From: Brandon Brylawski (brandon@caldonia.nlm.nih.gov)
Date: Mon 25 Apr 1994 - 22:26:59 EEST
Martin notes :
>Re: warrior women
> The Washington Post today had an article about the Silver
>Bullets, the women's baseball team sponsored by Coor's Brewery.
>Like it or not, the best women athletes can't beat mediocre men's
>athletes.
> So warrior women in Glorantha are going to have to fight
>using some strategies other than brute strength. RQ doesn't make
>strength everything, but it does count. Bows are good idea;
>fighting from a mount is another (think Unicorn Women).
> But what about your average Babeester Gori temple guard? (I
>assume she is of normal woman STR and SIZ, not on the heroic
>scale.) Axes require brute force to use, and the more force, the better.
The Silver Bullets are not a good example of women's prowess in sport, as they are excellent softball players who only recently (< 1 year) switched to baseball.
More important, the difference between men and women in strength and running speed only manifests itself at the very apex of ability. Certainly championship male tennis players, major league baseball players, or sprinters can beat out the best women, but these are very rarified circles; the best female sportsmen can defeat the overwhelming proportion of men at their game. The Silver Bullets article noted that Chris Evert Lloyd could not beat her brother, a "mediocre player"; however, her brother was mediocre only by the standards of tournament tennis players! Chris Lloyd could have gone to any tennis club and wpied up the competition without difficulty, I imagine.
I have seen this in my own sport, volleyball. The best male players can easily defeat the best females, but the latter can defeat 90% of all male players.
Add to this the fact that warrior women, of whatever stripe, tend to be quite an atypical, self-selected bunch and would be much larger and stronger than average women. A woman who isn't strong enough to swing an axe well just won't join Babeester Gor. "Average" women don't become fighters.
Brandon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:33:56 EEST