disagree with this notion that women are treated with such contempt in the community that the only way to 'fix' it is to add female space marines. Changing that lore isn't going to make those people start playing if they haven't already. If a woman started a 40k army right now, of any faction, im sure 99% of people would encourage them. They aren't being 'kicked out' of the hobby. In fact, many female wargamers I know detest the changing of this lore.

 Don Savik wrote:
I disagree that the concepts of Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods are inherently wrong and need changing.
...
And I also disagree with this notion that women are treated with such contempt in the community that the only way to 'fix' it is to add female space marines.

I've only been skimming the most recent pages of this thread, but is anyone making a case for either of these things?

Brotherhoods/sisterhoods being a thing isn't innately a problem. It's the fact that those brotherhoods get so much of the spotlight/support that makes it more of an issue.

Similarly, I haven't seen anyone arguing that adding femarines would end sexism in the hobby or whatever. It would just, perhaps, make the hobby a bit more approachable if the main face of the hobby (marines) weren't a he-man-women-haters club.

Edit: Or put another way, if guard or admech were the posterboy faction, I'd have no issue with marines being a sausage fest.

Marines being the poster faction is the root of like 99% of the settings lore and game design problems, most of which don't have to do with gender.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Don Savik wrote:
I disagree that the concepts of Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods are inherently wrong and need changing.
...
And I also disagree with this notion that women are treated with such contempt in the community that the only way to 'fix' it is to add female space marines.

I've only been skimming the most recent pages of this thread, but is anyone making a case for either of these things?

Brotherhoods/sisterhoods being a thing isn't innately a problem. It's the fact that those brotherhoods get so much of the spotlight/support that makes it more of an issue.

Similarly, I haven't seen anyone arguing that adding femarines would end sexism in the hobby or whatever. It would just, perhaps, make the hobby a bit more approachable if the main face of the hobby (marines) weren't a he-man-women-haters club.

There are people that want women in every faction, regardless. On this thread even. Yes, that is against the concepts of brotherhoods and sisterhoods existing.

I 100% agree that Sisters of Silence should have been updated with new models and gotten more of a role side by side with Custodes as Talons of the Emperor than make female Custodes. Everyone loves Sisters of Silence and everyone would've been fine with this approach. To me, its an incredibly lazy way to offer support to say 'yea some of those helmeted dudes are women' than just acknowledging Sisters of Silence more and flushing them out with new kits.

At the end of the day no matter what you do, the population of a tabletop wargame is going to skew male. Even if the face of the hobby was changed to be female guardsmen like Minka Lesk, most women would still not want to sci-fi wargame. People like what they like, and while you can make it more approachable, you aren't going to flip the demographics. Just look at any other miniature game that isn't 40k and find me one that isn't 90% men. You can't.

So women not complaining about being harassed somehow proves that that the once that say they are harassed are lying rather than them no wanting to get drag into it...

Also love my youtube page right now, a lot of "gw gone woke" along with videos from the same people about "europe is no longer white".

 Wyldhunt wrote:
(do corsets even work as corsets over the top of power armor?)

Weirdly the first time I saw them I assumed it was brigandine (the old misidentified 'studded leather' armour). Too young, too innocent, too much DnD :p

 morganfreeman wrote:
I also very intentionally used the term gender rather than sex

Well I suppose in fairness with nothing more than the text either term may ultimately be correct in context.

Gaen wrote:
Also love my youtube page right now, a lot of "gw gone woke" along with videos from the same people about "europe is no longer white".

Same. I feel like I have to be careful not to click on the wrong thing and make YT's algorithm start feeding me toxic gak.

Don Savik wrote:
There are people that want women in every faction, regardless. On this thread even. Yes, that is against the concepts of brotherhoods and sisterhoods existing.

Personally, I don't mind some factions being gender-locked. I'm not in a rush to add guys to the sororitas for instance. That said, gender-locking factions doesn't really add anything either. If sororitas had been made up of guys and girl when I started collecting them, I'd still have started collecting them because being all-girls wasn't really a main selling point of them. I'd still collect them tomorrow if GW retcon'd them to have contained dudes among their ranks the whole time. Retcons are always mildly awkward, but they're not inherently bad.

I 100% agree that Sisters of Silence should have been updated with new models and gotten more of a role side by side with Custodes as Talons of the Emperor than make female Custodes. Everyone loves Sisters of Silence and everyone would've been fine with this approach. To me, its an incredibly lazy way to offer support to say 'yea some of those helmeted dudes are women' than just acknowledging Sisters of Silence more and flushing them out with new kits.

But does having femstodes exist detract from the faction in any way?

At the end of the day no matter what you do, the population of a tabletop wargame is going to skew male. Even if the face of the hobby was changed to be female guardsmen like Minka Lesk, most women would still not want to sci-fi wargame. People like what they like, and while you can make it more approachable, you aren't going to flip the demographics. Just look at any other miniature game that isn't 40k and find me one that isn't 90% men. You can't.

I don't think anyone is suggesting we'd "flip the demographics."

Downsides of a retcon:
* Makes existing fluff references to gender-locking kind of awkward.

Upsides of a retcon:
* Might make a few more people comfortable trying out the hobby.

I feel like that's a decent trade-off. Especially if you minimize the awkwardness for marines by saying, "Cawl did it."

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'm a big fan of breaking down the barriers between genders. there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway, so it shouldn't really matter on the tabletop, either

That is just a big fat lie. There are MASSIVE differences between men and women in terms of physical capability. For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap (and that was a study of college kids, not trained athletes where differences would be even greater).

Men have larger hearts and larger lungs, which means that they can sustain high degree of effort for longer.

Men have different muscle insertions, especially in the upper body and shoulders. This means that they can exert larger forces in terms of punching, grappling and carrying.

Lower body structure is also significantly different. Structure of the hips and knees in particular means that women are more capable of e.g. sideways movement, but men are better and more efficient at running and jumping. And this increased range of motion women have is not necessarily a good thing, as it leads to more injuries.

All and all, it is frankly a better idea to employ early pubescent men in combat than it is to employ adult women.

And if you say "but this is fiction"!!! Yes, it is. But if you think that is a permission to do anything, why would it matter that Space Marines are all male? You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

I really thought this was going to be satire, since "For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap" is one of the dumbest and most ignorant things I've ever heard. I mean, watching Ryan Dunn get his ass kicked in the first Jackass movie is all you need to disprove this alleged thought.

While, yes, men may have some subtle advantages by nature, pretty much the only one that can't be overcome with sufficient training is the ability to write your name in the snow.