[Rian]

You know what, I’m done here. I don’t feel comfortable contributing to this forum if this is the attitude espoused by its leadership. Enjoy your boys’ club.

[Droid803]

While what Goober says is fine from a purely biological and statistical standpoint (don't argue this - the limiting factor to a population's growth is the number of females - even if you only have one male, your species would be 'ok', and the same cannot be said about having only a single female), it is rather tactless and well, I guess morally wrong (and rings of old-fashioned misogynistic thinking).

I suppose if the loss of a given percentage of the population was imminent and unavoidable, however, that sacrificing males would be preferential to sacrificing females. Think of it that way. If the females were volunteering for it though, it wouldn't be right to stop them from doing so. (?)

[General Battuta]

There are fewer people directly involved in warfare in FreeSpace than in most wars in human history.

The fundamental notion that anything which happened in FreeSpace barring repeated massive planetary bombardment could cause a species-wide demographic crisis is so laughable as to almost render the ineffectual bluster of the proposed response equally risible.

In 14 years of war with the Vasudans - 14 years of low-intensity war that mostly involved fighters, bombers, and warships - I'm willing to bet fewer people were killed than in a single year of World War I.

Never mind the useless demographic crisis you'd have when your 'baby boom' of uneducated runts matured with no jobs for them to fill, no one to teach them how to do it, no housing, no food, and no education...because none of the skilled women who could have helped with those problems were available.

Imagine society today without anything invented or discovered by women in the last hundred years alone. It would be very, very bad...and that's with women already subjugated.

I promised myself I wouldn't do this so I don't know why I'm ****ing doing it. If it weren't for my responsibilities to BP I'd have followed Rian's example five minutes ago.

[Herra Tohtori]

No sane people would be keen on having children at a time of war. After the war there are baby booms instead.

Having women at home would therefore not increase the population.

Moreover even if you forced them to have babies (!) it would not help with the war effort except if you assumed a long, long war of attrition that lasts over 18 years.

Then you have to assume that you can hold out for 18 years with just the men fighting the good fight and women having babies.

Even further you would have to assume that bare manpower would help at all, which is unlikely since what you need is trained professionals. That's what was the main limiting factor in, say, Battle of Britain; they simply could not produce pilots at the same rate they would produce fighter airplanes. Today, this would be even more disproportionate. Even infantry would suffer from this; it's not like you can simply hand out a shield and a spear these days and tell your boys to stand in a line on some field. They need to be trained, and they need to have the professionals to train them.

Speculating even further, if your purpose for subjecting the female population to this is not winning the war but saving the species, you would have to assume you have the capability to hide the women somewhere and keep them safe even if you end up losing the war completely and utterly with the rest of the population (men) fighting it.

In the specific case of Shivans, I find that supremely unlikely.

So, strategically I would rather gather the most capable forces available, independent of gender, and do the best to fight off the threat to the species with all I could muster. If the effort fails, so be it. End of the line, everybody off.

If it got truely desperate, relocating small communities of balanced gender distribution (preferably consisting of couples in solid relationships, exhibiting different training and talents required for survival) to some remote planet and cutting all communications could be the best option. Even then it would be unlikely there would be any place to hide.


So ignoring all this speculation, there's still the matter of ethics to question. What sort of government would have the power to essentially imprison half of it's population to the task of producing offspring?

I don't really want to godwin the thread but considering how much damage has been already done I doubt it can make it worse, so... I can't help but draw parallels to the aryan ideal of woman.

 

[General Battuta]

Let me highlight a critical point that I brought up and Herra brought up too:

If the entire GTVA military were made of women it would not represent a demographic threat to human society, because the number of people in danger is that small.

Given this fact there is absolutely zero reason not to take the best you can get of either sex. Because you can damn well bet that the small number of women you skim off for service will save more lives than they would produce as mothers.

[FoxtrotTango]

Please, everyone, I don't want you to throw away your statuses and positions based on a debate that stemmed from an innocent comment I made. I don't even know where the whole "women would be better at home/women would be better on the front lines" debate came from, but I do know that it's causing major strife and is really hurting relations across the anyone still bothering to participate in it. As the one who started it, I implore all of you to please finish it, bury it, and let this issue die. It's a fight that has no place here and every moment longer that I let the accusations fly is a great failure on my part.

This is an issue that will keep dividing us until we're warring over it. And because of what? A few words that have already been wiped clean of the implications that stained them? I want all of you to stop acting like this is a matter that even deserves your attention. Let's get back to reality and leave this bickering behind.

[General Battuta]

Actually, I'd prefer that Goober5000 not disregard this thread because it's inconvenient to him.

Furthermore, I'm well aware that this debate could be easily taken as 'blown out of proportion' or 'oversensitive'. It's easy to say things like that when you don't have a stake in the debate or the outcome.

I recognize that Goober5000's positions are, as best as he knows, fair-minded and rational, and that he intended no malice by them. Unfortunately, implicit attitudes are held without awareness, and sometimes the shock of seeing how other people react to them can help in their reexamination.

No matter how innocently intended, the assertions Goober5000 made here were so preposterous that, until he further clarifies them, I cannot help but see them as (unintentional, yes) sexism.

A moment's clear thought should have made it obvious why no such demographic crisis would exist, and, even if it did, why permitting women in the military would not make a whit of difference.

To be honest I'm concerned that Goob is just going to write this off as 'emotional venting' and 'irrational hysteria' and refuse to engage with some very real concerns here.

[Mongoose]

Okay, **** it.  I'm unilaterally moving this thread because I don't want to have to look at it in this folder anymore.  Have fun, GD.

[General Battuta]

I'm going to keep picking at this because of how bothered I am.

The Terran-Vasudan war lasted fourteen years.  Suppose that Terran Command had followed the strategy you advocate; by the time FS1 rolls around, you'd win the Great War but sacrifice your best people in the process.

Goober5000, that is exactly the strategy Terran Command followed during the Terran-Vasudan War and FS1. There were women flying those ships: the best and the brightest.

And I'm pretty ****ing glad I didn't get a second-rate wingman on 'Good Luck' because the best woman wasn't available.

Strangely, I'm not seeing any demographic apocalypse by the time FS2 rolls around.

[iamzack]

am a bit nauseous at reading goober's posts.

if it ever came to being forced to give birth over and over or extinction, i'd put the gun in my mouth myself, thanks

and thats all i got to say about that

[Mongoose]

Y'know, some of this is exactly what I meant when I used the phrase "hyper-sensitivity" earlier.  Like, I don't care if you think what Goober said is the worst thing ever, and that he's a horrible person for doing so.  That's fine. That's your prerogative.  But in the end...it's just one ****ing post.  Take a look outside at the world we live in.  I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that there are millions, if not tens of millions, of women alive today who live in what is essentially a state of sexual slavery.  That's right now, in the real world.  Not in some stupid theoretical future where we need to replenish the human population in a hurry.  Now.  And yet one asinine post is what people choose to get incredibly over-dramatic and apoplectic about, and even threaten to leave the forums over.  I'll never ****ing understand it.  Not at all.

Seriously, people.  Try getting really ****ing angry about the real **** going on out there today before you start worry about some whack-job opinion that will never see the light of day.  That's the only way we'll ever do anything about this ****-hole of a planet.

(...why did this wind up in GenFS?  I moved it to GenDisc because it pretty much screams that, unless someone thought otherwise.)

[General Battuta]

You're right, you don't understand it.

It's not a zero-sum game. Making an issue of this here does not deplete efforts somewhere else. It does not make someone less angry about injustice elsewhere.

You do not dictate my feelings, and it is presumptuous of you to believe that you can determine what I - or what Rian, for that matter - should feel better than we can.

I will determine for myself whether I am becoming over-dramatic or apoplectic. You, however, are not in a position to either understand or dictate what harms others, especially when said factors do not harm you.

[Goober5000]

I'm tempted again and again to edit this post to gut your argument on the factual level, to point out how minor the casualties in these wars are compared to the size of the human population. But I simply will not be drawn into a debate on that level when I know that your attitudes here are not grounded in a factual analysis.

They are, indeed, grounded in factual, historical, social, and logical analysis.

The willfull, rationalized retrogressive ignorance it takes to justify this position - and the thought put into rationalizing it - disturbs me deeply. You can shout that I'm unable to respond and therefore quitting with drama, but the fact is that I'm not going to waste my time breaking my head against this kind of attitude.

Hmm.  I shall let the thread speak for itself.

It would have been one thing if you had advocated economic and political incentives for large families. Instead, you argued for a cultural-level sanction against women in combat roles, regardless of their qualifications.

Oh, I'm not arguing for a cultural-level sanction.  I'm saying that such a situation would arise organically, and naturally, given the conditions at the time.  Sure, the government would encourage it via propaganda; but having a large family would become a cultural value.  It has happened before and it will happen again.  I would not have the power to force such a change, and neither would Rian have the power to prevent it.

I prefer to wait for such attitudes to die out. I cannot maintain a professional relationship with anyone who advocates the resubjugation of half the human race.

I cannot in good conscience participate in a community under this leadership. I will consider my positions and whether to relinquish my current responsibilities as Global Moderator.

Please understand that the personal is not the political; I do not consider my opinion of you to have changed due to this thread.  Also, I do not wish for you to relinquish any responsibilities or privileges as a result of a forum debate.

The fundamental notion that anything which happened in FreeSpace barring repeated massive planetary bombardment could cause a species-wide demographic crisis is so laughable as to almost render the ineffectual bluster of the proposed response equally risible.

In 14 years of war with the Vasudans - 14 years of low-intensity war that mostly involved fighters, bombers, and warships - I'm willing to bet fewer people were killed than in a single year of World War I.

Except, you know, we did have planetary bombardment.  Canonically.  Both in the Terran-Vasudan war (c.f. the Harbinger) and with Shivans (the Lucifer cannons "bombarding colonized worlds").  Furthermore, we know that ground troops were deployed in both wars; one cannot infer ground casualties from space casualties.

Never mind the useless demographic crisis you'd have when your 'baby boom' of uneducated runts matured with no jobs for them to fill, no one to teach them how to do it, no housing, no food, and no education...because none of the skilled women who could have helped with those problems were available.

One of the reasons for having the women stay at home to raise families is so that they can give them such an education.  And "stay at home" does not imply "unskilled".  Finally, considering the depopulation due to war, the "baby boom" will find jobs waiting for them when they reach adulthood.

So ignoring all this speculation, there's still the matter of ethics to question. What sort of government would have the power to essentially imprison half of it's population to the task of producing offspring?

Raising a family is not "imprisonment".  And as I said to Battuta, it would arise naturally from the culture; it wouldn't have to be forced by the government.

To be honest I'm concerned that Goob is just going to write this off as 'emotional venting' and 'irrational hysteria' and refuse to engage with some very real concerns here.

Well, I hope -- based on this thread and the IRC conversation -- that you don't think I'm refusing to engage.

Goober5000, that is exactly the strategy Terran Command followed during the Terran-Vasudan War and FS1. There were women flying those ships: the best and the brightest.

[...]

Strangely, I'm not seeing any demographic apocalypse by the time FS2 rolls around.

That's begging the question.  We're discussing the male/female balance of the FreeSpace universe, extrapolating from what we know of the game, all other things being equal.  So the lack of demographics, or the canonical head ani distribution, is not relevant here because it's the very variable we're trying to estimate.

(...why did this wind up in GenFS?  I moved it to GenDisc because it pretty much screams that, unless someone thought otherwise.)

I moved it, since we're talking about a situation specific to the FreeSpace universe, as opposed to men and women in society in general.


Anyway, I suppose General Battuta and I must agree to disagree.  I have not changed my personal or professional opinion of him based on this thread, and still hold him in high regard.  I likewise hope that he feels the same way.

[General Battuta]

I have spent some time on IRC with Goober5000 trying to hash this out. His last post contains his view, including the belief that this situation will arise organically.

I consider that patently absurd. When the survival of mankind depends on fighter pilots and warship crews, then any intelligent system will focus all its efforts on putting the best people, with the best training and the best equipment, at the tip of the spear.

Barring all women - directly or indirectly - from combat removes 50% of the potential von Richtofens, MacArthurs, Bismarcks and Yorks from the pool. That means a drop in combat effectiveness. It also means that these women will not be available to train later pilots, damaging the effectiveness of the combat arm of the fleet for decades to come.

Putting women in combat has zero costs. None. They can have children once they're rotated home to train new pilots.

Any system which bars women from combat is grossly inefficient compared to one that does not.

The military today is, in complete defiance of Goober5000's predictions, opening as many roles as it can to traditionally sanctioned people: women and homosexuals. This is because they need talent.

[Goober5000]

The military today is, in complete defiance of Goober5000's predictions, opening as many roles as it can to traditionally sanctioned people: women and homosexuals. This is because they need talent.

I should clarify that my prediction is for an extrapolated scenario during the era of FreeSpace when the Terran and Vasudan species are facing the real possibility of extinction, not the present day when the human species is unthreatened and thriving.

Furthermore, the "homosexuals in the military" topic is not relevant because this scenario explicitly deals with the preservation of the species.  There would be no restriction on homosexuals serving in this situation, for this reason; because they are not biologically critical to producing children, as women are.

[General Battuta]

Homosexuals are an example of a class socially barred from military service, then allowed in by need. This supports my thesis that under pressure the military will expand eligibility, not restrict it.

My prediction is also for an extrapolated scenario when the human species is facing extinction (though you have yet to prove that this is so.) Please reread my previous post. You will find your points countered.

[General Battuta]

To add to an overwhelming body of evidence.

Operation Thresher killed 504 pilots. Assuming 1/5th female, going off personas, that means 100 dead women in combat roles. We can throw in a few hundred more for warships if you like.

That many women are killed in car crashes every minute in Terran space, I'm sure.

Demographic impact? None.

Furthermore.

Pilots can start at age 19. They will be home to serve as flight instructors within a few years. They can have as many kids as they like then.

Fitness cost of women in combat? Zero. Even if none of them have kids? Still zero on the demographic level. There aren't enough pilots to make a difference.

[Black Wolf]

Keep in mind, it's fairly obvious that they don't bar women from combat in Freespace - not in the TV War (We have Admiral Shima and the Riviera Station comm officer as the most obvious evidence of that), nor against the Shivans, nor in FS2. But it's also - although not proven - I think strongly indicated that there is still a gender disparity skewed towards males in all three of these eras. The reasons for this - if we ignore any real-world concerns like [V] anticipating a mostly male audience - aren't elaborated on, so we need to guess at them. Personally, I think it's quite likely that you would see a degree of government encouragement of large families and women staying - if not at-home in the chained to the sink sense, at least at home in the "not deployed to Beta Aquilae on a destroyer" sense, for many of the reason's Goobers mentioned. It's not like governments don't encourage population growth through large families - it's happening all over the western world (and first world asian countries like Japan and South Korea), including here in Australia - when you're going through a 14 year long war, such government encouragement would run directly counter to all the recruitment efforts, so you'd lose some of the female recruits through conflicting influences right there. Anyway, if you have an alternative explanation for what we see ingame, I'd love to hear it. No sarcasm or anything, I honestly would.

[EDIT]Wait... you're going with 1/5th... OK... so I'm not exactly sure what this argument is about anymore. Never mind then. Carry on.

[General Battuta]

I did some calculations.

If Operation Thresher happened every day for 15 years you would only lose 545,000 women. In 15 years. Not demographically significant at all.

If the Epsilon Pegasi massacre - 16,000 dead women - happened every week for all 18 months of the NTF war, you'd lose about 1 million women. That sounds like a lot, right?

We lost 50 times that to the Spanish flu in 1918. That was 3% of Earth's population at the time...and that population was only 1.6 billion.

No major demographic consequences. No move for crazy breeding. In fact, get this: the Spanish Flu killed mostly young adults, and did so in a 9 month span, just like a bad part of a war. Nobody noticed. Deaths from the flu were confused with deaths from the war.

BlackWolf: I have no issue with promoting big families. What I have an issue with is the suggestion that qualified women would be in any way, directly or indirectly, barred from combat. Goober argues that in 'real life FreeSpace' they would.

I think by now the demographic argument for this concept has been thoroughly trashed.

[Herra Tohtori]

Raising a family is not "imprisonment".  And as I said to Battuta, it would arise naturally from the culture; it wouldn't have to be forced by the government.

What would arise from the culture spontaneously would of course happen. We just have no way of knowing how the culture would evolve to that point. We might have our expectations, but no one has a way of knowing for sure. Especially in a fictional setting such as FreeSpace, where it can be pretty much how ever the writer wants to fluff it out to be.

I do not know how exactly GTA as a society and culture exists. What we see on screen does suggest some sort of gender disparity like has been pointed out.

Personally, I believe the division between gender roles in professions will continue to diminish, barring any unforeseen events of ultraconservative patriarchal authority figures becoming/staying a prominent factor of humanity's future. And that is something I do not want to happen, so I prefer not to consider that a viable option (YMMV). So no, I don't think the culture would develope into a direction where it would self-impose restrictions for females on combat zones. If this prediction of mine is correct, it would still be possible that there would be a lesser enlistment percentage throughout the female portion of population, but not in such significant numbers as today.

However, earlier on I got the impression that you would advocate officially banning or strongly discouraging females of working in combat sorties (by the virtue of protecting them since only they can give birth to next generation of humans). That would be one way of government sanctioning and, if the underlying logic would be to protect the humanity's ability to reproduce, it wouldn't really work to that end for the reasons that surfaced in the discussion so far; the risk to humanity's reproduction ability by having women in combat is smaller than the risk by not having them there and having less capable men fill the void, which could cause reduced performance and results, and ultimately might even tip the scales so that the faction ends up losing critical engagements and possibly alter the course of the war.

Apparently, others had the same misconception and responded on that assumption.


The biggest issue here are numbers and economical/industrial basis for space warfare.

I don't think it's in any way plausible to have a space fleet that would require an amount of enlisted personnel so big that it would put a significant percentage of the female population at risk, even if the whole fleet was solely made of females. Even if the fate of the whole humanity were in risk, it would be impossible to send even a quarter of whole population to fight effectively against the threat. Industrial capacity could not produce that amount of hardware, and the personnell could not be trained rapidly enough. Having one per cent of the population in combat would be a massive fleet in a population of billions.

Meh. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore.