“Come back with your shield, or on it.”

-Spartan mother presents son with shield

Sure, those guys were just regular Joes, no better than the guys who urinated on themselves when The Men of the Silent Land came wordlessly to battle…

The twenty pound aspis was too large to flee with, and was large enough to act as a dish-shaped stretcher for the dead. So the Spartan warrior who came back from war without it was reviled in the extreme.

Throughout history, there have been tribes, units and cults of fighting men, who, when looked at through the objective lens of Time, clearly punched above their weight when they went to war. What is more, the records of such men’s martial exploits come down to us, as often as not, from their enemies. When one checks the evidence, and compares it to the stories of those who felt the brunt of these men’s violent attention—such as the British troops who survived the Zulu onslaughts at Rorke’s Drift, or the English monks who wrote of “the fury of the North Men”—more often than not, one finds a supportive notion of womanhood behind that remarkable aggression.

As a fighter, boxing coach, and a promoter of a half dozen stick-fighting tournaments, I can tell you the following: If you want the guys in the ring to try and win, rather than try not to lose, give out tickets to the hottest babes you know and put them in the front row. It will be Armageddon in the ring. This has been tapped into brilliantly by MMA promoters, and accounts for much of the additional effort fighters on MMA cards spend seeking victory, compared to the generally more cautious boxer. There are other factors, such as the KO bonus, fight of the night bonus, etc. But hundreds of young women getting drunk—or even Mom sitting at ringside—gets just about any knucklehead trying to win their approval at his opponent’s expense. This is an old, old piece of fight game lore. Every boxing trainer knows not to let women watch a sparring session involving a fighter he cares about, and every appropriately sleazy boxing promoter gives special consideration to the lawyer who brings his arm candy, rather than his wife, to the fight.

Recently I had two experiences that compelled me to outline this extensive essay, which shall form a third of the book on the Western Martial Tradition, A Dread Grace. I had previously intended to address this topic piecemeal, but was wrong on two counts:

1. Our current trends in macro-aggression are overwhelmingly maternal, as driven home to me by four women of differing backgrounds who called me on the same day delighted that “we” would finally be “going to war against ISIS!” and “get them back for attacking us in Paris.”

2. In Taboo You, my book on masculine self-determinism, I made a cursory case for societies where women have a voice having tended to field stronger warriors than societies were women are mere property. A young White Nationalist took me to task on this, claiming that my argument was invalid because all of the great warrior nations I named were defeated in time. This makes as much sense as claiming the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s—who won four Super Bowls in a decade—were not a remarkable team because this year’s Steelers are not going to win the Super Bowl. We might as well say Ali was a bum because he lost his last fight, and Marciano was a fraud because he retired before getting steamrolled by Liston. The blank look on the man’s face, as I detailed cases of military hegemony shifting ever westward, into societies with freer women, reminded me that few of today’s readers have read the hundreds of military histories that table top war game geeks like myself have delved into.

The frustration of constantly hearing women of all stripes: liberal, conservative, family and friends, call for “war,” for “boots on the ground,” or call for “a law” that will be implemented, ultimately, by “boots on the ground,” and make of every starving child or ill-served clitoris a case to send our young men into a meat grinder half a world away, is more than frustrating. It is infuriating that people who have never fought in any way, and who do not know a single fact about any war, have the bully vote in America. The female dominated electorate is a recipe for continual war.

It is also frustrating to have read over 1,000 books specifically on warfare, and then find out that the rest of the reading world has read perhaps two, both on the same war. The genius of the modern American educational system, wherein a person graduates without having read a single history book, and having only been taught history in the month of February—a history that begins in 1864—is that cases my not be made to people concisely, who have not been exposed to the historical narrative being referenced by the proponent of a theory—such as my bizarre theory that ancient folk who won more wars than they should have had a better recipe for making men than the losers. So, this essay is going to be something of a cultural overview of military hegemony with an eye on Athena, patron goddess of the most powerful Classical Greek city state, the ruthless bitch that actually beat War at his own game in the Iliad.

Let me make it clear that I am not making a claim that societies with a female political voice universally, or even mostly, generate the most successful militaries. Rather, I am pointing out—over and over again as you shall see—that societies in which the warrior is raised by a strong father, who is married to a strong mother, and fights in anticipation of emulating his father and gaining the admiration of his mother, as well as a mate of her same quality, that those societies have consistently fielded better fighting men, then those societies who live in thrall to, in fear of, or in disgust of, their female half.

In large measure the difference between the West and the rest of the world, throughout history, has been reflected in the higher status of women in western societies. There are repeated correlations of this tendency—in primitive and modern and western and nonwestern societies—with superior war fighting ability on the part of those men who come from two strong parents as opposed to one, or none. For those among the readership for whom this is a no-brainer, I promise not to bore you. For those who look at the modern American version of the “strong” woman—either the promiscuous, foul-mouthed, violent, child-abusing black mother, or the conniving, feminist, proxy aggressor white whore—and fail to see how strong women can be good for society, then I hope to open your eyes to the fact that modern women are the weakest crop of females in the human line, and that without strong women to bare children for strong men, we are destined to become nothing but drones and worker bees in a hive ruled by a queen that only eats her young.

Find the outline for this essay here Women Who Men Kill For. I hope to complete a section per week. If you have in mind any tribes or societies that fit the scope of this survey, which you would like me to address, in addition to those in the outline, feel free to place a request via the comment function at the base of this article or the outline.