The Myth of the Woman Warrior

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historically fair.
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Why can’t a woman be like that?

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? My Fair Lady

My wife and 20-something daughter are women of the Right. They are feminine, physically strong, can shoot confidently, and have a protective fighting spirit. 

My daughter competes and wins regularly in jiu jitsu, something I don’t approve of mainly because she trains almost entirely with cops and meatheads, who I can’t help but think enjoy grappling with the pretty young feisty girl. My mother has the Slav “just smash it” gene that comes out when lines are crossed. Her weapon of choice is a metal meat tenderizer. 

And yet, none of them would fare well against your average 17-year old male from suburbia. If pressed, they would agree. Even Miss Jiu Jitsu, in spite of all the training and technique, knows first-hand that a man, and especially the full-size variety, can snap her in two. 

Even the large rampaging dynamic women of color, captured in hours of video spinning each other by their hair extensions in airports and Arby drive-thrus, yield quickly to men who put their phones down and finally step in. 

In spite of this reality, the social programming doubles down to convince women and men that they are physical equals and, more importantly, equal in their psychological capacity and even desire to fight and spill the blood of another human.

The Marvel Cinematic Gynocracy

It’s apparent why the controllers are feminizing the traditional male martial vocations: soldiers, cops, MMA fighters, and heads of state. It weakens the social order in general, demoralizes men, and siphons women from motherhood and happiness. Like legalized pot, it makes a population docile and easily controlled when so many are so profoundly confused about reality.

The effort is multi-institutional, to be sure, but arguably the most effective battlefront is the entertainment industry. The mass-marketed fighting-dangerous-woman role is hardly new, and includes many now iconic characters: Princess Leia/Star Wars, Sarah Connor/Terminator, Katniss/The Hunger Games, and Lara Croft/Tomb Raider. 

But what truly supercharged this archetype and twisted the collective imagination are the nearly 200 female characters that enforce the bad-ass tough girl found in Marvel comics and movies. From Black Widow and the female Captain Marvel to Gamora and Spider-Woman, these ladies are endowed with male superhero powers as well as hyper-female superhero cleavage, all nicely shrink-wrapped in form-fitting cat suits for our viewing delight. The combo has been irresistible to our growing anti-culture of simping men and the reluctant women who hang around them, inspired on some level, I believe, because they realize that scanning the room, someone here has to at least try and wear the big boy pants.

DC Comics predates Marvel and is culpable, too. Psychologist William Moulton Marston, who developed a prototype of the lie detector, was the creator of Wonder Woman. In 1943, he said that the character was inspired not by his wife but by their shared lover, a younger woman who lived with them. Said Marston, “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.” 

Well, there you go. But was there ever a real and forgotten golden age of the real Xena: Warrior Princess? Just maybe.

Amazonian Wonder Women

It seems that the Amazon legend was based on real encounters with women fighters, but it is nearly certain they were not an exclusively female “clan.” The Amazon mythology was invented by the Greeks with Homer and Herodotus introducing them into the Greek mind as a recurring foe that became more fantastic as time went on. 

They fought with the Trojans and helped with the fall of Troy. Achilles killed their queen in hand-to-hand combat, only to fall instantly in love with her as her helmet slipped to reveal the beautiful face beneath. Hercules completes his ninth labor by taking a magic girdle from the Amazon queen Hippolyta. Plutarch tells of Theseus fighting them in running street battles, eventually eloping with another Amazon queen, Antiope.

Herodotus even located the Amazonian capital near the coast of the Black Sea in northern Turkey. From there, the women raided Persia and he says founded settlements, among others, in Smyrna and Ephesus. They would mate once a year with a neighboring tribe, sending the boys back, but training the girls to become warriors. 

Eventually, the Greeks tell of defeating these terrors, with shiploads of fleeing Amazons beaching on the southern coast of the Black Sea where the Scythians promptly met them in battle. When they realized they were women, they were enamored, and an alliance was made. The taming took, babies were made, and they continued their horse-bound nomadic ways pillaging the steppe happily ever after.

The most likely truth with all this is that the Greeks had been fighting the early Scythians all along and that there were women among them, the novelty of which took on mythical proportions for a variety of cultural and political reasons. In 1991, a Scythian burial site was discovered with 1,000 bodies, close to 300 of which were women, many of whom were buried with weapons and with some bones showing scars that could have been from battle or from the hard life as a bow-hunting nomad encountering other aggressive people. 

Scanning the rest of the ancient world, there are tales from farther east of other women sometimes fighting alongside their men. In spite of the great effort to find conclusive evidence, everything points to the opposite: an all-female society of wonder women didn’t exist.

Shield-Maiden Trad Fetish

For more traditionally inclined men, there is an odd attraction to the Viking Shield-Maidens, or at least their portrayal as lusty, sword-wielding, blonde Scandinavians, capable of matching men tankard for tankard. You can see this earthy fantasy on display with the denizens at your local Renn Faire. However, like the Amazon legend, Shield-Maidens are myth and saga folklore and even then, the stories don’t really describe a community of women warriors but something more akin to the Valkyries. 

Everything we know about the larger-than-life Lagertha, wife of Ragnar Lothbrok, comes from Saxo Grammaticus, the 13th century historian who wrote about her in his history of Denmark four hundred years after the fact. While she was a real woman of influence and probably did fight with other women in localized battles, the legendary feats concerning her are not to be believed. 

Women warriors were not a phenomenon among the Norse. Archaeology simply doesn’t support it. When graves are disturbed and weapons are found with women and the remains show a brutal end, the sane, reliable, and non-politicized voices point out that burial with a sword was far more indicative of social status than being a warrior. A cleft skull proves that life in the 8th century was often violent.

The Smithsonian, National Geographic, and women’s studies departments are eager, however, to exaggerate the significance of the remarkably few examples discovered showing that there have been women capable and willing to bear arms. They quickly rush past the martial and fantasize about the sexual-freedom and social equality these women “must have” enjoyed as well. That’s the Marvel-inspired agenda they want you to take away. 

What the Scythian and Viking examples of fighting women actually show is that there were ancient cultures that had a hard and violent existence, and it was often necessary for men and women to work as a cohesive unit, which means fighting was necessary.

During the Civil War, an estimated 1,000 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Confederate and Union armies. There are countless stories of women fighting bravely in World War II, famously in Stalingrad. Mama bears protecting their children from bad guys, car jackings, and home invasions make the news. Of course, there are women willing to fight and some are big enough and wired to enjoy it and probably hold their own against a man.  

However, should any of this be celebrated or normalized in a healthy culture because there are examples of ancient women who mastered a recurve bow and were caught in circumstances that required them to fight for their life? Reasonable people don’t need to be convinced of this.

So, why then are we still so interested in the woman warrior motif?

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

The truth is that a lot of normal good men are attracted to the women in the Amazon and Shield-Maiden stories, but not the reality of women being in the Rangers or Recon Marines.

I believe this is because the myth of the ancient warrior woman is a type of perfected female, one that likes ultimate guy stuff. She is physically capable and fit, enjoys weapons, fighting, adventure and all else that comes with this lifestyle. She can keep up with the guys, roughing it in the wild without complaint and develop the camaraderie reserved for those who share danger. And, of course, ah-hem, she is a battle buddy with benefits.

Contrasted with the abrasive attitude, frigidity, and annoying radical equality projected by the Marvel gynocratic agenda, while these characters may be physically attractive, they are deeply unappealing to the normal good man. Having to choose between being trapped in a long car ride with Black Widow or Lagertha, no one I know would pick the former.

As the contrived modern world breaks down and the cynical social tinkerers are eventually asked to face the music for their enumerable crimes, women and men will both toughen-up and nature will assume its equilibrium again.