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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.

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.



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 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'.

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.

 Don Savik wrote:
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 would always state 'currently' when making statements about what men and women want to do. Otherwise you stand to look foolish if it ever changes (women driving cars, being doctors, etc. etc. - a whole bunch of things that men could never imagine large numbers of women being good at).

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:


Not to mention that in male bodies there's plenty of difference already. Are you also calling for male bodies that are slightly shorter and taller, so that we have recognisably different male bodies?

There's simply no need. They aren't "male bodies" - they fit fine for both, and don't look odd at all.

I would actually love GW models to give scaled options for taller and shorter guardsmen. Its actually a tricky modelling thing to do, especially with lots of guard, and not have ones look off.

robbienw wrote:

They aren't physically equal.
The models are great though, technically equal to the marine kits on a design level.

Too tall. I was so upset when I saw how out of scale they are with the rest of the range. Its the biggest let down for me with GW models.

The hobby appeals far more per capita to men than it does to women.

Currently.

You would have been confidently typing that in the 80's about RPGs. Now all women play groups with one or two token men aren't unusual.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

So now you're suggesting that women in general aren't smart enough to be Marines? It's not enough to defend the only BS reason for the lack of female Marines, it's not enough to argue women can't physically cut it... now they're too dumb?

My daughter does a lot of dumb stuff. I wouldn't want her becoming a space marine and conquering Earth. Case closed.


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robbienw wrote:

Men are more mentally capable of participating in warfare and are more aggressive.

Again, fundamental lack of understanding of a military as a system and what is wanted from its various parts. Also go read up on how long people can fight for (the UK and US have different estimates of number of days due to different definitions of combat) before the majority are combat ineffective and why veteran troops are the amazing soldiers wargames make them out to be.

I can't really engage in the whole pseudo military discussion anymore. The positions are so far away from actual military experience, copious evidence (who was it that said western soldiers will just keep fighting if ordered to?) and 30 seconds of thought that its pointless. Changing would require bringing you to work for a few weeks before an appropriate level of sheepishness developed and you were sent home.

 MalusCalibur wrote:
I'll just leave this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLRqXE7Les

Puts it into better words than a lot of us can.

No, from where I watched up to it was mostly bonkers.

Though ironically trans stuff that gets a lot of people hot and bothered (man>woman, not the more common woman>man) fits right in, as the setting, whether it is shapeshifting assassins or dodgy medical procedures featuring added laser eyes, doesn't have a problem with it.

I would also genuinely love to know what are 'the other things' people are worried about? We already have main characters who are disabled, extra genders, robots, aliens, etc. GW has already toned the horror down to sell to children more. Would you be upset with more sex, or do you want things to be as asexual as possible (and most of the factions modifications seem to be towards celibacy and new life stringing from the vats, not the kind of large families needed to sustain the low life expectancies). Worried they might start showing every character having a dozen kids to keep the meat grinder going?

 Hellebore wrote:
The amount of hypocrisy in this thread is ridiculous.

Every single person here arguing that this is a retcon and is bad for being a retcon, has accepted without issue plenty of other retcons in 40k, and even in the custodes themselves.

Custodes never left terra until they retconned them in the codex to justify them as an army. They never guarded special people in the imperium, they never had blade guards or terminators.

But then bam they did and everyone lapped it up because it was a change that agreed with their sensibilities.

If they reversed the retcon and made them half naked cone heads again, would people be upset...


I can't help but think how this conversation would have gone if it had been racial rather than gender segregation in 4ok.

Custodes are all white men, no other man may join. But it's ok because we have an all black group called the brothas of violence for you non whites to enjoy. They are not only not super soldiers they're mentally repulsive to everyone around them, but they're your group you get to have so don't complain about not having black custodes.

I think given how wierd peoples identities have become and what they consider core to them, yep you would have. though obviously worded carefully.

When even the daily mail wants to use it for the dullest war ever (the culture war) you know things have gotten dumb. Still fun to read how they try and explain it, shoehorn Cavil in, fail to mention its a massive company and the comments. Really I was surprised that nothing in the hobby was found to cause cancer.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13313535/Wokehammer-gender-row-Games-Workshop-fans-army-squadron.html

 vipoid wrote:
*snip* and all Genestealer cultist were suddenly and very explicitly coded as Indian.

Well we had the poor old Chaos dwarves get axed for being a collection of stereotypes that worried the company. Shame because they are my favourite blood bowl team.

 Overread wrote:
Don't forget classisms?
Many Imperial worlds have a class tiered society and its VERY evident that many upper classes consider the peasantry to be lesser creatures than them. People who can be killed by the thousands by faulty machinery or cheap food or lack of proper healthcare and those upper classes sleep sound at night.

Yeah, we are allowed to have culture wars over gender, but oddly few people in government and media wants to talk about that class stuff and its implications, so that is fine to put in

robbienw wrote:
Of course its justifiable. The imperium is the only thing standing in the way of mankinds extinction, its extremisn is entirely neccessay. The lore on the age of technology and the age of strife makes the point that mankind tried being nice and allying with aliens, letting a myriad of different 'free' societies exist and using AI and tech to do all manner of things, and it all ended up in the fall and near extinction of the human race.

Given ten minutes and a notepad you could probably come up with better alternatives. Indeed the Imperium periodically comes into contact with isolated human factions that are doing quite well in different ways.. and exterminates them. I think though GW either from an in universe point of view of the natural desire to justify things does go out of its way to explain how this is all necessary. (and then contradict it with stuff like grav tanks for everyone.)

 Insectum7 wrote:
^Another bangin' post from catbarf. Nice.

As I've been thinking about all this I've come to another realization and just want to post about a shift in the demographic locally that's been really bugging me. And that's that my game shop has gone from blue-collar to white-collar.

When I was showing up to hobby night 10 years ago, we had a security guard or two, an ex boxer, a mailman, a bike repair guy, the shop-keeps, a commission painter, a short-order cook, a nurse, and a smattering of computer engineers along with a number of local students.

These days when I show up to hobby night it's more computer engineers, data analists, marketing strategists, hardware prototypers and other higher-education types. It's been a heck of a shift. There's been more women, and that's nice (none of whom I've seen play, just paint), but the occupational shift has been stark. Incidentally the old crew was more racially diverse, and the new crew is predominently white and asian.

I mostly chalk that up to local demographics shifting about, but I have seen one or two of them show up on nights when cheaper games are being played, Battletech iirc, which makes me think that the aggressive churn of 40k might also be part of it.

Yes I have seen a massive shift in class of who plays wargames. Used to be lots of blue collar/lower middle class. That former group very scarce now. Not sure why, perhaps we didn't get our kids into it? Other things have died of too, for example the who railway thing, in numbers if not sales. Maybe this was how wargaming stayed alive?


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Of all the posts I could respond to, things I could argue (quick, someone on the internet is wrong!), I have eventually realised... It seems some people had the defining traits in 40k as gender and sex. And not the NSFW kind. Just mundane one. I eventually realised in the 36 years I have been playing with toy soldiers, not once was whether the model was male or female an issue. I am really baffled at all these people for whom it apparently is.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Chris, I'm going to make the assumption you're male?
Because if you are, you're represented in 40k, and most all other media to boot. The typical show, movie, whatever-it's designed, if not FOR male audiences, at least with male audiences in mind.

The same is not true for women. It's getting better, that's for sure! But in different steps in different medias. And there's still a way to go.

Oh I get that, I meant more that you could make every single model female and I wouldn't bat an eye, and if that got more people playing great. I guess i don't see them as gendered models, just as playing pieces. I might be different if playing historicals/present day, if the females involved weren't accurate, but even then I would shrug and focus on the rules system.