Imbalance between male and female magician population - What would be the implications?

Question

Setting is a medieval fantasy.

In every 1 million people living, there would be 10,000 magicians. Among those 10,000 magicians only 150 are male the rest are female.

Kingdoms compete in quality and quantity of their magicians as 1 magician = 1,000 ordinary troops

All male magicians are guaranteed to be in a noble family or be adopted by influential ruling nobles if they came from lower caste(Peasants, townsfolk and etc)

Effects of breeding between male and female magician

1. Offspring is guaranteed to have higher aptitude in magic than ordinary male and female magician breeding

2. highly possible to have Equally strong control of magic

3. possibility of Strong magic orientation due to parentage.

4. possibility of high magic potential

5. High mana regeneration rate(pure blood bonus)

6. Also, the heart, blood and brain extracted directly from a still living young male magician can be made into strong magic instruments.

EDIT

Perks of being a male magician for a kingdom

1. A Kings ransom to be gifted during the coming of age(16) ceremony or for non-noble born magicians, when they are adopted by noble houses or when they are state sponsored and start learning from a magic school.

2. Fiefdoms for non-noble born, it is a guaranteed viscount peerage.

3. Prestige and political clout, rarely are male magicians can be turned down.

4. A lot of marriage proposals, this has to be expected, this also paves way for alliances, and chances to ascend in the hierarchy. Marriage of a male magician is a very powerful diplomatic weapon. it can end wars, it can start grand alliances, it can start a civil war and most of all it guarantees political and economic gain to the bride.

5. Security detail of a male magician is second only to the royal family. A knight order is dedicated protecting these magicians

6. yearly pension apart from what a male magician gets from his fiefdom

Cons

1. There is a black market for "male parts" to be made into magic instruments

2. Single male magicians are almost guaranteed to be married by the time of their coming of age(16)

3. Breeding stud - specially if the bride is militarily strong

4. Heavily guarded - to a point that they can't go out of the country unless there is a magic knight order guarding them that is if their spouse allows them to go.

5. highest form of currency - From the first sweat to marriage even body parts, any female who is married to a male magician is guaranteed to not go hungry for generations while living lavishly

NOTE

1. 1 out of 200 pregnancies from male magician to female magicians are male magicians

2. It is considered an honor of high degree to be one

3. Ordinary male and female magician breeding will has tendency to not bore a female magician child in 3 out of 10 times while breeding with a male magician will guarantee a magician child.

4. Female magicians on the other hand are not all from a noble house, most came from ordinary families in which a magician bride and ordinary groom marries.

5. The chances of a male magician being born from ordinary male to female magician is 1 out of 1450

6. Male magicians are unnaturally strong in magic, they make a good military asset if honed

7. ordinary male to ordinary female probability of having a female magician child is 1 in 50,000 and having male magician is 1 in a million which is referred as miracle child.

8. Male magicians to ordinary female having a child have tendency to be stronger than male magician to female magician counterparts and will always be a magician of supreme caliber compared to peers. having a male magician child with this pair is 1 in 200 chance.

9. Society is patriarchal rule however gender equality among the nobles and populace is practiced.

10. Due to strong religion fervor(Despite regions having different religion) among the nobility and populace monogamy is a practice, but having a mistress or two isn't frowned upon nobility or rich merchant families.

11. Non affiliated male magicians(No relations to any kingdoms or religion) are really rare as the perks of being one is really tempting.

12. Slavery is legal, its not rare to have female magician slaves, this comes from those who have been defeated from the battlefield or war captives or slave trade across the continent. Owning a male magician slave can either be a bless or a curse since kingdoms, empires, dominions and religions will either buy them or capture them.

13. Female pregnancy(ordinary or magician) is a death sentence during this age unless someone knows a good healer or doctor. Rarely a female will be able to give birth to a 6th child before dying.

14. Male Magicians are almost or immune to external magic

RATIO

1. Magician male and magician female = 1:1 for female magician child and 1:200 for male magician child
2. ordinary male and magician female = 3:10 for female magician child and 1:1450 for male magician child
3. Magician Male and ordinary female = 1:1 for female magician child and 1:200 for male magician child
4. ordinary male and ordinary female = 1:50,000 for female magician child and 1:1,000,000 for male magician child

With this data in hand what would probably be the implications of this situation from politics, war and possibly economy ?

What i think

1. Male magician population will be tightly controlled by the government

2. They will forcefully be adopted either by the state or the noble families

3. The black market for the "Male parts" is quite rare but if you have money it would be easy to find.

apart from the above what would be the implications of this situation?

Answer 1

Your Setting is in an unstable equilibrium:

Effect 1: The rare Male Magicians are kept far from the battlefield for preserving the breeding stock and coddled as noble rulers, magical researchers, or acting as prestige body-guards. Women mages mage up the combat brigades, acting as high-end shock-troops, fireballing left and right.

Effect 2: The percentage of magic-capable as a fraction of the population will increase in every generation, if each male mage is allowed/compelled to have relations with all of the 65 mates or so that are numerically available to them. If female mages dominate politics this may change, as alliances of women might hoard magic-capable males in 'stables' of males kept exclusively for the ruling females. This will also depend on the battlefield death-rates. See next points.

Effect 3: Alliances of female mages utterly dominate politics. If 1000 women have as much military power as 1 million soldiers, that sort of thing is only to be expected.

Effect 4: If wars tend to cause light casualties (1-5% of the mage force for the losing side, say due to mages fleeing magically or having a magical defense advantage of some sort that gets them out of trouble) rather than heavy (50%-100% for the loser, if mages are particularly squishy, especially to their own magic), magic will become more and more widespread until it is either dominant or wars become far more frequent and deadly for the mages.

The OP has still have not made clear a few points:

• how often a mating of two ordinary people will result in a magically capable offspring, so a main variable is missing. I will complete the answer later once this info is provided in the Question.
• normal-male/normal-female/mage-male/mage-female offspring ratios for mageF-mageM, normalF-MageM, mageF-normalM, and normalF-normalM mating.

Answer 2

If nothing else, the magicians will institute polygamous marriages, and the nobility will encourage this, in order to maximize the probabilities of raising new generations of magicians.

Male magicians will certainly not be heavily opposed to having a harem of 60 or more female magicians (at least at first, until the women start squabbling over their social positions inside the harem), and the nobility, looking at short term advantages, will probably not recognize or care that they are essentially sealing their own and mundane humanities doom ("hey, that's the next generation's problem. We need magic right now!").

Given the high ratio of female to male magic users, and the overall imbalance of power between magic users and mundane humans, the social order will also be overturned by both the actions of the magicians and social conformity to a much more matriarchal society. Women will rule by the virtue of their magical powers, and thus "by right", while men will be in subordinate roles. Even the supposedly lucky male magic users will be essentially locked in gilded cages, not only to ensure the magical bloodlines are preserved, but also to ensure they are secure behind a wall of magical energy produced by the women who are counting on these males to continue the magical breeding program.

This actually sounds a bit like Dune, with the Bene Gesserit society essentially in control of "magical" powers and able to use these powers to stand behind the throne (indeed all the noble houses) and work to direct human society to their own ends.

Your story may be a bit less stable, since the various covens might well work against each other for various reasons, even if they are willing to cooperate in a certain extent to maintain overall control of society.

Answer 3

Not really an answer but too long for a comment

Are you sure your magical population is sustainable with your current birth statistics?

Magician male and magician female = 1:1 for female magician child and 1:200 for male magician child
ordinary male and magician female = 3:10 for female magician child and 1:1450 for male magician child
Magician Male and ordinary female = 1:1 for female magician child and 1:200 for male magician child
ordinary male and ordinary female = 1:50,000 for female magician child and 1:1,000,000 for male magician child

I mean, especially the number of male magicians.

You've got a population of 1Mio ordinary people -- meaning, that if every person has 3 children (i.e. couples need to have 6 children), you have statistically speaking 3 male mages (MMs) and 60 female mages amongst them. And all of them need to survive to adulthood, too! So, ordinary people are completely out when trying to keep your magical population alive.

Now your mages. Since it doesn't matter at all in your statistics whether a MM has a child with an ordinary female or not, you should not waste your magical females on them. A magical female is of much greater use when paired with an ordinary, since they can greatly increase the odds of siring MMs with them. If you have 10000 female mages, and they have 6 children on average, you will get about 60,000/1450 = 41 MMs from them.

That's still not the 150 MMs you're postulating, so your 150 MMs got to sire the remaining 105 MMs (67%) of their population. Since 1 in 200 children from MMs is an MM, you need about 21,000 children, or 140 children per MM. On average. I think that's going to be a little bit of a problem... performance anxiety, anyone?

(Interesting statistical fact: even if an individual MM sires 200 children, there's still a 36% chance that there's no MM amongst them...)

And since you need such high birth rates in magicals just to sustain your 150 MMs, you're bound to have a population explosion within a couple of years, especially one of the female mages. Of the 21,000 MM children, 10,500 will be female mages. Of the 60,000 female mage descendents, 18,000 will be female mages. And of the 3mio ordinary descentents 60 will be female mages -- giving you a population of 28,500 female mages for the next generation while your 150MMs barely remain stable.

Answer 4

Female magicians would dominate warfare and politics.

Let's assume, since it hasn't been stated, that male magicians are twice as powerful as female magicians, and count for about two of them in battle. Initially, based on a population of 150 male magicians, 9850 female magicians, and 990,000 non-magical people, the female magicians will have about 10 times the military might as the rest of the population. No group with that much power doesn't take control of society. Female magicians will displace the entire aristocracy, and will make up roughly the entire military.

Religious control generally goes hand in hand with political and military control, so it's likely that female magicians would have control of the church, the military, and the state. The ability to control religious doctrine will very quickly result in a re-writing of social values, to be upheld on pain of death. Society would revolve around the female mages.

Male magicians might be individually powerful, but unless they're 100 times as powerful as the female magicians, they simply aren't powerful enough to make a difference. Furthermore, their options will be either be likely death in combat if they try to overthrow the female mages, or else a life of luxury and pleasure since...

Male magicians would never marry, instead spending their lives producing children with many, many different women.

The greatest ability of a male magician is to produce more magicians. A male magician who spends their life having children with as many women as possible will likely be able to produce thousands of them. If a healthy male can sustain a few more than two encounters a day, almost every day of the year, and produce children from 25% of those encounters, they can have almost 200 children per year. Even if they drop dead at the age of 40, or start to slow down then due to age, that's still easily 4000 children per male mage, of which roughly half will be female mages and roughly 20 will be male mages.

Since magical children are ostensibly more beneficial for a mother than non-magical children are, the goal of all of the women, magical or non-magical, will be to have children with the male mages. It's likely that women will be required to pay a stud fee to the family of the male mage for the right to try to have children. Male mages will be valued based on their fertility. The church will likely do away with marriage as well, and make sex with male mages a holy act, since encouraging women to have magical children will benefit the state.

Eventually, all females will be magical, as will 1/200th of the males.

If male magicians produce more than one male magician child on average, which they will, and produce FAR more children than non-magical males, eventually, they will be the only males having any children. They will make up 1/200th of the population, which will mean that they'll only be required to have 200 children each, on average. If there are 1:1 odds of having a female magical child (or 50%), and 1:200 odds of having a male magical child, and half of children are male, that leaves 99/200 children as non-magical males, with all of the females magical and that special 1/200 magical male.

Non-magical males will be the lowest in society.

Non-magical males will likely be servants to low-ranking magical members of society. They won't be allowed to have children, and they won't be as good at anything as the magical females are, assuming that magic can help with things like plowing fields and crafts.

Answer 5

First there would definitely be polygamy. It would be extremely unusual for a male wizard to not have a large harem of wives. Since producing children strong in magic is important politically and militarily it marriage outside of other magic users would be forbidden.

Witches would marry young. Very young probably at the first sighs a puberty. Why because there must produce children before war comes. While both witches and wizards will fight in war, since witch are in far greater number they would make up most of your army. The males would still fight (they are after all more powerful), but they would be the big guns that you only use when you have to. The females would be the involved in all the suicide mission and other dangerous jobs. What dose this have to do with the marriage age? let me explain

The trouble is that you need the witches for more then just war, you need them to produce more magic users. So you would want your them to produce at least two children before they die in battle.

Because of this not only would the witch marriage age be young, but thier fight age would be much older. Most likely witches under the age of 30 (or at least twenty five) would not be allowed to fight.

There would be political unrest. The witches are not accepted in to noble family's and are not give land. But there are trained to use there power to fight in wars. The males are more powerful, but the females have the numbers. They could be some kind of revolution of x-soldier witches. I not sure if they would be victories or not, it is possible that this uprising could end draw with no side clearly wining. This situation could lead to some kind of compromise that grant more privileges to witches.

I don't see the "magical man parts weapons" make much of a differences. The wizards are well protected and are most likely trained to use magic to fight. It's unlikely anyone could get close enough to cut off there man part. except for maybe in war.

Answer 6

Given the birth ratios, the population of magicals will spread quickly, and be dominated by females. Expect that a matriarchal society supplants the current one in few generations.

Since the "magic gene" appears to be from the male, male magicals will be a commodity: I expect forced adoption of magical boys by the rich and/or powerful, most for breeding than war. No government involvement, beyond having a few magicals of its own.

About war, let the female magicals do it, since they have 1000:1 advantage over non-magicals. Heck, one magical man, if well used to impregnate women, can beget an army of a few hundred magical women in 20-30 years! Nobles with non-magicals will lose. Badly. And the females will be in power.

Roll forward 200 years: then, almost every female is magical, and almost every male is non-magical.

As an aside: you posit that male parts can be used for magical items. And female parts cannot? Menstruation comes to mind, as blood for magical items, and such parts would be much more common.

Answer 7

My opinion?

Given the stated scenario, magical males would be culled or heavily controlled upon first use of their powers.

Why?

Firstly, we must address a few issues:

1. Cooperative Casting
2. Comparison of Power
3. Risk versus Reward analysis

I will also be operating under the following assumptions:

• Magic is relatively constant and can be quantified on a scale

• Female mages remain within the same scale of magnitude when compared to each other (for example, no female mage is magically stronger than 10 other female mages at a measurement of base power).

• Male mages are controlled by the government due to the level of power they represent, and as such are used as a national asset rather than treated with individual rights.

Cooperative Casting

If the setting contains an option to allow multiple persons to work together to complete a spell, it diminishes the importance of strong individual casters. To justify keeping a strong individual mage, this option would need to be removed from the table entirely.

Comparison of Power

We need a comparative ratio of female mage to male mage power. Without putting out the math as the previous posts have done, I will make this argument: the ratio point where acquisition of male mages is so extraordinarily high that it is not optimal to seek male mages, as I will cover in the next part.

Risk versus Reward Analysis

Let us say that a male magician is powerful enough to justify expending resources to acquire and retain. I would argue that there is no commander who would willing depend on such a figure.

Justification:

• a solitary figure of such an extraordinary scale of power represents as great a threat to the controlling nation as to their enemies. Should they somehow be controlled, rebel, or in some other way act in a non-controlled manner, they represent a serious threat to the structure of the nation. Such mages would be tightly controlled and restrained, or kept solely for research.

• use of a greater number of lesser strength mages should suffice if the rarity of male mages is universal. If there is a low number of male mages total, then there is no necessity to use them unless the opponent possesses a similar asset, or has a standing force that greatly exceeds the opponent's. Division of strength among individuals assures a more standardized result, and is generally more consistent and widespread.

• In the event that a male is identified as a mage, he will become an asset of his controlling nation rather be considered an individual. Accordingly, nations would control such persons with a heavy hand.

In terms of answering the questions regarding economy and politics, it is dependent upon the magical system. Unless magic is a finite resource with limited applications, the normal rules of economics would no longer apply. In the event that agricultural magic is available, there would realistically be no shortage of produce, and specialization of labor would be quickly achieved. If a mage can operate a machine at little to no cost, then labor also approaches a negligible value quickly.