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[Eleas]

Alternatively, you could design it around the concept of Frank Miller's 300, and assign your various dwarves to labors like sparring, formation training, full-body waxing and lingering hugs.

Nice one.

Oh, I almost forgot! You have to have a circular well right next to your trade depot.

Because of strong gender roles and tradition. Modern fantasy dwarves are actually based on the prussians.

Interesting. Haven't heard that one before, but it doesn't seem implausible that modern Fantasy dwarves have prussian influences. Offhand, I know they're related to old Norse dökkálfar (in other words, they're connected to elves and gnomes), and that Tolkien was influenced by Hebrew for his dwarven language. And now I'm visualizing a parade of goose-stepping dwarves with spiked steel helmets and names like Manfred von Granate-Sprengschtoss. We may finally have discovered a use for those drums...

On the other hand, I love the idea of dwarves in picklehauben...

Gah, you beat me to it.


(It's weird though. While a lot of interesting stuff has been done with dwarves and orcs in Fantasy, I don't think you could say the same thing about elves. They're perfect and magical, sure, but dwarves are greedy and pig-headed, which is much more fun. Or what do you guys think?)

[Befenismor]

Aren't elves usually almost extinct in fantasy? They're also weak and discriminated against. Far from perfect.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

more interesting is debatable, but the archetypes of elves have been subverted a lot more often than the archetypes of dwarves, refer to dwarves are all the same, contrast with our elves are better

[Eleas]

Conceded on the being interesting front. I suppose what I ought to have said is that dwarves seem more elemental, at least to my mind. There's almost always an aspect of idealization involved in describing an elf. Conversely, I have no problem envisioning a dwarf having a crappy day at work.


Someone spoke earlier about the breakdown of genders/social standing in a fortress (presumably we're talking a 13-14th century European castle or burgh). It would depend a lot on whether the fortress was on war footing. Generally though, we can assume that the actual fighters in the castle were not in majority. In order to fight efficiently and well, the defenders of a fortress would require a large support system in place, consisting of menials (serfs and drudges) as well as specialized craftspeople (blacksmiths, fletchers, carpenters, masons, the works). Servants were generally drawn from nearby villages, though some undoubtedly resided permanently in the castle. Should an attack come, it was expected for the peasants to be allowed shelter; this made sense because few lords would want their source of income - grain through taxation - to be killed off. So a castle would at the very least have a large contingent of staff, many of them female (maids, washers, etc).

As for life in the keep itself, well, you were safe and secure and probably gained prestige. But space was at a premium, if slightly less so for the lord's family. Separate rooms were rare (the Norman keep that I visited had exactly one private room, an alcove for the priest adjacent to the chapel). This is another area where Dwarf Fortress improves on reality.

[G-Flex]

Women are capable of manual labour, but certainly not in the mines. Even in this day and age if you visit a mine there will be no female there. I guarantee it. Men are simply more suitable for the job. Why would you hire a female miner when females are physically inferior? Engineering is different, though.. not sure why it's considered a man's job.
Cooking is a unisex job and I never said otherwise, but mining, masonry, carpentry, smithing are all obviously male jobs. And that's what a fortress is all about, right?

Are you serious?

I'll give you that men and women are physically different on average; that's obvious. However, there are also plenty of scrawny men (I count myself among these) and plenty of sturdily-built women. Female mine workers are an extreme minority but they do exist. Due to both culture and physiological variations, obviously female mine workers will be rarer than male ones, but there's no reason why they shouldn't or can't exist.

Masonry and carpentry and smithing are even worse examples, quite honestly. They're physical labor, sure, but women are, in fact, capable of physical work and generally have done so throughout history, modern and post-Depression "homemaker" trends notwithstanding.

I also consider your use of the term "physically inferior" kind of insulting. Saying their bodies are geared toward different things on average would at least make some sense, but "inferior"? Seriously?

[Number4]

I also consider your use of the term "physically inferior" kind of insulting. Saying their bodies are geared toward different things on average would at least make some sense, but "inferior"? Seriously?

Sorry, but: Fuck political correctness, yes. Women are on average inferior physically and no amount of goodwill towards perfect equality can change that. Males have advantages in almost every physical discipline imaginable, you don't see many females in unrestricted sports, do you?

If your life would depend on a random physical task and you had to choose one random person, would you rather choose a random male or a random female?

[Eleas]

I'm curious which superior trait should I then be most proud of: my relative weakness to g-forces, my greater risk of suffering color blindness or hemophilia, or that smashing sex-linked degenerative muscle disease?

I may have forgotten a thousand other factors, but I will say this: as you enjoy evolutionary explanations you might consider that if procreation is all that matters to the human male (as you argued in the other thread), then the male should be utterly inferior. After all, the female is the one who would (according to the script) have to stay with and protect the child, whereas the male would already have spawned and left and could be, evolutionarily speaking, discarded.

(Or possibly serve as food. That's how certain spiders worked it out.)

[G-Flex]

Sorry, but: Fuck political correctness, yes. Women are on average inferior physically

Define "inferior". And no, it does not mean "worse at professional sports".

I may have forgotten a thousand other factors, but I will say this: as you enjoy evolutionary explanations you might consider that if procreation is all that matters to the human male (as you argued in the other thread), then the male should be utterly inferior. After all, the female is the one who would (according to the script) have to stay with and protect the child, whereas the male would already have spawned and left and could be, evolutionarily speaking, discarded.

(Or possibly serve as food. That's how certain spiders worked it out.)

This is a major problem with evolutionary explanations for physical and psychological trends. It's very, very easy to come up with whatever hypothetical evolutionary explanation you want without being expected to test or verify any of it, so all options are open. Even if something is the result of environment/society/upbringing, you can come up with a plausible-sounding evolutionary-minded "reason" for it and face surprisingly little question. There's a word for this: "Just-so stories". If you really felt like it, you could come up with some "evolutionary" reason right now for, say, girls wearing pink as infants, and it would be about as verifiable as most of the junk evolutionary theory that's thrown out there.


It should also be stated that evolutionary explanations for human traits is complicated by factors most people utterly fail to take into account, such as the fact that we're a social species, meaning that we have more use (even to our own genetic propagation) than simply successfully reproducing, and whether a trait is "negative" or not can be surprisingly hard to ascertain, since in group dynamics, a trait that is negative to the individual but still positive to his group (yes, such traits exist) can be, on the whole, beneficial towards his (and his group's) genetic stock. In this sense, the trait is even beneficial to him, since it makes him valuable.

I'm curious which superior trait should I then be most proud of: my relative weakness to g-forces, my greater risk of suffering color blindness or hemophilia, or that smashing sex-linked degenerative muscle disease?

Oh, and as long as we're throwing around current norms as if they're definitely-for-sure biological imperatives, we might as well mention the lower life expectancy and higher risk of certain forms of cancer and cardiovascular conditions.

[Number4]

I may have forgotten a thousand other factors, but I will say this: as you enjoy evolutionary explanations you might consider that if procreation is all that matters to the human male (as you argued in the other thread), then the male should be utterly inferior. After all, the female is the one who would (according to the script) have to stay with and protect the child, whereas the male would already have spawned and left and could be, evolutionarily speaking, discarded.
(Or possibly serve as food. That's how certain spiders worked it out.)

First, make a difference between biological factors and reality. I do certainly support full equality and I'm VERY far removed from biological thinking. And yet, society thinks men should be rather discarded. Think Titanic or "another bomb attack, women and children died."
I'm fully opposed against such thinking btw.

I'm curious which superior trait should I then be most proud of: my relative weakness to g-forces, my greater risk of suffering color blindness or hemophilia, or that smashing sex-linked degenerative muscle disease?

Of course, those are the most important factors, not for example being able to carry more, run farther, greater endurance etc.? Yes, men aren't perfect. Yes, women are better in certain physical aspects. But in most --!!physical!!-- aspects, especially considering a dwarfhuman fortress, males are simply superior!
But this is NO reason for any discrimination. We are simply born this way. Neither of the genders is superior because what defines a "superior" human are deeds, not proportion of musclemass.

[Vercingetorix]

Out of curiosity, are there differences between male and female dwarves in that respect?  I haven't noticed any real difference between them based upon combat effectiveness in my military.

[Number4]

As far as I know, females plop down children and that's it. I like it that way.

[G-Flex]

And yet, society thinks men should be rather discarded. Think Titanic or "another bomb attack, women and children died."
I'm fully opposed against such thinking btw.

Even if that is a symptom of misandry, it's a symptom of misogyny as well. Part of the attitudes you're stating come from the idea that women are creatures incapable of protecting or taking care of themselves. It's a patronizing attitude. It's less about men being treated as disposable and more about women being treated as children; there's a reason it's "women and children first"; they're both being treated as helpless. Of course, the other side to this is that men are expected to sometimes be far more capable than they actually are, and female-on-male crime (and especially sexual assault/rape) is trivialized.

That's the thing about gender discrimination; even when you're ostensibly discriminating against a particular gender, it can still wind up hurting both.

Out of curiosity, are there differences between male and female dwarves in that respect?  I haven't noticed any real difference between them based upon combat effectiveness in my military.

The women don't have beards, and they have children; that's it as far as I know. I'm pretty sure other playable races are similar in that regard, in that there's no sexual dimorphism of consequence.

[Vercingetorix]

The women don't have beards, and they have children; that's it as far as I know. I'm pretty sure other playable races are similar in that regard, in that there's no sexual dimorphism of consequence.

Okay, that makes sense.  I wasn't sure.

[khearn]

LOLWUT it was proven a long time ago that females are much less tolerant towards pain.

Citation, please.

[Sscral]

That is correct, but no physically fit female will go to work in the mines. Do you know how long it takes for a female to reach the average man's physical strength? There must be another reason why there are no female miners, besides gender role and tradition.

Women faced different demands during the industrial age to those that they face today. Women of the working classes would usually be expected to go out to work, often in the mills or mines.

http://www.schoolshistory.org.uk/IndustrialRevolution/womenandchildren.htm

Women and children are shorter and therefore more suited to working in mines.