On the whole, women’s own attitudes in respect of dueling were ambivalent. A woman who suffered an insult through no fault of her own could feel proud in having some male volunteer to defend her honor. As Georg Weerth, a well-known German writer and a close friend of Marx and Engels, put it in 1849: “Is there any way [but for the duel] that men can give women greater pleasure than by proving to them that they are men?”139 On the other hand, a woman who had brought about the affair through her own loose morals could expect to carry the blame. If a fatal injury resulted, she might well be ostracized.140 Men of the pre-Civil War American South were said to be particularly touchy about their women’s honor. Conversely, Southern women sometimes insisted that their men challenge or accept a challenge and fight on their behalf. Rather like the Spartan woman who demanded that her son return from war with his shield or on it, one belle wrote that being the widow of a brave man was better than being the wife of a coward. Another threatened to take her husband’s place if, claiming illness, he did not show up. Among the many duels fought by the future president Andrew Jackson at least one involved a slur cast on his wife, Rachel. The affair ended with Jackson gravely wounded and his opponent, Charles Dickinson, dead.141
Some duels may have been arranged without the women’s knowledge, but again such cases are hard to document. Perhaps situations in which wives avenged themselves on their husbands or other male relatives by arranging things in such a way as to compel them to fight were more common.142 Even when female honor was not directly involved, many duels originated in social events such as theater shows, balls, tea parties, and the like when people of both sexes intermingled. The impact the presence of women could have on men’s propensity to quarrel, refuse to compromise, and challenge each other hardly needs explaining and was much commented upon at the time. For example, the English newspaper owner−editor Rachel Beer (1857–1928) wondered why men should consider themselves so much more attractive when they quarreled.
The demise of the duel, as well as the legal changes that led to it and the social ones that surrounded it, marked the end of a chapter. For good or ill, perhaps for the first time in history men found themselves in a situation where society no longer permitted them to engage in any kind of wargames in which they might deliberately set out to shed each other’s blood. Increasingly, even accidental deaths suffered in the course of the rougher games were likely to result in investigations, lawsuits, and punishments. Numerous attempts were made to abolish those games altogether, a fact that some might attribute to the “civilizing process.” All that was left were chess and Reisswitz-type games – subsequently supplemented and largely replaced by free games, BOGSATs, and computer games – on the one hand and combat and contact sports on the other. Probably owing to their overwhelmingly intellectual character, the first four have never roused nearly as much enthusiasm, or attracted nearly as many spectators, male or female, as did the more bloody wargames that have been discussed in the present volume. The necessary drama and shots of adrenalin simply do not appear to be there. Much the same applies to paintball, laser tag, and reenactments of every kind.
The situation in respect of combat and contact sports is entirely different. Women have long formed a minority among the spectators who attend the games in question.143 Attempting to attract more of them, here and there organizers have often issued them with free tickets, sometimes with success, perhaps more often without. Being a lone woman among a crowd made up of wildly cheering or groaning men is not easy. On the other hand, women who do attend often engage in blatant sexual displays with the objective of drawing attention to themselves. Rarely, it seems, do men enjoy seeing women tearing each other apart in earnest. When such displays do take place they tend to be terminated by the male spectators, which may well account for the very low number of women killed in duels. For whatever deep-seated psychological reason, though, those spectators do like having them humiliate themselves and each other. Doing so is somehow considered erotic, to the point that many videos of the events in question border on pornography if they do not actually contain it.
For their part, many women are not at all averse – to put it mildly – to watching men physically tackling each other and pummeling each other half to death. Proceeding backward through duels, tournaments, and judicial combat all the way to the gladiators of ancient Rome, they were almost always present as spectators. Sometimes they organized the fights in question and instigated them. At other times they were offered, or offered themselves, as the stakes in them. Quite often they went wild over men actually killing one another. If, like male deer fighting over a female, they do so as part of their competition for the women’s own bodies, so much the better.
Now, as in ancient times, women applaud the male players during the matches and swamp the victors with their attentions during the intervals between them. For good or ill, perhaps in no respect do wargames, especially the more strenuous and more bloody among them, mirror war more closely than precisely in all that concerns the relationship between men and women.
1 E. A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 56 ; B. Mitchell, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, Washington DC: Regnery, 1997, p. 4 .
2 J. Hendershott, “Annoying Reenacting Types ,” at: http://wesclark.com/jw/annoying_2.html.
3 See Clash of Steel Reenactment Groups, at www.clash-of-steel.org/pages/links_groups.php?cat=ww2.
4 Thompson, War Games, p. xxi.
5 J. Cassell and H. Jenkins, eds., From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 7–11 .
6 Dunnigan, Wargames Handbook, p. 301.
7 R. Brownlow, “Airsoft Hits the Mark,” Taipei Times, April 19, 2007 .
8 See: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.paintball/browse_thread/thread/5972d15a03499c1b/f2b745c919930a30?pli=1.
9 Wichita Area Airsoft at: http://airsoftwichita.informe.com/20id-airsoft-dt6435.html; Airsoft Reload at: www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2007/08/19/2003374955.
10 R. Baldick, The Duel, London: Chapman & Hall, 1965, p. 177 .
11 Quoted in Holland, Gentlemen’s Blood, p. 81.
12 See for this entire subject Kiernan, The Duel, pp. 133–4.
13 See Julie d’Aubigny, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_d%27Aubigny.
14 A reproduction may be found at: www.kunst-fuer-alle.de/english/art/artist/image/jusepe-de-ribera/7891/49/144263/duelo-de-mujeres/index.htm.
15 See on Talhoffer and his Fechtbuch Hans Talhoffer, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Talhoffer.
16 McCullough, “Female Gladiators in Ancient Rome: Literary Context and Historical Fact,” Classical World, 101, 2, 2008, p. 208 .
17 See Jackson, “Gladiators in Roman Britain,” British Museum Magazine, 38, 2000, p. 18 .
18 Cassius Dio, The History of Rome, 62.3.1; Suetonius, Domitian, 4.1.
19 Cassius Dio, History of Rome, 76.16.1. For this entire question see McCullough, “Female Gladiators in Ancient Rome.”
20 See, for a particularly nasty case of this kind, Martial, Spectacles, in Epigrams, LCL, 1993, 21 .
21 See H. Pringle, “Gladiatrix ,” Discover, 22, 12, December 2001, pp. 48–55 .
22 Herodotus, The Histories, 4.180.2.
23 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, R. P. H. Greene, ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 4.53 .
24 Kelly, Warless Societies, pp. 32, 35–6.
25 See on this e.g. M. Kotler et al., “Sexual Dysfunction in Male Posttraumatic Disorder Patients,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 69, 6, 2000, 309−15 .
26 See on this, most famously, S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, New York: Macmillan, 1913, especially pp. 131–62 , as well as C. Cohn, “‘Clean Bombs’ and Clean Language,” in J. B. Ehlstain and S. Tobias, eds., Women, Militarism, and War, Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990, pp. 33–42 .
27 Thompson, War Games, p. xxiii.
28 Donova
n, Replay, p. 88.
29 B. D. Bartholow and C. A. Anderson, “Effects of Violent Games on Aggressive Behavior: Potential Sex Differences,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 2001, pp. 288–9 .
30 E. A. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations of Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, New York: Basic Books, 1994, p. 37 ; N. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 169–76 ; W. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989, p. 89 ; A. Dundes, From Game to War, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997, pp. 25–46 .
31 C. Loilzos, “An Ethological Study of Chimpanzee Play,” in J. S. Bruner et al., eds., Play: Its Development and Evolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p. 360 .
32 See Aldis, Play Fighting, pp. 101–4.
33 P. Govindarajulu et al., “The Ontogeny of Social Play in a Feral Troop of Vervet Monkeys,” International Journal of Primatology, 14, 5, 1993, p. 716 ; J. B. Lancaster, “Play-Mothering: The Relation between Juvenile Females and Young Infants among Free-Running Vervet Monkeys,” in Bruner et al., Play: Its Development and Evolution, p. 378 .
34 S. S. Suomi and H. F. Harlow, “Monkeys without Play,” in Bruner et al., Play: Its Development and Evolution, p. 490 .
35 M. F. Small, Female Choices: Sexual Behavior of Female Primates, Syracuse, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 189–99 .
36 R. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996, p. 181 .
37 Data summarized in Mitchell, Women in the Military, pp. 141–2.
38 G. Zorpette, “The Mystery of Muscle,” Scientific American, 10, 2, Summer 1999, p. 48 ; J. F. Tuten, “The Argument against Female Combatants,” in N. Loring Goldman, ed., Female Soldiers, Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE, 1976, pp. 247–8 .
39 D. Morris, Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior, New York: Abrams, 1977, pp. 239–40 .
40 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, Report to the President, Washington DC: Government Printing Office, p. C-74.
41 Morris, Manwatching, pp. 230–2.
42 D. Kimura, “Sex Differences in the Brain,” Scientific American, 10, 2, Summer 1999, p. 27 .
43 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, Report to the President, p. C-64.
44 Cassius Dio, History of Rome, 61.17.3 and 7516.1.
45 R. Fine, The Psychology of the Chess Player, New York: Ishi, 1967, p. 25 ; J. Shahade, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport, Los Angeles, CA: Siles Press, 2005, p. 17 .
46 M. Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 57 .
47 Mai und Beaflor, W. Vollmer, ed., Leipzig: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1848, lines 230–6 .
48 Anne de France, Les enseignements d’Anne de France . . . à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon, Nabu Press, 2010 [1878], part 1, p. 9 .
49 See on these paintings M. D. Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly, 47, 3 Autumn, 1994, pp. 556–622 .
50 W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, V.i.174–6.
51 R. L. Oshea, Queening: Chess and Women in Medieval and Renaissance France, MA thesis submitted to Brigham Young University, 2010, pp. 43 , 53–4, at: http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd4018.pdf.
52 See, for Europe, A. L. Prescott, “Translatio Lupae: Du Bellay’s Roman Whore Goes North,” Renaissance Quarterly, 42, 3, Autumn 1989, p. 403 ; for India, see Maharishi Vatsyayan as quoted at: www.shvoong.com/humanities/2082545-arts-womans-02/.
53 Anon., “Coffee History,” at: http://web.archive.org/web/20070915014128/http://www.humboldtcoffee.com/History.htm.
54 Anon., “Chess and the Fair Sex,” Chess Player’s Chronicle, March 15, 1881, pp. 121–2 .
55 Quoted in Anon., “These Women Can Play Chess,” Washington Times, July 15, 1895 .
56 According to Anon., “Famous Woman Chess Players,” at www.chess-sets-and-more.com/women-chess-players.html.
57 See M. Bilalic et al., “Why Are (the Best) Women so Good at Chess? Gender Differences in Intellectual Domains,” 2009 , at: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679077/.
58 Shahade, Chess Bitch, pp. 154–5.
59 Ibid., p. 3; R. Kruk, Dame aan Zet/Queen’s Move, The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 2000, p. 46 .
60 See for all of this Shahade, Chess Bitch, pp. 49, 97, 109.
61 See Cassell and Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, pp. ii, 48, 50, 53.
62 Lee McEnnay Caraher in Cassell and Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, p. 204; P. M. Greenfield, “Video Games as Cultural Artifacts,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 15, 1, January−March 1994, pp. 3–12 .
63 Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, ch. 8.
64 Brenda Laurel in Cassell and Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, pp. 122–3.
65 J. Kim, “Gender Disparity in RPGs,” 2005, at: www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/gender/disparity.html .
66 C. Pearce and Artemisia, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2009, p. 22 .
67 N. Yee, “Maps of Digital Desires: Explaining the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games,” in Y. B. Kafai et al., eds., Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008, pp. 84, 85 .
68 S. Rosenbloom, “It’s Love at First Kill,” New York Times, April 22, 2011 .
69 P. Frangoul, “The Women Finding Love in the World of Warcraft,” The Times, February 25, 2010 .
70 B. Childs, “Felicia Day Explains How to Meet Girls in World of Warcraft,” November 24, 2008 , at: www.asylum.com/2008/11/24/felicia-day-explains-how-to-meet-girls-in-world-of-warcraft/.
71 Associated Press, “New Mexico Mom Gets 25 Years for Starving Daughter,” June 3, 2011, at http://beta.news.yahoo.com/mexico-mom-gets-25-years-starving-daughter-145411042.html.
72 Sheri Graner Ray, quoted in Kafai et al., Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, p. 322.
73 See, most trenchantly, M. Mead, Male and Female, London: Gollancz, 1949, pp. 159–60 .
74 J. Webster, Shaping Women’s Work: Gender, Employment and Information Technology, London: Longman, 1996, p. 63 .
75 Gisela Gresser, nine-time American women’s champion, as quoted in Shahade, Chess Bitch, p. 156.
76 See W. B. Tyrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 44–5 .
77 Xenophon, Anabasis, LCL, 1961, 6.1.5–13 .
78 See, on the nature of pudicitia, R. Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 37–77 , 186, 346.
79 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, 6.3.12.
80 See, for the details, K. Coleman, “Missio at Halicarnassus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 100, 2000, pp. 487–500 .
81 See Single Female Combat Club, “The Bravest Women the World Has Ever Known,” 2011, at: www.fscclub.com/history/gladiatrix-e.shtml.
82 Thanks to my friend, Major Dr. Li Ting Ting, for pointing this out to me.
83 See, for pictures, Old Time Female Combat Club, “Old Time Female Combatants,” at: www.fscclub.com/history/zhened-old2-e.shtml.
84 See Female Single Combat Club, “Motion and Fighting in Fine Arts,” 2011, at: www.fscclub.com/muse/dynamics3-e.shtml.
85 Chie Ikkai, “Women Sumo Wrestlers in Japan,” International Journal of Sport and Health Science, 1, 1, March 2003, pp. 178–81 .
86 Quoted in D. Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650−1850, London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 125–6 .
87 Herr Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbachs Merkwuerdige Reisen durch Niedersachsen, Holland und Engelland, J. G. Schelhorn, ed., Frankfurt/Main: Gaum, 1753, 2, p. 532 .
88 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Lon
don: Unwin, 1811, p. 33 .
89 The paintings are available at “Master Paintings of the World”: www.iment.com/maida/family/mother/vicars/p177.htm#color.
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