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Your point about marathons supports a belief I have about womens' sport leagues. I am not sure how many others share it.
Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.
That we don't have a competitive league for unathletic men like Brodski reveals that league segregation is not really about fair play. Arguments about "not putting in the same amount of effort" are essentially my point -- Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status. It is even difficult to say it in English. We still call them "athletic women" because all the words we will use for this concept (like "weak" and "athletic") are status-laden and graded-on-a-curve.
Because the way we talk about athletes (of all sexes) uses fuzzy terms instead of objective ranks, someone like Brodski can hear about women qualifying for marathons and being strong and he will continue to be blind to physical reality.
Contrast in Chess, where the definition of Grandmaster is actually the same for men and women. However, there is a different title called Woman Grandmaster which has fewer requirements. Presumably, being a woman is also a requirement to hold the title, but I am not sure. Maybe a man who can't quite make GM can call himself a WGM. It would be an unconventional for sure. But, nobody can deny that the purpose of the WGM title is the same as any other title, which is to assign status.
Which is why we have the Paralympics. The Special Olympics is a different model which confers less status on the winners. See this post where I discuss further, but the short answer is that the Special Olympics is intended to be less competitive than the Olympics in a way the Paralympics is not.
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This reminds me of a serious argument I've seen someone make in the ultimate Frisbee community, for why transwomen ought to play with women despite admitting that transwomen, especially ones who haven't done any sort of medical transitioning, have a physical advantage: that transwomen suffer so much bigotry in their everyday lives that we just ought to accommodate them in this one thing. It doesn't make sense from a fair sports play perspective, but from the perspective of just seeing this as a question of status, it kinda does.
Someone on the anti-trans side -- who wants trans women to play in mens leagues -- is still thinking in terms of status when it comes to competitions. For them, it's stolen valor for a trans woman to play with real women.
I admit I have trouble understanding the pro-trans mind on this issue. If I had to guess, they are biting a bullet, and sacrificing womens sports on the altar of the greater good of tolerance. The womens sports issue is just one piece of a mass-deception designed to convince society that a transwomen share the same characteristics as ciswomen. This is the only way to effect the desired change, which is to make society treat transwomen as-if they are ciswomen.
Yes, this is more or less right. I've certainly encountered endorsement of something like this in left spaces. "It kinda sucks, but the right decided to make women's sports a battlefield of the greater societal conflict about What A Woman Is. Making sure they don't win that fight is of existential importance and takes precedence over concerns about the short-tem fairness of competitive sports". Personally I wish we'd settled on advocating for "let's rename them XX League and XY League". It seems more principled. Harder to turn into a slogan, though.
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Do you have the same feeling about weight classes? Would you say that the flyweight UFC Champion is athletic? Would it be accurate to call him tough, despite weighing 125# (fighting weight) at 5'5"? Or is it inaccurate in the same way "athletic woman" is inaccurate because he would be toast against any higher weight class fighter? What about Ilia at featherweight, 145# fighting weight and 5'7", but reportedly closer to 180# walking around, who probably stunts on most average men but would be similarly stomped by a LHW or HW UFC fighter? Or do we consider p4p for men, but not women?
This kind of discussion confuses me sometimes, because a lot of men who aren't running 3hr marathons and can't climb 5.13b and can't sink a three pointer on an open basketball court love to shitpost about how stupid the idea of an athletic woman is. The existence of someone better doesn't seem to preclude the use of the word athletic in my mind.
I mean, does an announcer belting out "In the red corner, the Heavy Weight Champion of the Wooooooorld" have the same gravitas as Feather Weight Champion? I mean, I'm not gonna fuck with a featherweight champion just because I weigh more. But all the same, which weight class sells more tickets on average? Heavyweight is where the big bucks are. There is a perception that the Heavyweight is the champion of champions.
@PutAHelmetOn ((Because I'll cite back to this in my reply to you))
This is less true than you think it is in modern fight sports.
Average Purse for Boxing By Weight Class:
🔹Heavyweight: $20M
🔹Bridgerweight: $1M
🔹Cruiserweight: $3M
🔹Light Heavyweight: $5M
🔹Super Middleweight: $25M
🔹Middleweight: $2M
🔹Jr Middleweight: $3M
🔹Welterweight: $10M
🔹Super Lightweight $5M
🔹Lightweight $15M
🔹Super Featherweight $1M
🔹Featherweight $1M
🔹Super Bantamweight $4M
🔹Bantamweight $1.5M
🔹Super Flyweight $2M
🔹Flyweight $500K
🔹Jr Flyweight $1M
🔹Minimumweight $200k
You clearly see that Super Middleweight (168#) tops the charts, and that lightweight and welterweight are both vastly higher than any of the weights between Super Mid and Heavy.
For the UFC, the top ten highest paid fighters of all time includes four heavyweights, but also two lightweights top the list and it also features middleweights and welterweights. In the UFC in particular, among fight fans HW is often seen as a bit of a sideshow, with a shallow talent pool and sloppy fights; the biggest stars and best fights have normally been between 155# and 205#, where the fighters tend to land at "normal male" heights of between 5'9" and 6'2".
That's what more fans are tuning in for, rather than the Universal Championship at HW.
Historically in Boxing the Heavyweight Championship was the ne plus ultra of sports, but back then your heavyweight champions were Rocky Marciano at 5'10" 190#, and Mohammed Ali at 6'3" 226#, a big fella but not a mass monster by any means. I'm on the bigger side for my BJJ gym, and I'm a few pounds bigger than Marciano; the biggest couple guys in the gym are significantly larger than Ali.
The problem might be talent pools: basketball and the NFL soak up too many of the really athletic big fellas. Jalen Carter or Micah Parsons might be HW contenders if they had trained for it, but they make twice that fight purse a season in the NFL; and forget what guys like Lebron and Luka make in the NBA without getting hit in the head too often.
The correlation between weight and purse is 48%, which seems high enough to confirm the theory that heavier is more prestigious. There is also a mild bias in favour of the "classic" weight classes over the more recently added fine-grained ones, although the difference ($7.1M vs $5.6M) may not be statistically significant depending on the number of fights making up the averages.
That's not really a useful way to examine weight classes relative to @WhiningCoil 's assertion that HW is the prestige weight class. HW is the "open" class that any fighter could enter if they were better, they're the "real" champion, any other weight class whether at 200# or 125# is a "fake" champion by comparison. The assertion made wasn't "people like watching bigger fellas" it is "people like watching the 'real' champion, not a 'fake' champion protected by weight class regulations."
The real pattern you see is that fans like watching fights with great champions and great challengers, they like seeing great athletes compete against other great athletes, regardless of weight. This holds throughout boxing history: HW was big when you had multiple challengers passing the belt around in the Ali-Frazier-Foreman era, and decayed when the Klitschko's dominated it; Leonard, Duran, Hagler, and Hearns made middleweight great and their fights are still legendary today. Mayweather has the biggest three purses of all time. It's how it works.
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Lower weight classes offer different opportunities to view excellence - supreme speed, reaction time, endurance, doggedness. Big Man Smash Good certainly looks more attractive and brings eyeballs, but the other stuff is entertaining and a showcase in its own way, and in a way that women's classes aren't.
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I was not giving opinion on if "athletic" should be graded on a curve.
In case this sentence wasn't clear, I can annotate it:
There, I used "athletic" in the curve-grading sense, the same as you seemed to use it.
Yes, you are dunking on average men because female athletes outperform them. The sting of your dunk is precisely because the idea of an objective!athletic woman is silly. It wouldn't take much for the average man to outperform her. The disrespect we show female athletes is precisely because a man at that level is also not praised or respected for it. The respect and praise is allocated based on status (and society's intuitions for who should be given it), not based on who can do what.
The existence of weight classes proves that the featherweight's objective!weakness is high-status.
That there is no league for short basketball players seems to prove that short king's objective!weakness is low-status. I suppose one could try to argue that short players are not outmatched in basketball to the same degree that light players are outmatched in fighting. Probably the team-based aspect of basketball makes it harder to analyze individual players. In some sense it is the team that is the player in basketball, and there is no such thing as a short team.
I do not think it is a coincidence that short stature in men is one of the classic incel status resentments. Furthermore, I've heard it (but have not looked into it) that the male height-income gap replicates better than the gender income gap. In other words, a man's height is a classic status marker.
That's why I brought up Topuria specifically, because he is in a smaller weightclass on a UFC scale, but at his walking around weight he is essentially an average American male. In my view, that makes him objectively athletic, because he's outperforming the majority of men. And the market agrees! The most famous UFC fighters of all time are Connor Macgregor and GSP, who fought primarily at 155 and 170 respectively. The highest earning divisions have historically been between 155 and 205, rarely above or below. There's a deeper and more interesting talent pool that puts on good fights.
The assertion regarding lower-weightclass athletes or female athletes that:
Is the purest fentanyl-strength copium. I know a few dozens of women that climb 5.13b, that's not a trivial achievement for a man. Neither is a 3:13 marathon, or sinking three pointers, or playing scratch golf even from the women's tees, or any number of other female athletic achievements we see.
Really, I agree with you that athletics is about status, but I don't think the adverb "objective" belongs anywhere near the adjective athletic. Because there is no being "athletic" in some platonic ideal sense, there is only being more athletic than and less athletic than. And the question as to calling someone athletic when we get into weight classes, women's divisions, "master's" age classes, is probably whether such people are either "more athletic than the average person" or "more athletic than the expectation."
So I guess the status I'm interested in conferring on others when I call them athletic is that they are more athletic than you'd expect.
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You know, it's funny you point that out, because I never thought of it like that, but it really crystallized something for me from reading so much pre-current year literature lately. At no point in any novel I've read pre 1980 is any woman ever described as physically strong. Not in Dickens, not in Howard, not in Homer, Tolkien, Niven & Pournelle, Lovecraft, Ellison, Twain, or Burroughs. Women are not described as strong, even graded on a curve, there are no feats of female strength (though cunning is fair game). Though perhaps Gibbon occasionally describes the women of certain barbarian tribes as possessing manly or warlike virtues. I don't have quotes on hand.
Point being, there was a before time, when there wasn't the constant cultural obsession with giving equal time to flattering women as being "strong".
This reflects more on the particular kinds of stories they were telling than it does on history as a whole. Having a (relatively, for a woman) strong wife who can do farm labor and bear strong sons was valued. A female relative of mine who still lives off the same farm her grandparents did is visibly pretty strong.
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Certainly in Howard. Valeria is described as being strong (while still being feminine). Maybe the original Red Sonja (who inspired the later Red Sonja in Conan comics) might count.
"She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance." - This is the start of the description of Valeria. He does say she is unusual in her strength though.
"Then with a yell and a rush someone was at his side and he heard the quick splintering of mail beneath the madly flailing strokes of a saber that flashed like silver lightning before his clearing sight. It was Red Sonya who had come to his aid, and her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper." - She is splintering mail with sword strokes and reaping men like grain, which takes some level of strength.
"With a croaking cry Tshoruk ran at her, scimitar lifted. Before he could strike, she crashed down the barrel of the empty pistol on his head, felling him like an ox. From the other side Rhupen slashed at her with a curved Turkish dagger. Dropping the pistol, she closed with the young Oriental. Moving like someone in a dream, she bore him irresistibly backward, one hand gripping his wrist, the other his throat. Throttling him slowly, she inexorably crashed his head again and again against the stones of the wall, until his eyes rolled up and set. Then she threw him from her like a sack of loose salt." - Red Sonja again rescuing the main character - overpowered a man, throttled him, then throws his body away, like a sack.
So noted! I don't recall the exact description of the lady in Queen of the Black Coast either. But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal. Although I recall even in Red Nails, Valeria was disabused of any notions of superiority to Conan, and the people they fought were a fairly degenerate and sorcerous bunch.
I mean, yes, Amazons were a trope, and lost parts of the Greek Epic Cycle even had them. Maybe I over stated my case that "at no point" were the authors of those works describing women as strong. But it was rare, and far short of the almost compulsive behavior of modern creators of culture trying to give equal, or even superior time, to the ability of 90 lb totally normal women to overpower hulking 6'4" 300 lb manly men.
Absolutely. Belit throws herself at his feet, Valeria is certainly not his equal, this version of Red Sonja does save a European warrior giant who is fighting the Ottomans, but while she can overpower the "average" male warrior with strength she isn't shown to be a strength match to Gottfried directly and can't lift him out of a moat in his full armor on her own, she can only half lift him, though that is probably still reasonably impressive as he is in full armor, soaking wet and fully armed.
Celtic history and myths do have some warrior women as well:
From a Roman soldier:
“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”
You can find others in Celtic myth cycles like:
"Aife also known as Aoife in modern Irish, was Scáthach's rival and by most accounts, her sister, or even twin. She was reportedly fierce in battle, shattering Cú Chulainn’s sword with one of her blows when the two went head to head in an epic fight. The mighty Cú Chulainn had to resort to trickery to defeat her"
But usually they are portrayed as being unusual examples of womanhood in and of themselves.
As for modern media it's certainly more common I'd agree, but as long as they do the work I don't mind it. i.e. Buffy being explicitly powered by magic, Black Widow being augmented by a shadowy Red Room especially in a world where a man with apparently only peak human strength can hold down a helicopter. They are our modern version of the mythologies of the past (or as with Wonder Woman, the actual past mythologies), reinvented.
It's a little more jarring in more grounded pieces I agree but even there they have a tendency to show one man being able to beat 5 men at the same time or what have you, so they are obviously juicing everybody up for the sake of looking bad-ass. I imagine having to show a guy just about win a fight with an equal but be exhausted then sit around healing for a month from his cracked ribs, concussion and shattered knuckles isn't exactly conducive to a fast based entertainment product. So almost every character in an action series or movie is effectively superhuman for unspecified reasons.
I have met a single woman who was as strong as I was but she was a fit 6'2 black ex D1 basketball player. And I am a 5'11 schlubby gamer, and a decade older than she was. So I don't have any illusions about average strength comparisons. A woman needs very very significant size and fitness advantages in order to match male strength. My first wife was 5' even and 90lbs and there was no possible way she could overpower me hand to hand, even if she were trained by ninjas.
Where is this from? All I could find was unattributed copypasta with a Google search.
I can't find an attribution either, beyond unidentified Roman soldier. I did come across it in some book about Rome (hence why i knew roughly how it went so I could Google it), but I can't remember which, or whether it was attributed there or not.
We have some attributed quotes which say roughly the same thing, though of course how much is based upon them actually seeing Celtic women vs hearing stories is difficult to determine.
“The women of the Gauls are not only like men in their great stature, but they are a match for them in courage as well.” — Diodorus Siculus
“A whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one [Gaul] in a fight, if he calls in his wife, stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, begins to rain blows mingled with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.” — Ammianus Marcellinus
I think the evidence does suggest Celts were on average a couple of inches taller than Romans so probably Celtic women were taller than Roman women in the same way. Whether or not there was a besotted Roman soldier who wrote about Celtic Muscle Mommies compared to the small boring Roman women with that specific quote is unclear. I would heavily suspect that even if that is an actual quote the average Celtic woman was not actually as strong as any Roman man.
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