Why Space Marines Need To Be Male

(Quick note, this is another tumblr post I've gone back and edited and put on here.)

I mentioned on my tumblr, briefly, in a response to a reader letter in an issue of White Dwarf, that I had a reason for why I think there shouldn't be female Space Marines. Just so we’re totally clear by Space Marine I mean specifically Warhammer 40,000’s Adeptus Astartes, I’m not saying Pvt. Vasquez or Samus or whomever shouldn't exist. I think it is very important that the Adeptus Astartes should be male, and it isn't anything to do with the game’s fictional reason for why this is so.

In 40k, only men get to be Space Marines, or rather, only boys. They are taken at a young age, in pre-or early puberty, and physically and mentally made into killing machines. The fiction justifies why it’s only boys that get taken because of some vague notion of the process requiring ‘male’ hormonal development. Gimme your trans takes on this, I crave them. But, for the sake of brevity and to hopefully avoid Being Cancelled, I’m not going into analysis of trans and cis bodies for this.

It essentially boils down to what the Space Marines are, what they mean, and what exact genre of fiction Warhammer 40k actually is. In the narrative, of course, the Space Marines are the Emperor’s Angels of Death, his will made manifest, humanity’s finest. They are portrayed as the ultimate soldiers in a galaxy constantly at war, as heroes to all, defenders of humanity. The process to actually become a Space Marine is arduous and long, but if one were to become a Space Marine it would prove that yes, you are one of the best fighters humanity has to offer. Without question.

It’s when you actually analyse what that actually means, what being a Space Marine means, that I hope my reasoning becomes a little bit clearer. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of trying to teach a group of ten year old boys who’ve never seen warfare, who’ve never been affected by it or grown mature enough to comprehend the horror of it, I highly recommend it. Not because you’ll really get anywhere. It’ll be a troubling and haunting experience for you, actually. I covered the First World War with a group of Year 5 boys a couple of years ago, as a coda to us finishing Micheal Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful together. The book is quite damning about the way soldiers were treated by their own country during the war, about how being in a total war situation can affect and damage a young person’s mind, how it can make them do things they wouldn't dream of doing elsewhere. I confess, I got very emotional at the book’s climax. I take the horror of the First World War very, very seriously (I covered it in my Battlefield 1 review). I consider it an appalling waste of life, a grotesque display of colonialism and imperialist chest-thumping on all sides. I was quite shocked, perhaps naively so, that the boys I was working with didn't see it that way. After going over what life in the trenches was like, the sheer number of casualties lost over a matter of inches of ground, the complete inability of command structures to adopt strategies that would have mitigated said loss of life until the very end of the war (just to be clear, I did not try to impose my own opinion of why this was on the children; I explained to them how new this form of warfare was and left them to form their own conclusions), several of the boys still seemed quite excited by the idea of it all, of going over the top and firing artillery and what have you. I realised, of course, that they were mapping what we’d discussed onto what they knew about warfare and violence, which is to say the games they played and the films they watched. Even though I was trying to show them that war, perhaps, was not a heroic and exciting affair, they couldn't see it that way. They even saw death in war as some kind of noble thing, because thats the way they’d seen in on screen. ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' indeed.

Space Marines represent this kind of thinking, intentionally so. They are the epitome of the uncritical approach to analysing warfare, all glory, no downside. The idea that one might get to fight, and be really good at it, and do it all the time is a neat idea if you only know about war as this cool thing from video games and movies. The idea of the Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine works as a criticism of how we teach boys about war, how we introduce them to it and how casually they absorb the imagery of it, getting uncritically excited about tanks and guns and bombs. Space Marines, fundamentally, are little boys who never really grow up, robbed of a genuine adulthood to instead fight with their mates, forever, until they die, without having to worry about why or who they’re fighting. And that’s why I think its important that Space Marines be male. Because if there were female marines, this implicit criticism of boys and war wouldn't be as effective. Thats not to say that I think there aren't girls who get excited by this kind of thing, there are, but societally we don’t push it on them the same way. We don’t guide them, unconsciously, to this kind of fascination in the same way we do boys because ‘girls stuff’ isn’t about being a hero and fighting and being tough.

Let’s be absolutely clear here, the notion of things being separated into ‘girl’s stuff’ and ‘boy’s stuff’ is patently ridiculous, damaging and regressive. We, societally, still do it by the skipload. Again, work in a school, you’ll see this low-key segregation all the time. It’s massively  frustrating.

It’s important that Space Marines be male, and only male, so this criticism can stand because of what Warhammer 40,000 actually is. More than it’s sci-fi, more even than it is fantasy, Warhammer 40k is a horror story. It’s actually terrifying, a mix of hyper-Orwellian dystopia with cosmic horror and Hieronymous Bosch artwork. There’s definitely a place in the game for gender equality, but it has to exist within this horror framework, so it’s not ‘equal rights for all’ so much as ‘everyone will get to die for their empire equally’. The Imperial Guard, for example, where it’s not who you are, it’s just that you’re a body that can hold a lasgun. When people ask for female marines, when they come up with their own head canon or whatever, maybe a better option is to think, ‘why do I want this? Is it because I want to see a woman who’s as powerful as these men?’. In that case, think about those men. Think about the context within which they exist. Think about the power they represent. Space Marines are the Mitchell and Webb SS sketch but without the punchline. You know the one, where the two Nazi SS officers are sat down, and one of them, acknowledging the plethora of skull emblems on their uniforms wonders ‘Are we the bad guys?’. Space Marines are covered in skulls, only they don’t get to have ethical quandaries. 

Representation is important, but it can’t be as simple as like-for-like, it needs the appropriate context to justify it so it doesn't feel token or inappropriate. I don’t know if there’s an answer to the ‘female marine’ equivalent, I don’t know if there can be. I don't think it’s the Sisters of Battle. They’ve got their own stuff going on. I think the main thing people need to remember about 40k is that no one’s the good guys. Everyone’s terrible, because they need to be, because it’s a game that needs to justify why everyone fights all the time. It’s satire, parody, cynicism and good old British gallows humour. So trying to find positive representation in that always struck me as kind of a weird idea. If you want lady marines because you want to see some tits in power armour, you can kindly fuck off into a skip. If you want lady marines because you want representation, is that really the representation you’re looking for? Emotionally stunted killing machines who have become the poster children for a nightmare regime? I honestly think Warhammer 40,000 has some great female characters, but they’re largely absent from the tabletop, acting in the fiction as the human foil to the inhuman marines. If you really like the 40k universe that might be the place you find the representation you want.

And They Shall Know No Fear. Only people who think they’re invincible live without fear. We unfortunately live in a world where girls learn that they’re not invincible much earlier than boys.