Seldes Katne said:
I also noticed a rather sexist comment was missing from the movie, where Father Christmas remarks that "wars are ugly" and doesn't add "when women fight in them" or whatever the line was in the book. Wars are ugly no matter who's fighting in them.
Sure, all wars are ugly. Some are far uglier than others, though.
Historically, it's true that wars tend to be uglier when women are massively fighting in it. But that's a symptom, not the cause.
It's like this :
Lose 1000 men in a war and one generation later there is little effect on the population. Lose 1000 women and the effect is significant. That's because women have children, not men. Even in cultures with a strong monogamy component, historians have noted that the birth rate isn't significantly lowered by the losses of many young men at war. Even the strictest culture becomes more tolerant of children born out of wedlock in those circumstances.
But lose women and you lose the children they might have had and so a population that has its women getting killed in a war is facing a potential steep decline in coming years.
Nowadays, we are billions on the globe but remember that earth reached its first billion of population only in the 19th century and around 100 AD we were barely 250 million on the whole planet. So for almost all of our history, we've had the reverse problem of maintaining a population strong enough to occupy the territory we were claiming. From the dawn of men to the advent of modern medicine, birth rate was a critical component of a any group's survival.
And that's why every culture has had a strong taboo against women in the military that only now can be safely lifted.
But every taboo can be broken under the right, or in this case wrong, circumstances.
Every single case of women massively joining a fight was when a culture was facing an invasion. Furthermore, for this to happen, either the agressor was bent on extermination or the war had dragged on for years.
And these war are usually uglier than most. During the 20th century, the most striking case of women fighting in a war occured when Germany invaded Russia. And believe me, this was ugly. Over 30 millions Russians were killed on that front alone. Thousands of women fought in the street of Stalingrad. And to this day, I believe every single female ace pilot (A pilot with more than 5 kill on her record) are russian women who fought in WW2. Another famous case of women fighting in the 20th century is Viet Nam. Plenty of Viet Cong were women, as the hero of Full Metal Jacket learnt the hard way. That war, for the viet Cong, started right after WW2 and these guys fought one invader or the other for 30 years. The American were only the latest foreigner to stuck their nose in the mess. One of the ugliest conflict of the 20th century.
So, yeah, usually war is uglier when women are fighting in it.
But it isn't ugly because women are fighting, women are fighting because it is ugly.
When your back is to the wall and all that.
). But of course, it is a fantasy film....
