Angelblaze said:
Title, I've been thinking as of late is there any list of pro female sayings/insults like, 'Be a man', 'Man up', 'Grow some balls', like men have - but not based on physical beauty or sexuality? Can we get a complied list?
[On a side note, how did the gender that pushes living, human beings - limbs, head and all - out of their sexual organs NOT get the 'physically durable' note from society?]
Okay so short collected list:
Hell hath no wrath like a woman scorned.
Which requires that a woman be hurt/scorned first before she's really capable of doing anything. Grand.
aaaaaand that's it. Great.
"The female of the species is deadlier than the male" (true throughout a lot of nature)
"The lion may be fiercer, but the lioness more cruel"
I could probably think of more but those are two of them about not messing with women that first come to mind (apologies if others put them up first).
Overall though, in reality women have not historically been involved in martial pursuits, not do they tend to be as aggressive and lead with violence, as a result you haven't seen a lot of long standing platitudes of this sort. Whether any will appear through the first world military or not remains to be seen. Your best bet however is to look at fantasy literature and see if anyone has come up with anything snappy when dealing with female warriors, that won't be "real" but it can work.
It should also be noted that the US as a general rule has not really gone to war for a very long time, rather we've been involved in various armed incidents and police actions we've called wars, ones highly observed and regulated with moral watchdogs constantly crawling all over them. As a result we haven't really ever pitted female dominated units against those of other countries on a large scale, small scale conflicts, yes, but nothing compared to say trench warfare or some of the battles during World War II. What's more a lot of the martial sayings and stuff come from units involved in real wars who are committing what modern politicians consider war crimes. A lot of the bonding between units comes from shared experiences, and the rhetoric and mythology behind units oftentimes comes from inspiring fear and harboring dark secrets and the like behind.
To put it this way, let's say we simply decided "F@ck it" and the US embraced my points on dealing with The Middle East, so we bomb the crap out of the entire region and engage in total war once again. In the process of breaking the culture we send in our troops in force to outright exterminate most of the survivors and erase cultural and historical trappings. For purposes of manpower this means we have all-woman military units on the front lines, fighting dug in civilians fighting for their homes and sheer survival, as well as what troops are left... much like the final days of World War II. These ladies start putting other women and children up against walls and blowing them away, have people dig mass graves, and burn down mosques, historical records, and museum pieces with the same abandon that was taken to the Nazis and their iconography. If these units succeed, they are going to come away with a history and comradarie unlike anything else (even the bonding in pseudo-wars like the ones we have) the things said by their victims and vanquished foes are going to form the foundation of these kinds of platitudes, which will be repeted to remember what a group of stone cold bitches they were, and of course that shared mythology and necessity is part of what helps people come back and "power down" from warfare afterwards. I think part of why we see more PTSD today in part because of politics, with people suffering in war, but in many cases feeling they accomplished very little and did not make the enemy pay for what happened, leading to beliefs in a continued threat, and so on.
See, the thing is that it's one thing for a unit to just call itself something like "Hell's Belles" or "The Demon Dolls" or whatever else, but it lacks any real sincerity. Names like that tend to work when it comes from someone else. Basically when say Muslims start calling you "Hell's Belles" or some equivalent because your arrival is like demons, your going to be merciless, and not even the smallest children will be spared... a reputation that might spread and cause people to kill themselves or their loved ones rather than risk facing you and losing. Then it has meaning, and of course that's when you start seeing people wax poetic about how utterly vicious and deadly you are, especially when cruelty and a stomach for slaughter are backed by fighting ability (defeating your own enemies and then doing nasty stuff to the survivors being a bit different than simply being a death squad even if the distinction is lost on some people). Sure it might not be PC, but units that have scary sounding names and have been around for a long time usually did something to earn them in a past war, and oftentimes things that wouldn't meet with modern approval. For example it's been argued that we've fallen so far as warriors that great American heroes like Patton who knew how dirty war needed to be, would be considered war criminals today. Conversely that also means that I think the odds are very low of us really engaging in a real war again, even possibly at the expense of our own destruction, I suspect if we DO start seeing platitudes and infamous names and such appearing for female warriors it probably won't be as a result of American military actions which is kind of ironic given some of our pushes to bring women more directly into the military.
