One can easily surmise by reading through much of the period literature that there was a certain emphasis on the separation of classes, and that in the period, one could easily imagine that there was quite a disparity among different cultures, even different genders, social standings, religious upbringings, and many more things. In a sharp contrast, our modern society has given way to a point of relative tolerance, and while we're not quite there yet, we've certainly made some progress in the last roughly 700 years or so. With that in mind, one has to wonder, do we as anachronistic reenactment fans find it more important to hold "true" to what was written in anecdote about social acceptance at the time we portray ourselves from coming from, or do we push for the importance of leaving such old trifles in the past, and promoting acceptance as we likely should, just as we should in the real world outside of events?

It is with a sad and heavy heart that I must unfortunately give the answer as a good solid heady "Most of the time". Rather, do not get me wrong, as I firmly believe that acceptance and societal tolerance should be our absolute first priority, as education doesn't acknowledge a gender, a skin color, or really, at the core of it, a deity, but it seems that there is a small but vocal growing group(And I use the term group loosely, as they do not seem to have particular association with one another) that is pushing for a more period representation of "A Woman's Place", or a more period representation of acceptance of other faiths(That is, a lack of acceptance as a whole). Now, a large part of me is mildly not concerned with this particular fringe of the Society, but let us not take this beyond the factor of possibilities, while very few have experienced it, those that have will, as with many of the community faults that have become an issue, be left with an incredibly bad taste in their mouths in regards to the society as a whole, which sets this issue as a high level of importance in dealing with.

This particular worry found itself culminating over a number of years in my time in Ansteorra, with very small levels of issue on random occurrence, and mostly disappeared from the radar shortly before I relocated to An Tir, as far as I could see. It reached, however, its peak of tolerability during this year's Autumn War, wherein a baron stated to a traditional matriarchal household that he had no use for fighters provided by a house run by a Woman. Mind you, the house fielded fighters anyway, and between their own fighters and a group of mercenaries they had hired, they fielded a total of 25 pairs of feet that day.

This doesn't even really come down to period authenticity of intolerance, but it does touch on a rather nasty overarching sub-issue of this all, which is the "Period Authentic Asinine Disorder", as I've come to call it. Much of literature portrays nobles as "Better than you" types, often playing the one-upmanship game to one another, and publicly spurning anyone that couldn't keep up, and many have taken this personality type as the absolute necessity of their own game, often to the detriment of the community around them.

So I implore the community, if you Ever hear the words "But it's my persona" as an excuse for someone being, and a better term escapes me at the moment, a complete arse, remind them that their behavior isn't Cute, their behavior isn't "Living up to the spirit of the Society by being more period in our actions", it's just being a twit for the sake of being a twit.