A New Take on Female Space Marines

This old debate again? Stick with me because I think I have a different way of thinking about this topic. My personal view is that I actually like and prefer male-only space marines. But not for the usual reasons. Perhaps paradoxically, I also think that including some female space marines in a clever way would actually enhance the male-onlyness of the space marines and make them much more deep and interesting.

The typical (and bad) argument against female Space Marines

The usual argument from guys who don’t want female Astartes is that girls could never make the cut. That the trials are so brutal that only the tippy-top 1% of boys are able to pass them. And for most chapters, that’s just the application process! It gets even more difficult for the aspirants after they get accepted. How are girls supposed to compete with the elite 1% of boys? I mean, can you even imagine a 10-year-old girl who could travel across the Gobi desert on her own, foraging for food and battling alien beasts just for the slim chance to sign up for the actual trials? I can’t. But you know what? I don’t know any 10-year-old boys who could survive that either. But this is a fictional universe, and we’re already suspending our disbelief to allow for preadolescent boys who can do what real boys can’t do.

The athletic differences between men and women are often cited as the main reason there are no female astartes. This is also a bad argument, because space marine aspirants are also not men. They’re boys. Being taken before puberty is actually a hugely important part of the process. Your body can be too developed to accept the genetic modifications. The difference between boys and girls as children are very slight. According to this study: “The gender divergence in athletic performance begins at the age of 12-13 years and reaches adult plateau in the late teenage years with the timing and tempo closely parallel to the rise in circulating testosterone in boys during puberty.”

Additionally this other study indicates that a condition which increases testosterone “can increase muscle mass and strength, stimulates erythropoiesis, promotes competitive behavior, and enhances the physical performance of women.” And “…her muscle mass will develop like that of a man.”

So if a preadolescent boy can pass the trials, then so can a preadolescent girl because there is very little difference in their athletic abilities at that age. And if we’re already accepting that male children can be turned into super soldiers by hijacking their natural development, and by giving them gene therapy and surgical implants, then the same can be done for girls.

The true argument against female Space Marines

So we see that the old argument against female Space Marines boils down to sexism. Sexism in the hobby community. They want their little boy’s club and they think girls are too weak to join. My argument against female Space Marines is also sexism. Sexism in the Imperium of Man within the lore. There should be no female Space Marines, in the Imperium of Man because sexism is bad and the Imperium is bad. They are the bad guys.

Space Marines are so obviously a metaphor for toxic masculinity. This is made explicit in the novel ‘Space Marine’ by Ian Watson, one of the earliest novels in the Warhammer 40k universe. If toxic masculinity can be thought of as a boy’s notion of masculinity in a grown man’s body, this is exactly what we see in that book. Three young boys are taken from the gangs of Necromunda and inducted into the Imperial Fists. But as they grow up, they aren’t mentored or taught how to be men. Instead, they are given surgery, combat drugs, growth hormones, and hypno-indoctrination.

In modern 40k, this process is described as creating a sort of blank slate personality so that a new heroic individual can emerge. But in 1993’s ‘Space Marine’ this process just covers up and sometimes conflicts with the boys’ original personalities causing extreme angst and confusion. In the book, one of the aspirants named Yeremi develops a crush on Lexandro, one of his battle brothers. But he has no clue what those feelings mean or how to deal with them. He finds himself wanting to simultaneously protect, possess, compete with, humiliate, and even kill, the object of his obsession. And in the end, he dies for him in an act of devotion and adoration. Like an extreme version of the school boy who feels the compulsion to pull the ponytail of his crush but can’t explain why.  The creation of an Astartes in Ian Watson’s ‘Space Marine’ is less like the creation of Captain America and more like a psychosexual feverdream that never ends. They exist suspended in an eternal state of hyperpuberty and breathtaking genocidal fury. And fart jokes. Lots of fart jokes.

I get that this book is not canon anymore, but even in the modern lore, an Astartes is a literal child soldier who was abducted and chemically castrated before puberty to prevent him from developing into a real man. His normal hormonal development is hijacked with hyperaggression-inducing chemicals. His physical development is augmented for brutal combat with surgical implants. His emotional development is completely halted and cauterized. And his mental development is stunted and redirected using hypno-indoctrination. Free thought actually causes an Astartes distress. They are such a boys-club that they don’t even need women to replenish their numbers. You could almost say that they reproduce asexually.

(Mira Manga expands on this idea in an excellent video. Also, Lewis Davies makes a convincing argument in his podcast episode on Ian Watson’s ‘Space Marine’ that literally carrying the genetic future of their chapter within their bodies is actually a very feminizing trait.)

They are emotionally stunted, xenophobic, fascist, meatheads.

In other words, Space Marines are chuds.

However, the problem is that in the modern day lore of Warhammer 40k, the Imperium is not depicted as evil. The marketing and the stories all show the Imperium as noble and the Space Marines as heroic. Or at the very worst, they are a necessary evil in a universe as dangerous as Warhammer 40k. But the “necessary evil” line is internal propaganda. Fascist governments always try to frame what they do as necessary for survival.

But that internal imperial propaganda has escaped the lore and become the meta-understanding among 40k fans. They started to believe it. And unfortunately so did Games Workshop. Somehow, at some point, Space Marines became humanity’s bulwark against the grim-darkness of the far future instead of the cause of it.

But the older stories made it crystal clear that the Imperium is not a necessary evil, it’s just evil. In the Horus Heresy series, the Imperium was constantly encountering human empires spanning multiple star systems which lived in peace with aliens, understood technology, and had a relatively liberal form of government. And yet they were able to thrive…until the Imperium crushed them and brought them into “compliance.”

In ‘Warped Stars’ by Ian Watson, we see a Squat character (btw “squat” is an in-universe racial slur used by the imperials against space-dwarves) who is a mechanic for a Space Marine chapter. He understands how technology works the same way we do in the real world. He doesn’t have the same closed-minded quasi-religious view of technology that the Cult Mechanicus enforces. At one point a vehicle needs maintenance and a Space Marine captain tells him to carve some runes and chant some prayers over it, but our Squat character knows that what it actually needs is a sparkplug or something like that. And he just shakes his head sadly because he’s powerless to express and act on the truth.

At another point in the book, an inquisitor also reflects to himself that the Emperor and the Imperial Creed are a stagnating influence on human development. That the entire Imperium exists to satisfy the colossal appetite of the Emperor’s psychic abilities. And he secretly longs for the day when the Emperor finally dies and releases his hold on humanity. (I recommend listening to this story on the Oldhammer Fiction Podcast. It’s an excellent reading and the analysis at the end expands on these ideas much better than I could.)

How female Space Marines would make male-only Space Marines more interesting

So, ironically, we can see that it’s the progressively-minded gamers who actually have the stronger argument against female space marines than the real-world chuds who just don’t like to see girls in the game store. And we see that the Imperial way of operating is not a necessary evil. It’s just evil. And little counter examples of humans thriving without the Imperial Creed, living alongside aliens, and understanding technology actually serve to add richness to the story of the Imperium. So I’m not arguing for the Imperium in the lore to be more open and accepting. I want them to remain xenophobic, closed-minded, and hamstrung by tradition because those things are all bad and the Imperium is bad.

So to bring this all back to the topic at hand, how do we do this for Space Marines? How do we inject a small counter example, like our Squat friend from earlier, into the Space Marine lore without drastically altering everything we love about 40k that came before? Well, it would be incredibly simple and it’s already set up perfectly in the existing lore! Who do we know who already likes to break the rules and alter the Astartes geneseed?

Mad scientist, Fabius Bile!

Bile is constantly striving to unlock the secrets of the Astartes project and improve upon it. I don’t see it as any sort of a stretch for him to attempt to make a female Space Marine. There would even be a good motivation for it. Chaos Space Marines are constantly under-manned and have to resort to stealing loyalist geneseed to replenish their numbers. And they also sometimes resort to insane and grotesque methods for gaining new aspirants. If Bile succeeded at making a female Astartes it would instantly increase the recruiting pool for the Chaos Space Marines. Something they, being desperate and unencumbered by tradition, might actually welcome. In fact, Fabius Bile already has a woman in his warband named Savona who is not only accepted by the other Astartes, she even wears power armor. The only difference is she doesn’t have the Black Carapace and other implants that allow a true Astartes to operate their power armor. Hers instead is copiloted by a daemon. But the lore is already so close to doing what I’m suggesting here!

Taking that final step and having Fabius Bile create one single example of a true female Astartes warrior, with all the geneseed implants and the Black Carapace, would do for Space Marine lore what our Squat friend in ‘Warped Stars’ does for the Cult Mechanicus. Without changing the character or flavor of Space Marines one single iota, it would instantly make them more tragic and interesting. It would show that there could be a different way, if only the Imperium weren’t totally blinded by tradition and shackled by religion.

Closing thoughts

Real-world chuds like to set themselves up as the gatekeepers of Warhammer 40k. They whine that “woke feminists” who don’t really care about the hobby are trying to bastardize the lore by injecting politics. But as we’ve seen, the modern “noble-bright” version of the Imperium that they’re defending is the newer bastardization of the 40k lore. Erasing politics from warhammer is the corruption of the original story. It’s no surprise that they don’t understand that because they are the newcomers and the tourists here. In the case of one of the most internet-famous “gatekeepers” (who I won’t name because his followers are fucking obnoxious) he admits that he only discovered 40k when the second part of ‘Astartes’ came out. Y’all. That was in 2018! Warhammer stretches back to 1987! I believe that we can go back to the original vision of the Imperium of Man as a warning and a political metaphor without retconning 40 years of development, and without forcing space marines to “go woke” or whatever buzzword the right-winger culture warriors are terrified of by the time this goes to print. I can’t keep up.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This is not about compromising with toxic gamers. It’s about restoring the original vision of 40k without too much retconning. Some toxic gamers may realize it’s a good idea and soften their views, and that would be awesome! Others (chuds) might feel that a tiny reference to a single female space marine hanging out with Fabius Bile would poison the entire setting for them, and they’d leave. Which would also be awesome.

One last thing that I think is very important to say. I love 40k. I want Space Marines to remain a parody of toxic masculinity; a stunted ideal of manhood; a warning about what happens when society falls down the rabbit hole of the fascist cult of action. I want the Imperium of Man to remain ugly. But it’s more important to me that the real world becomes less ugly. So if we can’t go back to the way it was, if the Imperium of Man is just going to be portrayed as noble and heroic now, then I think we should let girls be the heroes too. I would accept female Space Marines, even loyalist ones, if it would make life a little better for girls in the real world.

UPDATE: Since writing this article, Games Workshop has confirmed that Space Marines will remain a male-only organization. But they also confirmed that there are women in the Adeptus Custodes and released some pretty incredible models for them. I think this is the best and also most hilarious result. Sure women, can’t be members of the Adeptus Astartes, but they can be members of the objectively superior superhuman organization. Perfect.