Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

  More recently, the advent since 2000 or so of the kind of networked games in which hundreds if not thousands of players can participate simultaneously has made a difference. Popular games such as World of Warcraft and Warhammer do not try to capture anything that exists or could exist in reality. Instead they focus on goblins, dwarves, elves, dragons, and similar imaginary beings. Creating relationships among these creatures is what they are all about. In these games onscreen fights, and there are quite a few of them, are waged as much by means of magic – which, not being dependent on physical strength, women know they can wield just as well as men – as with the aid of conventional weapons and martial skills so characteristic of men’s games.

  Furthermore, World of Warcraft and Warhammer differ from other onscreen games – those that focus on both strategy and simulators of every kind – in that, like Excalibur, they put a heavy emphasis on socializing. One estimate is that as many as 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are female. However, others put it at less than half of that. The difference is explained by the fact that, online, anybody can adopt any identity he or she chooses. Apparently many of the female avatars floating about are actually created by males who use this method in order to “realize” their fantasies. It has been claimed that big-breasted avatars are particularly likely to be created by males.66 On the other hand, female players are unlikely to take on male avatars.

  One survey suggests that female players in these games tend to be rather older than male ones. They are also much more likely to enter play along with a real-life romantic partner.67 Some, indeed, consider wargame romance better than the real thing, particularly in the early stages.68 One female expert tells us that “while most female gamers say they love the competitive element of the game, the social aspect is equally important. Women say they can catch up with friends, flirt, and even find love in this virtual world. It’s like Facebook. But with dragons. And swords.”69 Another wrote that a woman who enters online games of this kind had better be prepared to fight off the guys, who probably outnumber her by between three to two to six to one, with a stick. Her best strategy is to join one of the larger guilds and pair with others to go on mission.70 One New Mexico woman became so caught up in World of Warcraft that she allowed her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter to starve and dehydrate to death.71

  In sharp contrast to the above stands a game called Whyville. While involving no combat, it enables players to design their own avatars – modding, as it is sometimes called. Using the avatars, people gather, meet others both real and virtual, visit all sorts of secret places, share impressions, and expand their knowledge about themselves and others. In the process they can even earn a regular “salary.” An estimated 68 percent of those who play it are women. Another series of non-combat videogames is The Sims. Reputed to be the most popular in history, it is also played predominantly by women. In general, one female games designer says, female players tend to avoid head-to-head confrontations. Instead they look for other ways to resolve conflicts.72

  Yet another reason for women’s disinterest may be the link that has always existed between the games and real-life war, a field from which women have traditionally been all but excluded. What is the point of spending time and effort preparing for an activity in which one is not supposed to participate? Another is men’s frequent reluctance to allow women to share their activities even when the latter are meant for entertainment only. Such participation, they believe, is very likely to cause the value of their own accomplishments to be questioned by both men and women.73 However, as the history of chess in particular shows, these two aspects only form part of the story and possibly not even the most important part. Even if they did apply, in many cases there would be little to prevent women from designing their own games and forming their own organizations for playing them against each other to their hearts’ contents. Rarely, though, have they done so; instead, some of them complain about men who play “commando-type games” in which they themselves cannot, or will not, participate.74

  Whereas men seem to be more interested in playing games that involve fighting, women like those that provide them with the opportunity to socialize, interact with one another, and reach some kind of desirable outcome. One might, perhaps, go further still: whereas for many men fighting is socializing – albeit a highly destructive form of it in which deaths replace gifts – with women that is much less the case. Judging by observations of our closest animal relatives, i.e. primates, probably there is a link between this fact and the biological differences between the sexes, their dimorphism in particular. When one is relatively weak, physically speaking, trying to use force against greater force is simply stupid. Turning this argument around, ultimately the real reason why so many women take leave of gaming in general, and wargaming in particular, at the onset of puberty may be because, to speak with Crawford’s wife and others,75 they see these activities as somewhat silly – which, in comparison with leading a full social life and especially the great task of obtaining a partner, conceiving children, carrying them, delivering them, and looking after them, they undoubtedly are. Could it be, in other words, that most women are just too sensible to play with war?

  Play and display

  Though women may have been reluctant to play with war, to the extent that they did play they often did so at the behest of men. What attracted men was less the women’s prowess at fighting than their sex appeal. For reasons that Freud might explain, from the day the first Greek artist took up his brush to paint the first Amazon, the combination of cleavage and weapons of every kind has always been a fascinating one. Talking of the Amazons, indeed, the later the date of the image the more they displayed their charms and the less they fought.76 The link retains its potency to the present day.

  Legend apart, there seem to have been few if any cases when ancient women encountered each other in single combat as men sometimes did. However, on occasion they were made to don arms – light ones, we are told, made especially for them – and put on a performance, albeit one that had to more to do with a dance than with a real fight. Xenophon in the Anabasis describes one such spectacle. It was organized by an Arcadian officer in a Greek army in Asia Minor. He had a slave girl in his possession take up a shield and perform in front of some Paphlagonian chieftains. The latter, having watched the show, applauded. Being in a jocular mood, they asked their guests whether they also had women fight alongside them in real-life war.77

  In ancient Rome the most desirable single quality men were expected to possess was virtus. The corresponding quality of women was pudicitia, best translated as a combination of modesty, chastity, and sexual virtue in general. Finding expression in modes of dress and behavior, it was exemplified by Lucretia. Legend had her killing herself after having been subjected, through no fault of her own, to stuprum, a shameful act; in its personified form, pudicitia was worshipped as a goddess and two different temples were erected to honor her.78 A man, even a criminal or a slave, who fought in the arena thereby obtained a last desperate chance to display his virtus and redeem himself. Not so a woman, who, whatever else she may have stood to gain, instantly lost any pudicitia she may ever have had. Instead of upholding an ideal, she discarded it. Publius Sempronius Sophus, who was consul in 268 BC, divorced his wife merely for watching some games without obtaining his permission first.79

  A relief discovered at Halicarnassus, the present day Bodrum in southwestern Anatolia, shows women gladiators in action.80 Originally presented to the British Museum in 1846, to date it remains the only one of its kind. Who set it up and why is unknown. However, it may well have formed part of a series commemorating events in the arena. At the top, a Greek inscription tells us that the two women received an honorable discharge that was often the result of a draw. They are presented armed in the normal manner of provocatores complete with loincloths, greaves, arm guards, and shields. Conspicuously absent is the breastplate (pectorale), causing the women to fight bare-breasted; most unusually, helmets are not worn either. M
odern archaeologists have spun theories to explain the latter fact in particular. Yet to anyone familiar with subsequent and present-day representations of fighting women it hardly comes as a surprise: it is primarily their long hair which distinguishes such women from men.

  The really interesting thing about the tablet, seldom noted, is that, as their names indicate, what we see is not a straightforward fight but a reenactment of the mythological combat between an Amazon – a legendary creature that never existed in reality – and Achilles. On this occasion, it seems, the “normal” world has been put upside down not once but twice: first, by having women fight at all, a fairly rare event that spelt the loss of their chief female quality, that even the Romans, who concerning everything else that took place in the arena were anything but prudish, considered somehow perverted; and second, by having one of them represent not herself but the male hero whose name was a household word throughout the ancient world.

  Modern movies such as Gladiator Eroticus: The Warrior Lesbians and websites such as Gladiator Girls are essentially pornographic by nature. So are some present-day illustrations of their fights.81 In fact the term “gladiators” has often been applied to all sorts of half-nude performing women regardless of whether they did or did not engage in actual fighting. One company’s website offers customers a “gladiator girls” swimsuit competition. A second tries to sell them “gladiator girl fancy dress” to wear on “wild nights” ahead of them, and a third tells them how to prepare a gladiator girl costume for Halloween. Briefly, in many, if not most, cases the combination of “female” with “gladiator” has to do as much with sex as with combat, real or simulated. At a guess, the same was probably true in the ancient world.

  The Halicarnassus tablet apart, classical antiquity has not left us with any images of females engaged in combat sports (though we do have representations of Atalante, the virgin runner who did not want to marry, grappling the male hero Peleus). This fact did not prevent subsequent artists, nineteenth-century ones in particular, from using their imaginations to paint “Spartan” girls doing so. In China, female wrestling seems to have been popular during the Three Kingdoms era (AD 220–80) and again during the reign of Emperor Song Shenzong (AD 968–1022). In both periods it was a question of exhibition matches that involved sex as much as violence.82 Several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian, French, and German artists produced beautiful sculptures of naked women, or nymphs as they are sometimes called, wrestling.83 Apparently such matches, combining naturalism, drama, and eroticism, were a popular form of entertainment in some contemporary courts.

  The artists in question appear to have struggled with a dilemma. They wanted to make the female figures appear big and strong – close inspection reveals that some are of truly Amazonian proportions. The problem was to do so without stripping them of their sex appeal. In some of these and subsequent works, it is hard to say whether the women are engaged in wrestling, bathing, dancing, or a not so thinly disguised lesbian love act.84 Eighteenth-century Japan had female sumo wrestlers. Osaka in particular was known for the brothels where many matches were held. From there they spread to Edo (Tokyo) and other towns where they were sometimes associated with Shinto rites. To make the fights more equal, some women had to fight blind men. As in ancient Rome, the authorities regarded the shows as immoral and repeatedly imposed bans on them. Finally prohibited in 1926, they have recently experienced a revival.85

  In England, too, women sometimes engaged each other in wrestling matches or gave non-lethal public dueling demonstrations for payment. For example, the London Journal of June 1722 provides an account of “boxing in public at the Bear-garden . . . When two of the feminine gender appeared for the first time on the Theatre of War at Hockley in the Hole, and maintained the battle with great valor for a long time, to the no small satisfaction of the spectators.”86 Hockley was a polygonal structure, probably located in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, where low-class forms of entertainment such as bull- and bear-baiting had traditionally been held. From other sources we know that the fights, some of which involved black African women, took place on a raised platform like the ones used in modern boxing and “professional” wrestling.87

  Similar shows continued to be held throughout the century. An advertisement for one of them read: “I, Ann Field of Stoke-Newington, ass-driver, well known for my abilities in boxing in my own defence wherever it happened in my way, having been affronted by Mrs Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of the best skill in boxing, for ten pounds, fair rise and fall.” Rising to the challenge, Mrs Stokes promised to hit her rival harder than the latter had ever beaten her asses. In 1792, two women fought each other at Chelmsford while their husbands acted as seconds and egged them on. “Being stripped, without caps, and their hair closely tied up, they set to, and for forty-five minutes supported a most desperate conflict” until the spectators separated them. In other fights, too, at least some of the women were stripped to the waist. By that time spreading middle-class respectability was causing a growing number of people to take a jaundiced view of female boxers. Among the first to condemn them was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) whose book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, is sometimes described as the most important feminist tract in history.88 To her they were one of the innumerable methods men use in order “to degrade the sex from which they pretend to receive the chief pleasure in life.”

  Such strictures notwithstanding, female fencing, boxing, and wrestling matches retained some popularity. One painting of such a match, entitled An Affair of Honor and showing two topless courtesans going after one another rapier in hand, was produced by Émile Bayard (1837–91). Exhibited at the 1884 Salon, so popular did it and its counterpart, Reconciliation, which showed one of the women (still topless) dying and the other (equally so) tenderly bending over her, become that they were not only shown in France but sent to travel abroad as well.89 Many well-known artists, including Eugène Delacroix, Camille Pissarro, Aristide Maillol, Max Bruning, Egon Schiele, and Jean Veber, also produced images of wrestling women. To the extent that the episodes they showed were real rather than imaginary, most of these encounters took place in brothels, saloons, and the vaudeville circuit. Usually they involved low-class women who fought for payment in front of crowds consisting primarily of men: a single match might earn such a woman as much as a laborer could make in several weeks. However, there were always exceptions. Like the men, the boxing women fought bare-knuckled. Judging by drawings, this often resulted in nasty bruises all over their bodies.

  In France, Germany, and England before 1914 teams of female wrestlers and boxers were fairly commonplace. Shown on the postcards they or their managers commissioned in order to advertise them, they were often hired to exhibit their prowess at fairs or else at private parties.90 Real or simulated – the latter is sometimes known as “foxy boxing” – women’s boxing still retains some popularity, especially among what one female writer has called “leering males” who, seeking “candy for the eyes,” fill the stands.91 They walk into the arena in high heels, wave, blow kisses – imagine a male boxer doing that – and do whatever they can to put their charms on display before the fighting begins. One female boxer is said to have fought one thousand exhibition matches against men but only eighteen real ones against women.92 Another favorite twentieth-century form of female combat appears to be mud wrestling. Some matches are known to have been held at least as far back as the 1930s. Apparently they owe their popularity to a 1966 movie, Mondo Freudo. Classified as a “shockumentary,” the film took viewers on a “hidden camera” tour to expose all kinds of “bizarre” sexual practices of which the “combat sport” in question was considered one.

  Spreading from the United States to the rest of the world, contests of this kind have become more popular still. Nowadays most are held in specially designed rings made of bales of straw. Others take place in a sort of rubber bath with thick inflatable walls. Normally the material used to make mu
d is sodium bentonite clay, a sticky, gray-yellow material that will swell to twice its size when water is added to it. Here and there other slippery materials such as gelatin, pudding, creamed corn, and mashed potatoes have been substituted. However it is done, all contestants enter the ring (occasionally fountains) barefoot and scantily clothed – this applies to both women, the majority, and the men against whom they are sometimes made to “fight.” On other occasions it is a question of several women taking on a single man. In theory the objective is to win the match. In reality it is to entertain the crowd by combining a display of mostly female flesh with humiliation. Why so many men want to humiliate women or else see them humiliate each other is a question that a Darwin, a Nietzsche, or a Freud might try to answer. Here all one can say is that the desire to do so undoubtedly exists and that female combat sports represent one important proof of that fact.93

  Some of the larger shows draw tens of thousands of spectators, all screaming their heads off. In the words of one, presumably male, advertiser, “sexy angry half naked girls kicking each other’s ass in the mud for your entertainment . . . can it get any better than that?” Like male combatants in boxing and wrestling matches, female participants in mud wrestling will boast, dance, and prance in an attempt to entertain the crowd and gain a psychological advantage before the match itself gets under way. Unlike the men they will try to make their shows as sexy as possible, thrusting out their breasts, fondling them – one team of mud wrestlers calls itself the Chicago Knockers – and engaging in something very similar to lesbian sex. Some promoters make the link explicit, seeking to attract customers by promising mud wrestling by lesbian women. If, as sometimes happens, the upper parts of their bikinis are torn off in the tussle, they do not seem to mind too much. Here and there, nude mud wrestling shows have been put on offer. Dirty talk and name-calling abound. So do breast slapping and grabbing, nipple twisting, pulling at hair (including pubic hair), and even aggressive sexual acts in the form of violent kissing, sitting across each other’s faces, and more. Some matches end in a shuddering orgasm, real or simulated. Had similar techniques been employed in a male homosexual or heterosexual context, no doubt they would have caused the police to be called in and the performers carted off to jail. Whatever the precise way things are done, rarely do participants suffer injuries of any kind. Nor does it look as if anybody cares who “won” a match and who “lost” it.