On mobile please forgive odd paragraphs.

Dear Reddit Reenactors,

I’m a female reenactor of mainly the 8th and 9th centuries (I hesitate a little these days at using Viking Age because of all the pop culture around it now) I dearly all kinds of combat from live steel to the SCA’s padded baseball bats (and I do say that with love). But what’s been driving me up the walls and out of the combat ring is what I like to call the ‘shieldmaiden aesthetic’. Lately it seems like if anything mentions womens rights or status in a culture there’s this response to try and prove the participated in active combat. There is perfectly good evidence to say (I’ll stick with 9th century examples as it’s my field of study) that there were possibly female fighters in the era based on archaeological finds and a few mentions in Snorri’s Eddas and Saxo’s Histories (though take those with a grain of salt if not the whole shaker) but the glamed up badass of modern fantasy seems to have a hold on peoples minds to the point where there is a lot of desperate straw clutching trying to prove her existence even in academic settings. When I point this out I often get called sexist, has anyone else run into this and how do you respond to it?