Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Shieldmaidens Continue to Undermine Feminism

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Nov. 14, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

23:07

Shieldmaidens Continue to Undermine Feminism

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	I've resisted the urge to deal with this character for a long time for many different reasons, not the least of which he did an entire series on Purus of Eperos that is, needless to say, riddled with inaccuracies.
	Inability to understand historical context and inability to understand the greater picture of the historical events he was describing.
	But at this point, as people have asked me to respond to him in some way, I'm going to be responding to Sargon of Akkad in this particular video.
	In particular, because it deals with the subject of feminism in terms of him historical reconstruction, and also because I want to demonstrate to people what happens when you let your own personal feelings intrude on what should be as an unbiased as possible look into historical events, historical sources, historical accuracy, and indeed in the archaeological record and what it tells us and how we reconstruct history from it.
	Which are precisely the reasons I'm doing this video as well.
	What a coincidence, Hannibal.
	I'm going to edit out large chunks of your boring, pointless waffle to try and condense your points into something that someone might reasonably want to watch.
	And I just want you to be clear on something.
	Don't ever insult my intelligence like that again.
	I want you to be very clear on one thing, Hannibal.
	I have absolutely no respect for your intelligence.
	You are a fucking moron.
	Ideological bias blinds you from any reasonable assessment of any kind of facts and turns everything you say into just a pure exercise in confirmation bias.
	Can I make that any more clear?
	Sargon of Akkad is taking issue with the fact that we've discovered that Norse warriors, which have been referred to as the female variety as shield maidens, existed and went with the men on raiding parties and took part in combat and things like that.
	Oh, if you assert it, then it must be true.
	Now, this is not news to those of us who look into history and who actually understand history, but it seems to be news to him.
	And the person who wrote this report and the people who covered this report at medievalist.net, when they say, more troubling is the fact that they report the story as if Norse women were actually Viking warriors who took part in the raids and attacks throughout England.
	McLeod's research in no way suggests this.
	Few people have pointed this out online, and one suspects that a few more mainstream news outlets will be sending out similar reports throughout this week.
	Moreover, the social media reaction to these articles has been overwhelmingly positive, but also confirms that many people are being misled into thinking that women were making up half of the number of Viking warriors.
	Hannibal, you fucking idiot.
	You with your ridiculous pro-feminist bias.
	The research does not support your assertions.
	This isn't my assertion.
	This is their assertion.
	They are telling you.
	You are just misrepresenting what they are saying at best and willfully denying it at worst because you are an ideological bigot.
	And it's unwelcome news.
	In other words, he in his misogyny can't accept this idea and then proceeds to engage in half-hearted attempts to dismiss what is said using primary sources that he didn't bother to look into and of which he does not give proper context to so that people can understand what's being talked about.
	Thanks for proving my point.
	So we are not dealing with an unbiased source.
	We are also dealing with, since we're dealing with the primary source, you must always remember the culture of which it was a part.
	And remember its biases also.
	The problem is, like with these individuals who wrote these things down, Sargon is incredibly biased because he's one of these male supremacy nutjobs.
	Male supremacy nutjob.
	That's actually how I introduced myself at Parsis, you know.
	See, here we run into our first example of ethnocentrism.
	You're using the term Lagurtha, which is actually Lagerta, which is a highly Latinized version of Hirdork, which is the Old Norse name for this woman.
	Or rather, let me see if I can pronounce it like Jasmine was telling me to.
	Hirdorthor.
	I think that's how it was, something along those lines.
	It's very different than our own linguistic tradition in terms of Old Norse.
	Wow, that showed me.
	I certainly don't know how to pronounce Lagurtha correctly.
	I just want to point out, though, I think what you just did was cultural appropriation.
	The reason I point this out is because in doing this video, you didn't seem to bother to find out much about the subject matter that you're talking about.
	Shield maidens, in terms of tradition in Old Norse, are as old as the Old Norse tales themselves.
	In fact, there is at least one tale, one epic, I believe, that was written by one of these women.
	So this is not new information to those of us who have bothered to look and/or ascertain what's going on.
	But your implication through the tone of your voice and what you're going to say throughout this video is to downplay that fact.
	I pronounced Lagurtha incorrectly, and then you go on to cite Norse legends as proof that half of Viking armies were composed of women.
	Do you know how stupid you sound?
	You have admitted from the very beginning that the Norse invaders brought their families with them, and by extension admitting that among those families almost certainly were women and children.
	Now, you seem to be mistakenly believing that Norse warriors were a separate class from some other group of people that included women.
	Absolute nonsense.
	I'm saying they are not the same people who are giving birth to children.
	That doesn't preclude these people from doing anything else with their lives.
	But that is not the case.
	When they weren't raiding, they were like any other medieval people in that regard.
	They were hunters, farmers, craftsmen, poets.
	They were shipbuilders.
	It's not like they set aside their identity as people when they became warriors.
	Never said they did, and that still doesn't make half of Viking raiders women.
	Now, in admitting that these women did obviously come with them, we are opening the door to the fact that the ideas behind shield maidens being present in these battles are valid.
	No, we don't, you moron.
	All we're opening the doors to is the fact that Scandinavian families came along after the raiding.
	You have just done that.
	Regardless of whether they brought their families with them or not, does nothing to invalidate the idea that a fair portion of Norse invaders were female.
	The evidence invalidates that idea.
	Okay, first of all, I want people to remember that when these chronicles were compiled, they were compiled usually at much later dates than the events discussed in this.
	Also, in the video that he created for this, people were free to watch it on their own.
	He dismisses outright the findings of these archaeologists in favor of the narrative that he has, and that is that somehow, someway, because it wasn't written down, that means it couldn't possibly happen.
	Now, any archaeologist worth their rate in salt actually knows that that is something that cannot be taken seriously.
	That's not true, Hannibal.
	What I am saying is that I agree, the research and the evidence in no way suggests that half of Viking armies were fucking female.
	You know you are being intellectually dishonest.
	You know it.
	This is your ideological bigotry at work.
	You cannot possibly accept the idea that this wasn't the case.
	You are a fucking lunatic.
	Here's why.
	One, not all aspects of culture in that regard are written down, especially when the people who have the pens aren't considering it important.
	Hannibal, that's fucking retarded.
	You think that armies that had a huge number of women in them wouldn't even merit a historical footnote or something, do you?
	Even though none of the archaeological evidence supports your claim, I would have thought that going to other sources and seeing what they had to say would be important as well.
	But since they don't support your narrative, and this is actually a narrative that you are trying to craft, you're quite happy to ignore them, aren't you?
	Two, when someone is running at you with a sword in hand, you don't tend to stop and check the plumbing before you let them kill you.
	In other words, I just have to make sure you're male before you sink that sword in my skull.
	I hope you don't mind.
	Unsurprisingly, genius, they had a habit of checking the bodies after the battle.
	And on one of the few occasions where they actually discovered some women warriors, it was so important they thought to write it down.
	Now, the reason I point this out, that just because it's not written down in these chronicles like you like it to be written down, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.
	That's true, but you've got nothing really to suggest that it did happen.
	And we already know this was an event so rare that it was worthy of documentation, so it's not unreasonable to think that if that was the case, they would have written it down.
	We recently discovered along Hadrian's wall from a burial in the third century CE Sarmatian women warriors who were serving along the wall as mercenaries in the Nume Arii.
	In other words, there were women serving in the Roman army.
	They were auxilias, but they were still serving in the Roman army along with Sarmatian men.
	This isn't written down or even talked about in any source that I'm aware of.
	That doesn't mean the source doesn't exist.
	It's just that at this point, I don't have any access to that information.
	Well, that is convenient for you, isn't it?
	So, if it's not written down in most of the known histories, what are we to make of this?
	The same way that they've actually found people with actual sub-Saharan African markers in terms of their skeletal structure along the wall, too.
	This suggests that, and this is not surprising to any of us who know anything about the Roman Empire, that they incorporated people from all over the world, including sub-Saharan Africans.
	The Romans weren't racists, especially not like us.
	And believe it or not, they weren't misogynists like us in some ways, too.
	Hannibal, are you trying to tell us that the Romans were progressive?
	In fact, even the worst sexists that I could think of didn't really hate women and tried to downplay their purpose in society.
	Now, they definitely didn't think that they were equal with them, but they hardly do the kind of thing you're engaging in right now.
	You just cannot keep your bigotry to yourself, can you?
	I am not saying that women had no role in society or have never had a role in society or whatever.
	I'm not even saying they didn't have a role in war.
	I'm saying that most of the Viking armies that invaded Britain did not contain any women as warriors.
	Despite these revelations, in this case of finding these warrior women entombed with the men in terms of combat.
	This has not been found, Hannibal.
	What has been found are women with grave goods.
	The extent to which certain patterns related to gender are restricted to particular social groups, especially on the basis of status.
	Elites, whatever their gender, are generally more visible in the archaeological record than other social groups because they control the material manifestations of power in life as well as in death.
	The main pitfall here is to avoid making generalizations about gender configurations in society as a whole on the basis of patterns observed in the mortuary ritual of elites.
	For example, there is good ethnographic evidence to suggest that the presence of high status women in positions of political as well as social power within society need not necessarily say anything about the relative status of women in relation to men in that society.
	An additional problem is to identify women with actual rather than second-hand or reflected power.
	This parallels the problem of identification of women warriors.
	Traumatic injuries tend to look superficially very much the same whether suffered by a woman warrior fighting on the front lines or by a wife and mother defending her home and family.
	And elite women who are buried with large quantities of high-quality grave goods may have acquired the right to such a burial either as appendages of high status males or in their own right.
	I'm not saying that it's impossible that a woman buried with weapons and armor was a warrior.
	I'm saying it's more likely that there are more simple, prosaic reasons that she was buried as such.
	This kind of thing is not chronicled and yet we know it to be true from the findings of archaeology.
	Sarmatian women were serving in the Roman numierii along the wall.
	Something the Roman women themselves would have never done.
	This isn't written down anyplace.
	It's not even talked about other than in Herodotus when he talks about the Sarmatians in terms of women in the society and that they couldn't marry until they'd killed a man in battle.
	Oh come on Hannibal, I know you're not a fucking amateur, alright?
	You know as well as I do that even Herodotus was like, look, half of what I'm telling you is bullshit.
	I know that must terrify you, the thought of a warrior woman coming at you with a knife, but that's the case of the situation here.
	Well duh.
	Who wouldn't be afraid of someone coming at them with a knife?
	Oh sorry, no no no, I'm afraid of women coming at me with a knife because I'm a misogynist.
	Same thing goes for the shield maidens and let me explain how we know this.
	First of all, when these burials were initially found, the archaeologists involved made a colossal blunder.
	One that today would be considered completely unacceptable.
	Now since the sub-discipline I intend to go into is paleopathology and bio-archaeology in regards to human pathology and things like this, I have a particular, not just interest in this, but I have a particular understanding of this.
	Because you're a male feminist.
	What they didn't do is do a biological profile of the skeletons.
	They found within the graves themselves the accoutrements of battle.
	They found swords.
	They found shields.
	I think they even found a horse burial in one case with this kind of thing.
	Which is cast iron proof that they were definitely warriors.
	There could be no other explanation for this, could there, Hannibal?
	You in this video kind of insinuate that just because they found these women buried like this, that that doesn't mean they were fighting.
	No, no, I'm not insinuating it.
	I'm flat out telling you.
	But this goes contrary to every single bit of evidence we have from other kinds of burial mounds and burial kurgans like this across Europe.
	From the Thracians to the Scythians.
	When we look at female internments in those cultures, particularly in the Scythians, we find women buried with the same kind of regalia as their male counterparts as warriors.
	And yet, contemporary reports of battles with those tribes do not report an excessive number of female warriors.
	In fact, they don't report any at all.
	And when they do, it's holy shit, that's a, can you believe that apparently somewhere in Salmatia, according to Herodotus, there were some female warriors.
	Same thing goes with the Norse culture.
	Now, what you're asking me to believe now is that the burials with these accompanying weapons, when you have an Etruscan burial where it has a woman buried with weapons also, so they may have been serving in the military at that point.
	Well, that would explain why the Romans beat them so handily.
	We also know, by the way, Sargon, that Etruscan women held office in Etruscan society.
	We know they had a huge amount of power, politically and socially.
	We also know that the sexual mores of the Etruscans were not like ours.
	It would have been your nightmare.
	Women freely having sex with whoever they wanted to, including husbands, wives, you name it.
	It didn't matter.
	They didn't have that same morality.
	I know that must terrify you people over in the male supremacy movement.
	I really don't care who Etruscan women fucked.
	But the thing is, I know that you think I do, because you, like I've shown, in fact, like you've shown, I didn't even need to do anything here, are a complete fucking bigot.
	That was the nature of the beast.
	This isn't chronicled anywhere.
	We had to figure this stuff out from reading the Etruscan gravestones.
	We had to figure this stuff out by looking at Etruscan culture and seeing what we found in the material culture.
	It's the same damn thing here.
	If that is how you have come to this conclusion, then I would say that your evidence for your assertions is tenuous at best.
	But frankly, you didn't actually provide any, did you?
	You just asserted.
	So what a fucking surprise.
	What you're asking me to believe is that when a person in Norse culture, or any culture where there is a split in terms of women and men in combat, that when women are buried in this kind of way, it means nothing.
	Which then means that men buried in that way mean nothing.
	So how the hell can we tell anything about status and place in society from the material culture if you're telling me this doesn't actually mean anything?
	I'm not telling you that, you fucking moron.
	I'm telling you that people of status are buried with these goods regardless of gender and regardless of whether they fought on a battlefield or not.
	Are you under the impression that most women in most cultures fought on the fucking battlefield, Hannibal?
	Here's the sad fact.
	This is what's going on in this.
	These women were these shield maidens talked about in Norse mythology and in Norse culture.
	They were combat warriors.
	They fought alongside the men and distinguished themselves in battle alongside the men and were buried with that kind of reverence.
	It's weird that you can't prove that though, isn't it, Hannibal?
	That's what we actually see here.
	Now, later in this video, you're going to go into a lot of hair splitting in terms of saying, well, men have greater upper body strength than yada yada yada.
	Let me tell you something about combat.
	Hannibal, you know nothing about combat.
	And I know this because you go on to describe combat as if it was a fucking game of D and D.
	The stronger warrior doesn't always win.
	There are easier ways to kill somebody in combat than just swinging a sword at their head.
	This is where martial arts comes in.
	This is when experience in battle comes in.
	This is when knowing your weapon systems comes in.
	And regardless of what you think, a woman who is in good shape can wield a sword just as effectively as a man.
	A male body part, like a carotid artery or something like that, is nicked the same by a female hand as a male hand.
	So, this idea that somehow they wouldn't be able to serve in combat is bullshit.
	Even if the men were somewhat stronger than those women, they were still a shitload stronger than most of us are today.
	I've got no doubt that a medieval woman is stronger than you are, but that really has no relevance on what we're saying.
	You seem to have no conception of what combat between armed men is like.
	I'm going to slow down a couple of parts that I really want you to pay attention to, because these are the real key reasons that women were not Viking warriors.
	I'm going to properly elucidate this point just so you don't miss what I'm telling you, right?
	A man is much bigger and stronger than a woman.
	When you have got two people on either side of a shield wall pushing at each other, the person who can run faster and has more mass has more force when they impact the enemy shield wall.
	Who's getting pushed back here, Hannibal?
	That's right.
	A woman that is half my weight can wield a sword, but luckily, I'm covered in armor.
	The problem isn't whether she can nick a vein, the problem is whether I push her to the floor and pound her head in because I am much bigger and stronger than she is.
	This is the reason you didn't get women fighting in Mali combat.
	They are fundamentally disadvantaged by nature to do so.
	So, these sources that you're putting so much in as not revealing anything don't reveal anything of importance to us in this regard.
	They're not eyewitness accounts.
	They're translations of translations.
	The translations themselves differ wildly in terms of the actual translation of the words.
	So, we've got a problem here.
	And that problem is that despite the fact that they talk about heathen men, this doesn't give us any kind of real answer to the question we're looking for here.
	Not at all.
	But the osteology does.
	The archaeology itself gives us an answer.
	And this shows us that these shield maidens that are talked about in these regards, especially in Norse culture, are very much real.
	And they were very much a part of this war effort to invade into the Dane Law and to take what they could when it came to the invasion of places like Scotland, England, and of France and other areas.
	You and the Mangina crew are the only people who hold this position.
	Actual scientists, actual archaeologists, actual professional historians do not share your view.
	And when you take one look at the situation you are proposing, it's very easy to see why.
	Now, also remember, since this is a very patriarchal society and intended to ignore female accomplishment and female ideas and female participation in society, except for in a very, very fundamental way, it's not surprising that these guys would ignore such details also.
	Or, perhaps they omitted such details because, like with, for instance, the Greeks, the idea of women in combat was terrifying to them.
	The idea that women could be wielding swords and killing men, that was terrifying to them.
	There is a machismo aspect of this that could be working its favor here.
	The only reason to assume that is if you have an ideological agenda that you're trying to push and you're desperately looking for increasingly unrealistic reasons to propose that women were in the front lines of medieval combat.
	They weren't.
	You know it.
	I know it.
	Everyone else knows it.

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