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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Also his argument is silly. You can look at women top tier athletes. You can look at top tier male athletes. They don’t look the same. The men look bigger and stronger.

In all fairness, there's a very long history of underdog sports and fighting stories where it's also presumed that tiny, willowy men can totally beat the brawny jocks through sheer pluck or clever moves or ancient Asian secrets, or whatever. Likewise films and books where humans defeat obviously larger and stronger animals in physical fights.

Cope-oriented David-vs-Goliath media tropes were being served up to insecure men long before they got cross-applied to women.

I guess — never found those stories reasonable but then again I played sports.

Main characters in media and games are depicted as unrealistically powerful across virtually all material domains, including physical contests and bodily feats of skill but also depictions of physical handicrafts, animal interactions, vehicles and projectiles, etc. That's because almost nobody in the audience has any actual experience making, building or doing anything with their bodies in the real world, so they have zero gauge of what's plausible and no reason to care.

So yeah, a woman can't beat a guy at arm-wrestling, and also mining doesn't mean swinging a weightless pickaxe until big nuggets of gold drop out of the rock face, and also IRL that pudgy gamer could barely even lift that longsword, and also a roadrunner mostly can't outsmart a coyote. But audiences like cartoon logic because it's nice to imagine that we are powerful and other people's skills are easy.

David used a ranged weapon.

In that specific story, yes, but the emotional thrust of the trope is that a little guy can beat a much larger opponent through his superior bravery, skill or virtue. And underdog physical conflict stories are all over 60s-90s boys' media, from Tom & Jerry through The Karate Kid. TvTropes helpfully points out that this is the convention for final boss levels in videogames, as well.

So Muscles are Meaningless is not one-sided in its gender appeal.

But isn’t the trope accepting that the smaller guy can’t physically compete so he has to figure out another way (eg out smart his opponent)?

Even so, who said pure brute strength is the only legitimate way to fight? If you win, you win. Even outside complete changes of frame or dirty tricks, there's plenty of space for "superior speed" or "technique"-style workarounds.

Sure but the idea is in the context of “men and women are equally strong” which even those tropes suggest is not true (because of course it isn’t true)

"Headshot your enemy. Doesn't matter how strong he is if his head is broken open."

Timeless wisdom.

A person who is not interested in sports will not spend time (1) looking at top-tier athletes and (2) comparing their musculature in detail.

Or at least they won't be looking at top-tier athletes of both sexes in order to make the comparison.

I seem to remember at least one issue of Sports Illustrated each year being widely purchased by men who were not particularly interested in sports, although I agree not everyone depicted therein (whose musculature would, indeed, be looked at in detail) was a top-tier athlete.

It doesn’t require detail. Pick any NFL WR. They don’t look like any women. It’s obvious.

Even if literally all you watched was blue-coded, scripted media where they used the same camera tricks used to make people like RDJ and Tom Cruise look taller, you can't avoid noticing the difference in stature/physical expectations for people who are cast to look like the top physical specimens for their sex.

Yeah I just don’t know how people can look at men and women and think “physically pretty similar.”

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