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Women Are Strong
(lemmy.nz)
Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
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Come on... Are we really going to argue that on average, men are not stronger and taller than women? That doesn't make women inferior to men. Men will, on average, go bald more often and earlier than women. That doesn't make men inferior to women.
This feels like an insanely online take.
What we're arguing is whether the definition of "strong" is tuned so that men are "stronger" than women. There are far more sports that focus on the upsides of having large amounts of anabolic steroids (such as testosterone) in your blood than ones that give space to the downsides, or that look at features unaffected by it.
Imagine a soccer game where all players were restricted to 1500 kcal and 80g of protein per day in the month leading up to the match. Suddenly "stronger" men would be malnourished, woozy and easily outmaneuvered by relatively clear-headed and fit women. It's not like you can argue that this isn't falling in the sport tradition of measuring military performance by proxy either - an army marches on its stomach, and soldiers might not always have access to full rations.
But no, our very conception of "strength" discounts the entire infrastructure behind it. In sports as in the wider world. Physical and metaphorical. Wars have been lost because the "strength" of armies did not account for the logistics of supplying them. Was the US army "stronger" than the Taliban in Afghanistan? Did it win?
And yes, men are taller than women, but there is a sport for jumping over hurdles and not a sport for ducking under them. There is a sport for jumping over the tallest gate but not for crawling through the smallest hole. There is a sport for being the lightest load on horseback, though, and ever since women were unbanned they've been climing in the rankings and now they're getting wins as you might expect. Being taller is not an advantage unless the sport's ruleset makes it so. But somehow it is an advantage in almost every olympic sport. Curious.
If "strength" only meant the peak force that a human limb could generate we wouldn't be having this conversation. If "strength" only meant the capacity to do violence we wouldn't be having this conversation. Nor if it only meant virtue, or capacity for labor, or excellent feature, or mechanical load bearing capacity, or ability to sit through a funeral without crying like a healthy person. But it means all of that and more.
"Strength" is the patriarchal ideal of masculinity and our worldview distorts to see it as the natural way to excel, despite reality constantly showing us otherwise.
I get that this might feel like an extremely online take. So did Socrates' takes to the people of Athens. It takes a distance from society to be able to see its structure and question its base assumptions.
I think your comment was an excellent articulation of what I was thinking, although I think you risk a significant distraction by using Afghanistan as an example when talking about sex and gender. I think comparing yourself to Socrates is overly aggrandising.
But yeah I agree. It's not that men are better at sports, it's that the patriarchy has defined "sports" as what realmen™ are better at.
Individuals aren’t averages or I’d be taller, and men aren’t competing in women’s sports.
When you optimize for the top men vs top women, you'll often see men come out on top. (Though there likely also is an element of men being encouraged to go into sports, rather than women, so they are disadvantaged not only because of biological differences.) The part of the OP you skipped is "inherently weaker". There's a problematic viewpoint, while not taken literally most of the time, of all women being weaker than all men. Or that they should always be weaker, whether physically, or just in the "being subservient" way.
With your response having missed the point, it basically shows you're falling for that propaganda. I invite you to rethink.
And the middle. And any other reasonably comparable subset of men and women.
Because it's a wild assertion made without evidence. OP feels this is part of a vast concerted planned conspiracy...
(Personally I think if there is a conspiracy, it's to create fights like this on the Left. It sounds like the Left is saying that men aren't generally bigger and stronger than women, which, for anyone who has ever seen multiple people, must seem a pretty wild claim.)
I think what's being pointed out is that it's not that black and white, and the argument you are using has been coopted and used as propaganda. As a part of critical thinking, we should be able to question everything we believe, in such a way as to disregard it. Do you accidentally have a bias because you've believed this your whole life, is a good question to ask. I'm not saying you're wrong or right, I do have an opinion on that, but I'm not expressing that right now, and I'm not talking about the premise, but the active ability to oppose your own thinking. Could you, (for any topic) put both or the many factors on the table in front of you and are you capable of rejecting beliefs you thought were inherent. It's something we all need to learn, with the co-opting of ingrained beliefs by orchestators of propaganda.
My opinion, no I don't think on average women and men are comparable like that. You're thinking of the idealised and top athletes, of both, and you're imagining an equal standing throughout thier lives to become the athletes. That doesn't exist. If the same athlete men had the societal pressures and responsibilities that had to also keep up, would that not shave a few seconds off their time. Does muscle structure make a difference, maybe. Maybe not. Height? Are we just judging running and running alone? Wouldn't that skew the results. That doesn't seem to be a varied comparison, that seems cherry picked. Women's and men's competitions used to be combined, until the men kept getting butt hurt at losing to a woman. Which events, I can't remember. It's more that the thought brings questions to answer. We should always be questioning what we believe, and be flexible enough to improve upon our knowledge.
That's not why we separate the genders in competitions. We do it for the same reason we separate the age bands and weight classes.
Convienent for your fallacious argument.
I see your point thag this isnt a black and white comparison, and there are definitely societal norms and pressures put onto boys and their performance in sports equating to their self worth.
But until someone can control for those, any other assertion is meaningless and entirely unprovable. The current data in all countries is that, no matter what level of competition you look at, men are faster/stronger on average when you are competing. The sole exception I am aware of where women routinely beat men's records at all levels is ultra endurance running (>50km is the threshold).
I've looked into this previously and am pretty confident. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, so if you can find any competition record with a good number of women and men where the women are equal to the men, on average, please provide it.
I am an athletic person who regularly races in a variety of sports as an adult, as well as various sports from highschool through varsity sports, and in every event I've done (save the ultramarathons noted above) average men times vs average women times are different.
Are you really arguing trans women are men?
Where do you get that from their comment?
The part where this is about the trans women in sport debate. Y’know the entire thing being discussed.
There are lots wrong with their comment including misogyny and ableism in general.
However, we're not sure misgendering is one of them, we say this as trans beings who have seen a lot of it.