Are there any female Stormtroopers?

Yes it does. I'll have to get it today.

 

RogueWompRat

Hopefully we don't have any dinosaurs breeding around with the Jango Fett clones.

 

I'm more concerned about a spontaneous sex change like the frogs in Jurassic Park.

Darth_Arthas:
This logic is extremely weak. Many of the positions women are prohibited from serving in are not ones in which muscle mass translates to success. The Army uses a probability model to assess which units have a high likelihood of becoming engaged in "direct combat," which has a much broader definition than brute physical combat.



Now I realize you were responding to JoruusCbaoth's response, but I think that this can be used with regards to the topic of female stormtroopers. In the GFFA, stormtrooper are the front line units, not only is there a high likelihood of becoming engaged in direct combat, it's their only purpose. The job of stormtroopers is to be front line fighters, it's entirely possible that they'd only use blaster carbines, in which case a woman would be equally skilled, but carrying ordanace, wounded comrades, on average a male human would be better suited than a female human to these jobs.

I can see no problem with there being female pilots, female support staff, technicians, female fleet personel, any of the low likelyhood of direct combat positions, but stormtrooper is basically guaranteed to involve high likelyhood of "direct combat" and hand to hand fighting.


Charlemagne19:
Counterpoint Jorus, in a world of Mmnenonic drugs and alien species, the same can be said of male humans as soldiers instead of wookies

This is a very valid point in the post Endor era, but during the emperors reign, he was against aliens in his military, and in general. Not to mention that the majority of people in positions that would allow them to change policy on aliens post Endor were just as bigoted as Palpatine.

 

Charlemagne19

Counterpoint Jorus, in a world of Mmnenonic drugs and alien species, the same can be said of male humans as soldiers instead of wookies

Did the Empire employ wookiees in combat roles? No, they were not prone to taking orders, nor were they nearly as numerous or as proven as their human clones and volunteers.

Darth_Arthas

Rather than type a lengthy response, I'll just respond to the core arguments. I really didn't go into this to hijack the thread, but it's what I get for opening my mouth before 9 AM before I spend 12 hours at work.

I have no basic objection to women serving in the military, but I do believe that all soldiers should be held to the same standards of physical readiness for their given job. If most women recruits were judged by the same standards as their male counterparts in basic training, the washout rate would be much, much higher than present. Is there really a reason why women recruits aren't required to run as fast as men, or move a certain amount as weight? We're not going to put a guy who can't cut it physically in combat, why on earth would we judge women by a different standard just to make it possible for them to do more traditionally male-oriented jobs?

If we applied selective service regulations to women, how many 98 pound girls would simply be sent away and deemed unfit for combat if they were ever called up and reported for their Army physical?

More soldiers does not equal better soldiers, it would just mean that plenty more of mommy's girls would have to deal with a lot worse than Jessica Lynch did next time we deploy to somewhere hostile. What that newspaper columnist fails to grasp is that the military is NOT a democratic organization, it's about the most authortarian organization in the United States. They answer directly to the commander in chief, and there's a rigid chain of command from the Joint Chiefs all the way down to the privates at boot. Commanders have zero tolerance for anything that makes the unit under their command any less effective, and while most male soldiers are quite pleased to see a woman at a bar on liberty, they'd be less than entheusiastic to find one watching their back when they go out on patrol in what's left of Basra.

The Empire simply took the authortarian structure to another level, expanding it to the bureaucracy in addition to the military. What doesn't work is culled, and the Empire made no attempt to have equality for the sexes in the military, and could have cared less in civlian life, so long as they weren't rebels or lawbreakers.

 

Didn't Leonia Tavira start out as some Imp's mistress who then proclaimed herself a warlord and Imperial military officer after his death before turning pirate?

 

A Moff I believe. Didn't she poison her husband's first wife to marry him? (sounds like quite a gal)

Female stormtroopers (I don't think the Imperials were ever that desperate)

 

Since we've seen that there we're female soldiers in the Republic before the rise of Palpatine we know theres a history of them being there. But I think it would be safe to assume that during Palpatines reign, with his prejudices against women, that he disallowed women to serve in his arm forces. But when he died and after the Warlord era when the empire was desperate for all the forces it could get they lifted the restrictions. Thrawn would have used all the troops he could muster. And in the post peace era Pelleaon would have lifted all restrictions and remember he did have a female body guard in Ruin.

 

I know Jorus

However, keeping women out of combat roles is strictly idealogical and doing so with varying gravity and species is silly in the SW universe unless sexist like the empire

 

Why aren't there female stormtroopers?

That'd be a stretch on writer creativity, wouldn't it?

I'm mean, having the potential for fresh character development---a rarity in a man's domain---well, that'd be too much to handle. better to stick with exciting, standard, expected stereotypes. Much safer. Smoother.

Was E4 such a hit partly because cinema audiences had rarely seen a female (Organa) negate the damsel in distress act and take charge?

 

Are you serious that Fisher had to tape her breasts back in ANH? Why?

 

Becuase George didn't like Carrie's breasts jumping around as she ran down the Death Star corridors. This is a known Star Wars Factoid...

 

Chaps, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there female Stormies in Splinter of the Mind's Eye? I know that there are issues that people have with this book - like Vader losing his hand to Luke - but it's a part of the EU, so the forum's canon policy applies to it. If I recall correctly - and bear in mind I can't check, because I'm 164 miles from my library of SW atm - Minban had Stormies who weren't real front line troops and included female Stormies and weren't trained to the same standards of those with Darth.

N.B. That wasn't a comment on women's fighting abilities. In many ways women would be bloody useful fighters - I know at least one ex-army British chap who'd not be able to kill a female enemy soldier simply because it's against his moral code. A few friends and I - although not soldiers - also feel the same. On another aspect of the topic, the Daily Telegraph (British newspaper) contained an article on the merits of female soldiers last year. The article highlighted a recent study that made the same point many here have made - that average female soldiers need more training time to reach the same strength levels as males.

The DT was a bit I told you so about this, but it's a newspaper that is more than a smidge right wing. Just to highlight some of its views: vegetarians and animal rights activists are communists and want to destroy society, speed cameras catch innocent motorists, who should not suffer for breaking the law, and foxes do not suffer when chased for miles then killed by hounds. Strangely, as a vegan I find myself reading a paper that thinks I'm the antichrist!

 

Even if the Empire were not activly conscripting females to be stormtroopers, there could be certain 'Mulan' situations.

 

Or they could be relegating the women off the assignments like Wild Space, the Outer Rim, Deep Core, the Maw or Unknown Regions.

Women make perfectly good fighter pilots, if nothing else.

 

Depends how one wants to think about women and men as differently capable creatures. For a start, one can only make generalisations about the two genders, so nothing really holds fast for individuals. In self-help books for couples you'll find some people actually pointing out the differences and the need for partners to understand them.

One specifically militarily applicable difference is supposed to be in the way the two genders look at things. I'd just like to reiterate that this is not intended to be derogatory to either gender, nor do these generalisations apply to all individuals of a particular gender, indeed certain individuals within a gender may display traits that are more characteristic of the other gender.

The theory I'm told is that men evolved to look for animals and hunt them down, so they have good distance-gauging abilities and can lock onto targets better than women (in general). Women, on the other hand, were often in a defensive formation back at the camp, looking after the children. They weren't generally looking for stuff to chase, but since the men had gone off, the women were looking all round for animals that might eat them or their children.

This can often be seen nowadays - a woman can look at something out of the corner of her eye, whereas a man generally has to look at something to get a good picture of it. Both of these specialisations are dashed useful in warfare. Male for sniping, female for patrolling and perimeter defence. Now I'm not saying that men and women all have these differences, just that they do generally apply to big sections of the population. So both genders have valid war applications, even if one only considers each gender in this most stereotypical way, without allowing for differences between individuals and the standard.

 

I always thought women would be better soldeirs. They can stand more pain than men.

This comes from a male btw.

Therefore I don't see any physical reason they shouldn't been included.

The only reason there are little to few of them is because the Empire is sexist.

 

Not necesarily, the Empire could have wanted specifically male characteristics in its Stormies - higher levels of aggression, male type eyesight, greater ability at putting on muscle. Who knows? Besides, we don't know there weren't - I mentioned earlier that SotME may well mention female Stormies. Has anybody been able to check that yet?

 

Men can withstand greater pain without passing out, women have a higher pain threshold, in that it takes more of it for them to take note of it.

For the same reasons that men are more suited to hunting mastadons and wild boars than women, men are the natural choice for a prolonged infantry campaign.

 

If they are, I think they get their shoes at this Sears Outlet store in Halifax.

 

There might not have been in the OT, but by the NJO, there might be. Daala or Pellaeon could have changed the system.

Note that in the beginning of HTTE, Pellaeon notes that the Chimaera's crew consisted almost exclusively of "young men and women."

 

As to the crew of a ship he is not likely referring to Stormies.

The clones are probably cloned sterile (maybe even without genitals), thus can you really consider them full males?

 

Well, the Baron Fel clones in HoT had wives and children (were their wives clones of Fel's wife?)

 

I don't like the idea of creating soldiers without any testosterone. One really wants an army that's going to rip the other chaps some nice, shiny new orifices. Low levels of testosterone might inhibit this. Although if they're conditioned to respond to orders without question...who knows?

 

I literally just read this.

"Tatooine Ghost" Page 312.

"There weren't many woman, Wookie, or Jawa stormtroopers."

 

So there are some? But there are no Wookie or Jawa stormtroopers! What does that mean!?