: I am hurt and ignored. No-one read my skillfully-written,
: clearly thought-out post on Sexual Preference Among
: Great Generals. Just out of spite, and at the risk of
: sounding insistent and petulant, I am posting it
: again! Ha! (the second half is written better than
: this intro)...
: Someone was complaining that the word 'Gay' was being
: used in excess by Homophobics of the Asylum...My
: Answer was as follows: But have you ever talked to
: anyone in the military? Armies are by definition huge
: displays of maleness and machoism, and naturally
: attract both the word Homosexual and those who it
: defines much more than they should, and therefore are
: also rife with homophobia. I think that it is in
: fitting with those who are afraid that there may be a
: reason why there is no Mrs. Alric to lash out on the
: world with insults that sound like their fears.
: Alexander The Great of Macedonia, Frederick the Great of
: Prussia, Julius Caesar(sometimes), Hadrian, and every
: other Greek General mentionable were fighting, albeit
: skillfully, for the Pink Team. Therefore I have no
: extreme difficulty in noticing a pretty obvious reason
: for the aforementioned female absence on Alric's side.
: I am of no alliegance with this Pink Team, but I find it
: comic that with such an in-depth examination of every
: character of both games, sex never came into it... I
: know that most of you are American, but this sort of
: conservatism is embarrassing. (no offence meant to
: patriots:))
: Your Pacifist
: (final message: Pacifism=Heterosexuality.....)
Well, since you want a response...
You're right that the Greek, and to a lesser extent the Roman, armies were indeed hotbeds of homosexual behavior--but they *weren't* at the same time rife with homophobia. Sleeping with men *was* manly, for a Greek soldier. The Spartans reasoned that you'll protect your fellow soldier more fiercely if you're in love with him. The simultaneous homosexuality/homophobia seems to be an artifact of later cultures, where you've got a big pile of men but a socioreligious climate in which they're not allowed to do anything with each other..
And GURPS says that most of the Myth unit types are, in fact, open to women. Women can join the Legion, or the Heron Guard; the nonhumanoid units like Krids and Mauls and Ghols are probably female half the time and we just don't know it. The main reasons why we don't *see* any women in-game are:
a) there'd have to be *two* different units, like Male Legionnaire and Female Legionnaire, who look different but are functionally exactly the same, which would have taken Bungie more time to make and limited their options on most maps (because of unit limits, projectile limits, etc.), and
b) Bungie's said that one of the reasons they made Shiver ugly was that there were issues with "14-year-old boys hacking up beautiful women," and I think this applies to female characters in general. Not so much that Bungie would worry that killing lots of girls would turn their younger players into sadistic perverts (except the ones at soulblighter.com and spleaf, who already are), but that Bungie would worry that assorted media watchdogs and politicians would shout about it. You can see that, even in Oni, the bad guys are all (as far as we've seen) male. You just catch less media flak that way, especially when you're going for gory realism.
--SiliconDream
