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nataliereed1984 wrote:


Oh, I was definitely having fun with the drink! It was the remaining half of the spiced rum I'd used for the Christmas eggnog. It left a TON of embarrassing typos I just painstakingly went through, though.

Rather than a debate of real-world opinions, I was more hoping for a thread of interesting alternative head canons for the in-universe explanation. Does that make sense? I just spent way too much of my original post on the real-world opinion stuff rather than the in-universe stuff I had meant to talk about!

you may want to get more of that spiced rum sometime. don't worry to much about the editing you had to do, i still got where you were going.. mostly. that said, the topic did get away from you somewhat.

while I get the intent fully now, i guess i already said everything I really had. i think it was a combination of time and resources if it is possible at all, essentially a combo of your 1 and 2 if so. Emps plays a long game with everything, so maybe thats part of it on top of wanting any less potential issues to arise. if it was already more effective in his intended way from the beginning, and time was of the essence especially, then that more than checks out. after all, Emps didn't exactly tell people much, and not many would question as to the why. nothing to interesting here, i wager. but then i focus my attention mostly elsewhere in the universe. i get enough of space marines as it is without wanting to.

To get back on track.

One of the unification wars' "old hundred" regiments allied with the newly minted empire was called the Geno Two-Five Chiliad. They made use of a strict regime of breeding and genetic control in order to attain a degree of genetic purity enabling them to make use of primitive genetic enhancements on their soldiers. These regimes of control and enhancements were presumably a great inspiration and a source of data for the Emperor's work on both Thunder Warriors and Astartes. This regiment consisted of males (which makes some sense, since they weren't a genius über psyker, and had reason to make use of male cannon fodder in the harsh environment of old earth) yet had similar regimes in place for females in order to find fledging psykers, who they then trained for command.

Now, we know Emps weren't perfect, and that many of his achievements were (at least to some degree) build heavily on existing technology and/or perfecting what options were available to him. In that light, the Space Marines might simply be males because that was what the Geno Two-Five Chiliad did.

*quietly compares post numbers and dates*

...i question how ive even gotten to this many posts in the recent time period... I guess something opened the valve. that said, back to the topic at hand.

poked my head in for this aside: there no "We" in the conclusion that genetics doesn't have something to do with why it is as it is canonically- i do think it does, even if it would be more a question of efficiency instead of possibility. I'm fine with the current reason, one reason as to why being that it could well be unreliable and therefore open to interpretation.

Bdrone wrote:
*quietly compares post numbers and dates*

...i question how ive even gotten to this many posts in the recent time period... I guess something opened the valve that said, back to the topic at hand.

poked my head in for this aside: there no "We" in the conclusion that genetics doesn't have something to do with why it is as it is canonically- i do think it does, even if it would be more a question of efficiency instead of possibility. that said, I'm fine with the current reason, one reason as to why being that it could well be unreliable and therefore open to interpretation.

touché :-)

Bdrone wrote:
*quietly compares post numbers and dates*

...i question how ive even gotten to this many posts in the recent time period... I guess something opened the valve. that said, back to the topic at hand.

Same.

My main answer is "Christmas break boredom"

nataliereed1984 wrote:

Bdrone wrote:
*quietly compares post numbers and dates*

...i question how ive even gotten to this many posts in the recent time period... I guess something opened the valve. that said, back to the topic at hand.

Same.

My main answer is "Christmas break boredom"

that and people are less inclined to hold back on questions that pop into mind by the 2nd rum and eggnog

I have always been perfectly fine with marines as male only, And i think the best answer is the 3rd. with 1 coming in second myself.
It sets a bit of a tone for the setting that is good, For the setting itself.
But it sucks that GW has then follow that on with a lack of female Representation in other places it should be.

So i think it has lost a lot of its impact that it should have.

BrianDavion wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

Bdrone wrote:
*quietly compares post numbers and dates*

...i question how ive even gotten to this many posts in the recent time period... I guess something opened the valve. that said, back to the topic at hand.

Same.

My main answer is "Christmas break boredom"

that and people are less inclined to hold back on questions that pop into mind by the 2nd rum and eggnog

LOL. *lifts drink*


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Apple fox wrote:
I have always been perfectly fine with marines as male only, And i think the best answer is the 3rd. with 1 coming in second myself.
It sets a bit of a tone for the setting that is good, For the setting itself.
But it sucks that GW has then follow that on with a lack of female Representation in other places it should be.

So i think it has lost a lot of its impact that it should have.

Yeah, that's a good point. The very good reasons that Space Marines have for being all-male, and the various things that's meant to convey, would have a lot more impact if factions for which it doesn't make sense, like the Imperial Guard or Adeptus Mechanicus, weren't comparably homogenous in their official miniatures.

Ultimately the reason is the same it's always been - "just because", and we're retroactively coming up with explanations.

The fact that there's apparently a pretty hard age limit to beginning the process implies some element of the puberty biochemical changes are hijacked for the astartes-ification process, but we don't know what.

Ultimately, it's future fake science. It's hard to point to a single chemical that exists in males but not females (though the comment that if it's more reliable for males the "feck human rights" Imperium will go that way and act like it's the only option is a fair one).

The same thing exists in reverse with the callidus fane of the assassinorium. We're not told why polymorphine only works effectively for women, only that that's the case.

The sisters of silence are another good case in point for gender-based weirdness. The sisters of battle are all female because it's a legal cop-out - the decree passive forbids "any body of armed men" which given the context was pretty clearly meant to apply to both genders but the ecclesiarchy had lots of money and influence and went "lawyered".
The sisters of silence, though, are a thing because of the pariah gene. Which expresses in men as well as women, because we see more male culexus than female in the setting (probably because the model is male). Since there's no legal or biological reason for them to be all female, one wonders why they were...

By comparison, I have zero problems with female chaos marines. Fabious bile practically has "I wonder what happens if?" Tattooed on his armour - it being difficult or non-standard is hardly going to put him off trying, given the mutant weirdness we see on chaos marines, gender-swaps seem like a trivial thing, and frankly, being a bit childish, given the influence of slaanesh it's not like the mammary-count is going to increase significantly.....

locarno24 wrote:
given the influence of slaanesh it's not like the mammary-count is going to increase significantly.....

I'll be pendantic and mention that men and women have the same number of mammary glands and both of them have the same number of tits. The only difference is that the men mammary glands are atrophied and most often incapable of producing any milk though some men do lactate small amounts. That's why men can get breast cancer just like women do, but the incidence in men is about 1/100 of that on women. Learning to palpate for such an issue is never a lost skill.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Also, male expendobility typically explains why men have traditionally taken up front line military roles.

If that was an issue, why let women into the Guard?

I think that nataliereed1984's approach is pretty common. It looks at Space Marines from a perspective of gender empowerment and fantasy. However, she misses the perspective I think that the originators came from, although she nibbles around the edges with the realization that the authors were somewhat experienced with war in some forms. That is better then most of the "We need female Space Marines" crowd, who confine their analysis solely to gender representation and do not look at the larger history at play.

From the dawn of mankind, violence has accompanied us. Hunter Gatherer tribes ran each other out of hunting territory. The earliest agricultural settlements built walls to protect their harvest from thieves and raiders. War has scaled up over the years with industry and technology, but ultimately it's been around in some form since mankind learned to make a hand into a fist. Their is some evidence that our cheek bones are evolved specifically to help mitigate the force of a punch, so we are talking millennia here.

You cannot look at the Space Marines outside of that context. You cannot blithely dismiss the fear of war, especially nuclear war from the 1980s, as jingoistic. Nuclear war was a real consideration, born not out of some misguided sense of nationalism but out of a real and demonstrated fear of weapons in the hands of leaders who didn't care how many lives were expended for their goals. Stalin starved millions just to get good press reviews, and would not have hesitated to use nukes had he thought he could get away with this. Here in the 2020s, it's easy to sit back and look upon that era and mock that fear, but I can attest, having lived it, that it was a real and rational one.

People are fortunate today that they have no notion of that fear. Of living knowing that if some guy on the other side of the planet gets up on the wrong side of the bed they have 15 minutes to live. Even before the 80s though, war is a constant. Africa has seen constant war long before any european colonization. Europe's borders are defined by hundreds of conflicts.
Through all of this, there is a very particular mindset that develops to enable men to prosecute these wars. Biologically, men are the sacrificial lamb, sent into war due to a general superiority in muscle and an expendability in reproduction. A tribe that lost most of it's men could continue. A tribe that lost most of it's women could not. Throughout history then, women have been a clear objective in war, to either protect or to steal/destroy. This again has shaped the mindset of men in war. It has driven men to march off knowing that they will likely die, to protect their family.

Thus Space Marines being all male fits the biological and historical context of war throughout all of our history. It's only recently, where technology has eliminated much of the physical requirements for violence, that women have become something other then a rare exception. There hasn't been enough time for women to overcome the biological conditioning that makes close up, personal violence acceptable. I have first hand experience with this as a martial arts instructor. Women can do all the punches, kicks and techniques, but by and large don't want to do them to another person. Men, well that type of competition is part and parcel of growing up.

So in 40k, it totally makes sense to have an all male, elite military force. It's not to say that there cannot be women in combat, and 40k has large numbers and whole female military organizations. However Space Marines are touted as being the best of the best, recruited from the top .00001 % of the population. There is no way to square that with women. At that level, the innate advantages and mindset of men will win out every time.

 ArcaneHorror wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Also, male expendobility typically explains why men have traditionally taken up front line military roles.

If that was an issue, why let women into the Guard?

You do realise that every world has their own traditions and rules? Cadia conscripted (RIP) both genders, because they are LITERALLY on the border of the Eye of Terror. The DKOK only conscript men while the women are the manufactorum workers. I can imagine the Ultramar regiments will be a standard meritocracy professional army model.

Also, you're conflating "more disposable" with "exclusively disposable".

Handy to have females around in the guard to help colonise worlds freshly liberated xenos worlds that may not have (m)any surviving civillian humans. Even ignoring that seems a good machine for generating orphans to feed into the imperial bureaucracy.

20 or so years ago I didnt give it any thought at all.

Now. My head cannon is that the Emperor, accumulating data from all across Terra, settled upon his super soldier idea and after a few false starts began creation of the Thunder Warriors as a means to an end. Male genetic material being readily available in the form of the soldiery of the time for his 'improvements'. Female recruits were available in high numbers but he probably took on certain advice from his Gene Wrights and being an old man himself, and in set his ways. Set his sights on male specimens exclusively.

Big E rapidly moved onto his super soldier mk2 scheme, along with technology which was becoming immutable so too was the reasoning behind the gender of this warrior caste.

Contradictory in nature, as ever. The Emperor so no issue in the creation and maintenance of the Sisters of Silence. Arguably these would be less disposable and would be the real MVP of the unification. Following our Golden ancient in claiming the webway and neuturing the gods of the immaterium (the real battleground for humanities future).

Durandal wrote:
I think that nataliereed1984's approach is pretty common. It looks at Space Marines from a perspective of gender empowerment and fantasy. However, she misses the perspective I think that the originators came from, although she nibbles around the edges with the realization that the authors were somewhat experienced with war in some forms. That is better then most of the "We need female Space Marines" crowd, who confine their analysis solely to gender representation and do not look at the larger history at play.

From the dawn of mankind, violence has accompanied us. Hunter Gatherer tribes ran each other out of hunting territory. The earliest agricultural settlements built walls to protect their harvest from thieves and raiders. War has scaled up over the years with industry and technology, but ultimately it's been around in some form since mankind learned to make a hand into a fist. Their is some evidence that our cheek bones are evolved specifically to help mitigate the force of a punch, so we are talking millennia here.

You cannot look at the Space Marines outside of that context. You cannot blithely dismiss the fear of war, especially nuclear war from the 1980s, as jingoistic. Nuclear war was a real consideration, born not out of some misguided sense of nationalism but out of a real and demonstrated fear of weapons in the hands of leaders who didn't care how many lives were expended for their goals. Stalin starved millions just to get good press reviews, and would not have hesitated to use nukes had he thought he could get away with this. Here in the 2020s, it's easy to sit back and look upon that era and mock that fear, but I can attest, having lived it, that it was a real and rational one.

People are fortunate today that they have no notion of that fear. Of living knowing that if some guy on the other side of the planet gets up on the wrong side of the bed they have 15 minutes to live. Even before the 80s though, war is a constant. Africa has seen constant war long before any european colonization. Europe's borders are defined by hundreds of conflicts.
Through all of this, there is a very particular mindset that develops to enable men to prosecute these wars. Biologically, men are the sacrificial lamb, sent into war due to a general superiority in muscle and an expendability in reproduction. A tribe that lost most of it's men could continue. A tribe that lost most of it's women could not. Throughout history then, women have been a clear objective in war, to either protect or to steal/destroy. This again has shaped the mindset of men in war. It has driven men to march off knowing that they will likely die, to protect their family.

Thus Space Marines being all male fits the biological and historical context of war throughout all of our history. It's only recently, where technology has eliminated much of the physical requirements for violence, that women have become something other then a rare exception. There hasn't been enough time for women to overcome the biological conditioning that makes close up, personal violence acceptable. I have first hand experience with this as a martial arts instructor. Women can do all the punches, kicks and techniques, but by and large don't want to do them to another person. Men, well that type of competition is part and parcel of growing up.

So in 40k, it totally makes sense to have an all male, elite military force. It's not to say that there cannot be women in combat, and 40k has large numbers and whole female military organizations. However Space Marines are touted as being the best of the best, recruited from the top .00001 % of the population. There is no way to square that with women. At that level, the innate advantages and mindset of men will win out every time.

I think you're strongly misreading my original post? I did not say that fear of nuclear war was jingoistic. I myself grew up with that fear. See the birth year in my screenname. I remember USSR on school maps, nightmares about mushrooms clouds, and my parents being unable to give me a real explanation as to why I shouldn't be afraid.

My point was that jingoism and blind nationalism were what could lead to the weapons actually being used. In such a context, it becomes morally and politically complex to want to make a game out of similar approaches. You don't want to design a game that glamorizes and rewards exactly the mindsets that were threatening the extinction of the entire human race! How the creators of 40k handled those complexities was through satire and exaggeration and horror.

As far as the idea that war throughout human history was fought by men, and it's only recent technology that has allowed women to be equally effective on the battlefield etc etc etc

First, that's not entirely truth. Women have been effective fighting forces throughout human history, in all the cultures who's views on gender and reproductions permitted them to do so. What kept women at home had more to do with the attitudes of the majority of those societies who's history we tend to study (i.e. Europe, The Middle East, and to a lesser extent Asia); namely that the majority of them held notions of women being both property and reproductive investment, that the men therefore wanted to protect. If a woman's is primarily regarded as "yours", and a means of delivering more sons to you or whatever, rather than as a person with agency in her own right, then yeah, you don't give her a sword and let her fight, no matter what she wants or how capable she is. If, on the other hand, your culture DOES regard her as a full individual (such as the ancient Celts and Britons, during their battles against Rome), and she wants to pick up a weapon and help out, who are you to say no to extra manpower (pun intended) on the battlefield?

And all of that is moot anyway because we're not only talking about them designing a game for modern technology, but them designing a game around hypothetical future technology. Them being male has nothing to do with them being elite when we're talking about surgically and genetically modified super soldiers!!!

It also seems like you're applying "in-universe" explanations - like "male fighting forces are more elite", and "men are more violent than women", which are arguably incorrect and over-essentialist anyway - to an "out-of-universe" question - why Games Workshop chose to design them that way.

And then those explanations themselves don't quite work in the context of the Imperium. Even if notions like "men are stronger than women", or even the much much dodgier idea that "men are more violent and competitive than women, and that makes them more effective soldiers", are true as generalizations, that hardly justifies a sweeping prohibition. Who would you rather have on your side, the flabby 5'4" guy with asthma, or the tough-as-nails 6'0" female athlete and trained fighter? The Imperium also, very, very, very clearly considers almost EVERYONE expendable. Your sole value - in the incredibly rare situation that you actually have any - is based on exceptional skill or position, like "Inquisitor", "Navigator", "General", etc, which by their very nature as exceptional defy statistical generalizations.

All of which is to say, there's about three different levels on which "in real life, men are naturally better soldiers" is not a good argument for this discussion:

1) It's not real life. It was an aesthetic and socio-political decision about a fiction.

2) Technology is sufficiently advanced with Astartes that any question of natural ability is moot, and the Imperium doesn't place any premium on individual human lives, just the species as a whole, so the question of who's historically been considered expendable is also moot.

3) The idea that men are inherently better soldiers, if so for what reasons, and the various alternate explanations as to why most cultures in our available military history did not field women, are all extremely debatable. And honestly not a debate I want to have.

And there's an additional fourth reason it's a bad argument:

It's likely to leave us with an unpleasant argument about real life gender, sex and history instead of a fun, laid-back conversation about head-canons for a fiction.

 ArcaneHorror wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Also, male expendobility typically explains why men have traditionally taken up front line military roles.

If that was an issue, why let women into the Guard?

Because that's what we do in a modern society? Offer equal opportunity. It doesn't invalidate evolutionary science. Men are expendible at the base level. It's the basis of everything from males generally taking the protective roles, to women and children first.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Apple fox wrote:
I have always been perfectly fine with marines as male only, And i think the best answer is the 3rd. with 1 coming in second myself.
It sets a bit of a tone for the setting that is good, For the setting itself.
But it sucks that GW has then follow that on with a lack of female Representation in other places it should be.

So i think it has lost a lot of its impact that it should have.

Theres an entire female faction? Theres also females represented in the guard, and the eldar.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
I have always been perfectly fine with marines as male only, And i think the best answer is the 3rd. with 1 coming in second myself.
It sets a bit of a tone for the setting that is good, For the setting itself.
But it sucks that GW has then follow that on with a lack of female Representation in other places it should be.

So i think it has lost a lot of its impact that it should have.

Theres an entire female faction? Theres also females represented in the guard, and the eldar.

It's never enough, you have to also exclude males or it's not equality.

Also T'au and Genestealer cults.

Edited not to go off topic.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:


Theres an entire female faction? Theres also females represented in the guard, and the eldar.

There is exactly 1 (one) female miniature in the Imperial Guard range.

Two requests:

1) Can we please not use "female" as a noun, rather than an adjective? It is grating in the extreme. It makes you sound like Ferenghi.

2) Can we also please, please, please try to keep the topic to our preferred in-universe explanations for the all-male nature of Space Marines, not any discussions about real world gender differences, or why men are disproportionately represented in real world military history, or the reasons for why that might be, or about other factions, or weird strawman complaining about diversity and stuff? Please? My tongue is getting swollen from all the biting it's had to endure thus far.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BaconCatBug wrote:


Also T'au and Genestealer cults.

Again, one (1) woman for a range is not representative gender parity.

T'au I can shrug off, cos they're mostly in helmets and power suits and there's not even any particular reason to imagine female T'au have breasts (I think Xenology even explicitly contradicts that assumption; main difference is their nose slit thing, I think). So we can generally imagine whichever model we want to be a woman. Just like with Knights, or generic Skitarii. And I think there's a female unhelmeted head in the Fire Warriors kit, too.

But to act like GSC and IG have perfectly fine female representation JUST because of the magus and Severina Raine is fricking ridiculous.

I'll also add that even if we count Angel Marines, Space Wolves, Deathwatch and Codex Marines as all one faction, and don't count any daemons or Xenos factions, and smoosh TS and DG into CSM, and don't count more ambiguous factions like AdMech... EVEN IF... we've got at least 4 all-male factions to 2 "all-female factions" that aren't actually all-female factions. Sororitas have the Missionary, the Preacher, the Crusaders, the Arco-Flaggelants, and the Penitent Engines, ALL represented solely by male models as of this writing, and Sisters of Silence are one kit and an alternate rhino sheet, not exactly a "faction".

And before you call me a hypocrite: I'm not saying the Sororitas have reasonable gender parity, I'm saying they're not comparable to factions like marines and custodes and so on, who are literally all-male.

Your example of an "All-Female" faction has literally, objectively more men than most of your examples of female-inclusive factions (like IG and GSC) have women.

AND THIS ISN'T EVEN WHAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE TALKING ABOUT, and I went OUT OF MY WAY to try not to set such a discussion off!!!

Edited not to go off topic.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
And before you call me a hypocrite: I'm not saying the Sororitas have reasonable gender parity, I'm saying they're not comparable to factions like marines and custodes and so on, who are literally all-male.

You... you do realise the Adepta Sororitas are literally all-female? As in, the lore states that it is all-female. The lore literally defines the Adepta Sororitas as an all-female organisation. There are no males in the Adepta Sororitas, by definition.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
And before you call me a hypocrite: I'm not saying the Sororitas have reasonable gender parity, I'm saying they're not comparable to factions like marines and custodes and so on, who are literally all-male.

You... you do realise the Adepta Sororitas are literally all-female? As in, the lore states that it is all-female. The lore literally defines the Adepta Sororitas as an all-female organisation. There are no males in the Adepta Sororitas, by definition.

Yes. Just like the lore states that the IG have gender parity. But in terms of the ACTUAL MINIATURES offered for their respective ranges, relative to the units in their respective codexes, there are EIGHT male models that Sororitas armies can field, and ONE female model that IG can field.

You do realize that? That your example of "all-female" to counterbalance Space Marines has literally eight times more men in it than women for an example you were using as female-inclusive? You... you do realize that?

Now... PLEASE... CAN WE GET BACK ON THE TOPIC.

I think the best head canon explanation for why space marines are all male is that men simply tend to be bigger and predicting how large somebody will be can be difficult with people as young as space marine recruits tend to be, so taking only male candidates reduces the risk of using geneseed to get somebody half way marine only to find out that you've ran out of space.

I'd be curious to see your source for different sex organ donations since I haven't heard of them.

 Mr. Burning wrote:
20 or so years ago I didnt give it any thought at all.

Now. My head cannon is that the Emperor, accumulating data from all across Terra, settled upon his super soldier idea and after a few false starts began creation of the Thunder Warriors as a means to an end. Male genetic material being readily available in the form of the soldiery of the time for his 'improvements'. Female recruits were available in high numbers but he probably took on certain advice from his Gene Wrights and being an old man himself, and in set his ways. Set his sights on male specimens exclusively.

Big E rapidly moved onto his super soldier mk2 scheme, along with technology which was becoming immutable so too was the reasoning behind the gender of this warrior caste.

Contradictory in nature, as ever. The Emperor so no issue in the creation and maintenance of the Sisters of Silence. Arguably these would be less disposable and would be the real MVP of the unification. Following our Golden ancient in claiming the webway and neuturing the gods of the immaterium (the real battleground for humanities future).

I quite like this. On a similar note - do we have any mentions of Emps working actively with the Pariah gene? Seems like something you would do, if you were waging an aeon long war against warp gods...

Also, why are the Sisterhood build as a sisterhood?

Alkaline_Hound wrote:
I think the best head canon explanation for why space marines are all male is that men simply tend to be bigger and predicting how large somebody will be can be difficult with people as young as space marine recruits tend to be, so taking only male candidates reduces the risk of using geneseed to get somebody half way marine only to find out that you've ran out of space.

I'd be curious to see your source for different sex organ donations since I haven't heard of them.

Hmmm... I actually can't remember where I originally heard that reasoning - most likely on various wikis, like Lexicanum, the 1d4chan wiki, or the one with the black background that has vastly better graphic design than Lexicanum but I can't remember their name? ... I'll try to take a look around, though, and see if I can find the exact sources! The impression I'd gotten, though, was that a lot of people (worst case scenario, I was misremembering, and the people in question were just fans, not BL or background writers) argued the reason was that the Emperor used his own DNA to make the Primarchs, so they were all male (which is already dumb: just take out your Y chromosome and duplicate the X! Or, better and more efficientyet, since you don't want them to reproduce anyway, just deactivate the SRY gene! Though in the continued interest of avoiding awful arguments, I mean just that he could have done so, not that he should have, or wanted to), and since the primarchs were all male, their geneseed would be rejected by female recipients, or lead to mutations. That's the explanation that always bugged me the most, and seemed least hard to accept, especially since there's lots of other, better explanations on hand (as exemplified by many posts in this thread!).

It's similar to how I feel about the "no men under arms" explanation for the Sororitas. Hate it. Fine with the Sisters being women, just like I'm fine with the Space Marines being all men, but hated the in-universe explanation. Like, first of all, not all the orders really bear arms for the Ecclesiarchy anyway, just the orders militant? Secondly, and more importantly, NO COURT WOULD EVER PERMIT SUCH A BLATANT VIOLATION OF THE OBVIOUSLY INTENDED DEFINITION OF A WORD. "Men" obviously meant "human beings", not "adult male human beings", just like with lots of long-standing, older laws in the real world. Maybe Low Gothic doesn't have that ambiguity, but that leaves the even SILLIER question of why they phrased it that way!

I especially hate when this is used as a justification for the boob-plate on their armour. "It's to help SHOW they're not men-under-arms!". You really think someone being gunned down by zealous death nuns is gonna file a complaint with legal?!? The boob-plate, like THOUSANDS of other ways models are designed, is just because of the aesthetics. Yeah, it might seem silly to some players, but some players might think they're not sexy enough (I advise them to check out Raging Heroes, Wargames Exclusive, etc). Trying to argue there's some practical reason for it is just pathetic. NO ONE'S armour is practical in Warhammer! Just look at Perturabo FFS!

I'm HUUUUUUUGELY happy and relieved with the way the new Sororitas has retconned it: Daughters of the Emperor were an all-female religious order, who only accepted women for reasons that were, from an outside perspective, purely arbitrary, irrational and spiritual. Just like how a great many real life religious orders might have arbitrary restrictions on gender, or slot different genders into very different roles, 'just because'. Sebastien Thor gave special dispensation for the Daughters of the Emperor to remain the one and only military arm it could remain so as to 1) Ensure the Ecclesiarchy wasn't defenceless, while also severely limiting their power... sort of like the motive for splitting the Astartes legions into chapters, and 2) Rewarding them for their exemplary faith, and their role in defeating Vandire.

So... the real world considerations (like "Gosh this game is macho... shouldn't we give something to those who'd like to play tough warrior women?") go from a silly in-universe justification ("No men under arms") to a much, much, much more believabled one ("It's just a religious thing for the Adepta themselves, and Thor wanted to reward them, while protecting the Ecclesiarchy, even as he minimized the Ecclesiarchy's power, by letting the Sororitas be an exception")




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Aestas wrote:

 Mr. Burning wrote:
20 or so years ago I didnt give it any thought at all.

Now. My head cannon is that the Emperor, accumulating data from all across Terra, settled upon his super soldier idea and after a few false starts began creation of the Thunder Warriors as a means to an end. Male genetic material being readily available in the form of the soldiery of the time for his 'improvements'. Female recruits were available in high numbers but he probably took on certain advice from his Gene Wrights and being an old man himself, and in set his ways. Set his sights on male specimens exclusively.

Big E rapidly moved onto his super soldier mk2 scheme, along with technology which was becoming immutable so too was the reasoning behind the gender of this warrior caste.

Contradictory in nature, as ever. The Emperor so no issue in the creation and maintenance of the Sisters of Silence. Arguably these would be less disposable and would be the real MVP of the unification. Following our Golden ancient in claiming the webway and neuturing the gods of the immaterium (the real battleground for humanities future).

I quite like this. On a similar note - do we have any mentions of Emps working actively with the Pariah gene? Seems like something you would do, if you were waging an aeon long war against warp gods...

Also, why are the Sisterhood build as a sisterhood?

Do you mean the Sisters of Silence? I don't think any firm in-universe explanation has ever been offered for that.

We know that male blanks are trained to become Culexus, and female blanks are trained to become Sisters, but surely the Imperium needs WAY more of the latter than the former???

And even so, it doesn't explain why Emp's split them up by gender in the first place.

Makes one think "the big gold dude was kind of a sexist" is more and more a viable explanation.

nataliereed1984 wrote:


It's similar to how I feel about the "no men under arms" explanation for the Sororitas. Hate it. Fine with the Sisters being women, just like I'm fine with the Space Marines being all men, but hated the in-universe explanation. Like, first of all, not all the orders really bear arms for the Ecclesiarchy anyway, just the orders militant? Secondly, and more importantly, NO COURT WOULD EVER PERMIT SUCH A BLATANT VIOLATION OF THE OBVIOUSLY INTENDED DEFINITION OF A WORD. "Men" obviously meant "human beings", not "adult male human beings", just like with lots of long-standing, older laws in the real world. Maybe Low Gothic doesn't have that ambiguity, but that leaves the even SILLIER question of why they phrased it that way!

Now the grimdark part of my brain wants a whole army of brainwashed child soldiers fighting for the Ecclesiarchy. I'll lock myself out.

nataliereed1984 wrote:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Aestas wrote:

I quite like this. On a similar note - do we have any mentions of Emps working actively with the Pariah gene? Seems like something you would do, if you were waging an aeon long war against warp gods...

Also, why are the Sisterhood build as a sisterhood?

Do you mean the Sisters of Silence? I don't think any firm in-universe explanation has ever been offered for that.

We know that male blanks are trained to become Culexus, and female blanks are trained to become Sisters, but surely the Imperium needs WAY more of the latter than the former???

And even so, it doesn't explain why Emp's split them up by gender in the first place.

Makes one think "the big gold dude was kind of a sexist" is more and more a viable explanation.

I did. But also my reasoning exactly ;-)

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
And before you call me a hypocrite: I'm not saying the Sororitas have reasonable gender parity, I'm saying they're not comparable to factions like marines and custodes and so on, who are literally all-male.

You... you do realise the Adepta Sororitas are literally all-female? As in, the lore states that it is all-female. The lore literally defines the Adepta Sororitas as an all-female organisation. There are no males in the Adepta Sororitas, by definition.

Technically, the Adepta Sororitas is indeed all femalte, but the army itself contains a variety of male models linked to the ecclesiarchy like the priests, the Crusaders (male Sisters of Battle in all but name), the Archo-Flagellant and even the Penitent Engines. In that we can't say there is an all female "faction" in 40K, but that there is an all male faction. (I'm not sure if Sisters of Silence and Custodians are lumped together, I think they are, but I'm not sure).

Why does gender matter so much?

epronovost wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
And before you call me a hypocrite: I'm not saying the Sororitas have reasonable gender parity, I'm saying they're not comparable to factions like marines and custodes and so on, who are literally all-male.

You... you do realise the Adepta Sororitas are literally all-female? As in, the lore states that it is all-female. The lore literally defines the Adepta Sororitas as an all-female organisation. There are no males in the Adepta Sororitas, by definition.

Technically, the Adepta Sororitas is indeed all femalte, but the army itself contains a variety of male models linked to the ecclesiarchy like the priests, the Crusaders (male Sisters of Battle in all but name), the Archo-Flagellant and even the Penitent Engines. In that we can't say there is an all female "faction" in 40K, but that there is an all male faction. (I'm not sure if Sisters of Silence and Custodians are lumped together, I think they are, but I'm not sure).

Yeah, that's basically the point being made. In lore-terms, the Sororitas are 100% female, the Imperial Guard are almost 50/50, the Astartes are quite rare compared to both, etc. In lore-terms, the Imperium very much has gender parity in its governance and military / intelligence forces, just a patriarchal tendency in its religion, and some weird tendencies to arbitrarily divide people up by their gender (see: Culexus vs Sisters of Silence).

But in terms of the gameplay and actual miniatures, there are numerous all-male armies, numerous all-male-except-one-or-two-characters armies, numerous not-technically-male-but-still-masculine-coded armies, etc, and NO armies that are ACTUALLY all-female. At all. The only armies in 40k (not looking at Necromunda or AoS or WarCry or anything) that have a sense of reasonable gender parity are the Drukhari and Harlequins.

I mean, even the monopose poxwalkers were made all-male, when there was no reason to do so!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 CadianGateTroll wrote:
Why does gender matter so much?

Why does trying to pick fights by trolling matter so much?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Aestas wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:


It's similar to how I feel about the "no men under arms" explanation for the Sororitas. Hate it. Fine with the Sisters being women, just like I'm fine with the Space Marines being all men, but hated the in-universe explanation. Like, first of all, not all the orders really bear arms for the Ecclesiarchy anyway, just the orders militant? Secondly, and more importantly, NO COURT WOULD EVER PERMIT SUCH A BLATANT VIOLATION OF THE OBVIOUSLY INTENDED DEFINITION OF A WORD. "Men" obviously meant "human beings", not "adult male human beings", just like with lots of long-standing, older laws in the real world. Maybe Low Gothic doesn't have that ambiguity, but that leaves the even SILLIER question of why they phrased it that way!

Now the grimdark part of my brain wants a whole army of brainwashed child soldiers fighting for the Ecclesiarchy. I'll lock myself out.

LOL. I sincerely wouldn't put it past them.

"Well, it's your 9th birthday, so here's your chainsword, Little Timmy! Now, what do we say when we get a gift?"
"'Death to the heretic! The mutant! The Xenos! Death!'"
"Good boy, Timmy! You've made an old Preacher proud!"

Just to occurred to me: Maybe Emps just wanted to prevent blanks having children with other blanks? Thus the gender division? And casualty rates in training are far higher for Culexus than Null Maidens?

But... that leaves the problem of WHY he would want less blanks in the population when his goal was stopping Chaos and endings its influence on humanity!