That is fair enough also. But what is it you disagree with me exactly?
While I do agree that “kick ass” women have been fetishized for boys and men, many women find them empowering too. And women are objectified no matter what. I disagree that we can’t find some value in it, because some women clearly do. You might not, and that’s okay, but given that we have women warriors now and in the past illustrates that it was and is a part of women’s history and not just a product of popular mythology aimed at getting young men to buy a product.
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Well I don’t really say there is no value in it. That’s why I say I am ambivalent about imagery. If I was really against it I would have said so.
Okay. You took the the time to explain your ambivalence, and I took the time to explain why some of us might not be ambivalent. But, again, we could say this about any number of aspects of how women are treated in popular culture. Pop culture carries a certain ambivalence with it, no matter what the topic. But it’s a part of our cultural landscape. It’s pretty valuable to have these sorts of conversations about them.
To be fair, I’m not sure your initial comment came off as being about your ambivalence, but as a sort of blanket comment about women being portrayed as macho. I think that’s what people were reacting to.
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Well that’s fair. But all you need to do is ask. I enjoyed this discussion but in way too many comments people were explaining me what I’m thinking and telling me what I am supposed to think.
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Well no, the article said that some researchers thought she was in fact a woman, but that they declared her to be a man anyways.
As someone said above stories like this are cropping up quite a bit. So the narrative that warriors are mostly men, might not be so accurate.
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i would highly recommend women warlords by tim newark which covers the various cultures world wide that have had female warriors
description of the book
“Women Warlords is the first book to reveal the reality of female military leadership in ancient and medieval warfare. It discovers true Amazon chieftains buried beneath the steppes of southern Russia and reconstructs their unique society in which women fought alongside men and could only marry when they had slain an enemy. It describes the last campaign of the African Amazons of Dahomey battling against the French in 1892, including rarely seen photographs of the women warriors. The book follows Queen Zenobia’s remarkable attempt to set up an Empire of the East, independent from the Romans. It relates stories of women crusaders, the sexual flaws of Celtic Queens, and places Joan of Arc in the context of other contemporary women warlords, equally victorious but far less famous. Women Warlords is about the women who held real power, their strategy and tactics, and their charismatic leadership and fighting courage. The warriors include Artemisia, Zenobia, Medb, Cartimandua, Boudica, Aethelflaed, Matilda of Tuscany, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Jeanne de Montfort. Tim Newark reconstructs their triumphant careers from contemporary sources and medieval chronicles. Angus McBride’s illustrations recreate the authentic appearance of the warlords and their warriors.”–Dust cover.
I would also recommend looking at the WWII soviet red army with both the night witches and soviet female pilots like Lydia Litvyak [highest scoring female ace of WWII] to the various famous snipers like lyudmila pavlichenko who was a stone cold killllllller!
below is a pic of lydia litvyak highest scoring female ace think ellen page as a murder machine.
shes the pilot on the left
some of the night witches
a few examples are the famous redhead and the girls school of Stalingrad. the redhead was leading several infantry companies into battle out side of the city in the lead up to the full battle of the city. Her battle group was wiped out and would give no quarter, lots of German soldiers reported seeing this amazon redhead women leading her soldiers right to the end.
The other story of a girls school which had been training in air defence for rear duty at Stalingrad found themselves due to the Germans advances speed on the front line. They decided to act as a speed bump and use there anti aircraft guns on the advancing tanks but knew they would have to do it piece meal to avoid a early wipe out. So they hide in a trench until it was their turn,they would say good bye to their school friends crawl to a hidden gun position open fire until destroyed and then the next group would go down hard killing to the bitter end. Once the German took the position they were shocked to find they had been fighting high school girls…
one of my favourite pilots was the night witch turned dive bomber pilot Mariya Dolina this lady was a daredevil and survived some inane air battles including a famous event where she was shot down by a me109 ace.Her plane was heavily damaged during her attack run so she got hunted by a ace thinking this would be a easy kill, he got cocky and flew next to her plane showing her with a gesture of fingers that he planned to kill her in two passes by showing her one finger nodding then two fingers and making the throat cutting motion. Inside she told her crew to hold on and out manoeuvred his first attack drawing him in closer. she used her air brake to make him parallel and shot point blank with a flare gun hitting his engine cowl. He smartly decide she wasn’t worth the squeeze and flew off, Meanwhile she fought her wounded plane to a spectacular fiery crash landing until her skidding plane hits a rock, flipping it over knocking her out. Her gunner was able to pull her and the navigator out before the whole thing exploded.
She was flying raids again within two weeks unfazed by the incident.
this is her below…
my personal fav is Anna Yegorova who was almost recruited into the night witches [her commander didn’t want to lose her so lied that she couldn’t transfer units, she only found out at the end of the war] she eventually become a IL2 attack group commander leading a company of aircraft into meat grinder low level anti tank actions battle after battle.
One of her most incredible attacks was like something out of star wars during the battle for the Crimea where the German army had prepared a 11 km!! line of anti tank anti aircraft defences next to a natural barrier of a river. the red army got chewed up not realizing this defence was there. so they planned to hide there next advance behind a smoke screen but realized the standard way of delivering smoke via mortars and artillery would take too long and signal what was about to happen. So instead they decided to use smoke from attack planes which meant the lead plane would be the wars greatest bullet magnet ever. She volunteered as lead plane as she felt she couldn’t ask some one else to do what she could.
She flew an insane gauntlet of every gun in the German line blasting her, she said it sounded like rain from the small arms rounds hitting her. She did the attack run and was able to nurse her plane back to base but crashed it on landing due to the damage. when she got out they just handed her a medal. Normally the red air force would recycle planes but hers was so damaged they just unceremoniously dumped it in the river she had traversed.
this is her below i love this pic have a print out on my hallway wall most bad ass pose
her 1/35 figurine for model makers…
last edit and story i swear…
during the battle of kursk, which was the largest battle in human history, largest air battle in human history, largest tank battle in human history, Raisa Surnachevskaya and her wing women flying yak 1s had been assigned to guard a huge rail muster yard where tens of thousands of soviet reinforcements were gathering before heading off to the front. At there HQ a British observer listened in as the radar confirmed a attack wing of 15 to 20 German bombers was heading towards the rail yard and to his astonishment realized the pilots being told to attack by any means necessary were women. Once they got within sight they sent back that it wasn’t 20 planes but 40 of mixed ju87s ju88s etc He listened as they decided to form a suicide wedge with there measly two planes but by coming in a low dive straight at the attack wing planned to break it up and pick off target of opportunity. Again and again they flew right into hell missing collisions by meters guns blazing. after 20 plus mins several of the Germans had been shot down and Raisa partner was also shot down. She was able to escape the plane while Raisa continued to press the attack until minutes from their target they had enough, dropped the bombs and flew away
The British observer had been in the battle of Britain and was astonished by this act of bravery knowing what it took to force bombers back to which the soviets seem to just find a workaday event. Even Raisa thought of it as just a day at the office. he returned to England told the king who had gold watches made and given to the mystified ladies months later much to the amusement of their fellow pilots
this is Raisa below with her yak1
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Litvyak]
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Wow! I loved this post. I’m not usually in to WW2 history (I blame the way it was taught me in school), but you’ve made me want to learn more about these women. I’ll have to see about picking up that book as well, it sounds like it will be an interesting read.
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As indeed are some mainly male roles…like soldiers and “superheroes”.
Personally I feel there’s bad male objectivisation - hello Nietzsche and the Nazis for instance, or the stereotype Jamaican male role of the “playa” - but most objectivisation has been aimed at the control of women and non-white people in general.
However, there are also relatively harmless versions which may even have positive attributes, where objectivisation shades into “role model” - and the female superhero/fighter pilot seems to fall into this category.
But, getting away from this and back to the original subject,
(a) I am really not surprised at all. We tend to see the past through the lens of people mainly writing from very gender-segregated societies like ancient Rome or Athens, or through the lens of white men writing from the 18th-20th centuries. We know rather little of, say, Sparta.
(b) IRL I carry a surname which is traceable right back to one village in the Viking world. And this news makes me very happy. Hey, we may have been ruthless, expansionist, murderous raiders who were only stopped with the greatest difficulty (e.g. near here, at Ethandune), but at least we were equal opportunity ruthless, expansionist, murderous raiders.
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for the soviet ladies i would recommend the fallowing books
on anna [love love this one]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6129621-red-sky-black-death
on the aviatrix’s
https://www.amazon.ca/Wings-Women-War-Soviet-Airwomen/dp/0700615547
you can see a lecture by the women author at the air force academy here on her book
i would recommend the battle of Sevastopol you can see the trailer in the last post on the female snipers the movie is flawed but still worth it and had several really outstanding scenes and moments
her first battle, meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, and her getting ptsd attack while making soup together, her being almost dead and having to get a propaganda photo taken while her back was torn up with shrapnel
there are a few comics on the night witches worth a read as well
https://pulllist.comixology.com/previews/AUG083940/0/
if you live or visit the seattle area you can see there planes at this aircraft museum where they have a po2 biplane in night witch colours
http://www.flyingheritage.com/
annas aircraft type of the IL2 is also at this museum
also one of my fav painting of Anna not as cool a pose as that photo but still worth printing out and framing
anna with a IL2 in the early 2000s
and best of all the awesome epic metal song about them by sabaton here love this one [not my fav metal style but love this song and video epic images from a 1980s Russian movie on the night witches
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1st this find was made in the 1880. If you know anything about archaeology at the time. Well it looked an awful lot like looting. Or “collecting” to be more kind.
With a passing familiarity with the history of the Norse yes. You’d “know” there was a history of female warriors. But that knowledge came primarily from written evidence. Folklore, legend, literature and history that was typically written or recorded well after the period in question. Until very recently there was apparently very little physical evidence for it among the Norse during the Viking age. Or from what I’ve read in Europe across the board. So those people I’ve run across with a more than passing knowledge of the subject tended to point that out.
Up until the last decade or so. Even with out the “sword = penis” sexist assumption there wasn’t much there to plausibly argue that there was a significant tradition of female warriors among the Norse or Vikings. Most of that new evidence seems to be coming from reassessing old finds, rather than new discoveries. Specifically checking the gender of bodies that have gone un-examined, improperly examined, or examined with older tech and older assumptions. Even now there doesn’t seem to be enough of these burials known to indicate how common it was. If it was a usual thing or if we’ve gotten very lucky and uncovered a handful of rare female soldiers. And female warriors aren’t the only interpretation out there.
Burial with weapons and other features of “warrior graves” apparently doesn’t always indicate that the person interred was actually a warrior. I’m not sure how valid this is with the Norse specifically. But that sort of burial can be as much an indication of membership in a warrior class or caste. A marker for political or religious leaders. Or otherwise a mark of an important person who may not have specifically been out fighting. So they mostly seem to be referred to as “high status burials”. To establish if some one was actually a warrior or soldier there’s other stuff we look at. Evidence on the skeleton of injuries typical of battle. And burial on or near a battle field.
The Independent’s article doesn’t tell us much more about the burial or skeleton than the rough outline of what she was burried with. And that she was a she. But it does mention that the burial was near a trading center, and that it was a high status burial rather than a more routine warriors grave or body from a battle. There are some people out there arguing that burials like this. High status warrior burials with Women in them. Weren’t the graves of warriors. And that these women were priestesses, leaders of some sort. Or just fabulously wealthy. Some for casually sexist reasions (that lady can’t be a warrior, cause ladies weren’t warriors). Others because that’s their interpretation of all such graves, male or female.
Though IIRC some of the recently discovered female warriors have shows signs of battle wounds, or have been identified from battlefield burials.
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i reedited my post with more info
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Which seems really weird given that, even without DNA, you’d think people would be looking at differences in pelvic bones etc…
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Those skeletal differences can be subtle and subject to interpretation and thus bias.
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IMHO this situation is more about assuming what roles women can and have filled in societies through history. There is a problem with not valuing the roles traditionally considered feminine, and with a prevailing attitude that looks down on them as well as men who fill those roles. But I don’t think that’s the salient point of this discovery. The salient point here is that misogyny and patriarchy aren’t good science.
Careful. You’re oppressing yourself. A man told me so I know it must be true. /s
No, they were responding to how your comments came across. There’s a difference.
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Quite.
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Fair enough, but you may have jumped into the wrong thread. The article is about a misidentified female Viking warrior. The thread about the misidentified female Viking scholar is on page 42.
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It was a long time since I read it, but I recall that if females are raised and trained the same as males, some of the gracile characteristics get overwritten: more developed muscles, heavier bones to support them, and the accompanying repetitive stress injuries. It’s also hard to tell if the muscles you developed from swinging an axe are from chopping firewood or whacking your opponent.
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Remember: Fight like a lady. Er, um, sorry. Be courteous.
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