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Notes -
My wife might have been, shall we say, less aware of the real physical differences between men/women... before she started lifting with me. At this point, she is basically dreaming of getting her maxes up to my warmup weight. (I've been lifting a lot longer.) It didn't take that long for her to become keenly aware and realize that we have significantly different ceilings.
Lots of jokes have been made about the lifting->right wing pipeline, but there really may be something to the idea that if you do get into lifting, it is completely unavoidable, looking at concrete numbers, to realize that one particular cultural soft lie is, indeed, a lie. It's not surprising that it leads to people questioning other parts of the edifice.
Sports are contact with reality. Just as Jackie Robinson and Mohammed Ali were the the most important figures in the Civil Rights movement; Nikola Jokic and Cooper Flagg are going to cause a crisis in American culture within a few years.
The most important myth that lifting destroys is learned helplessness: starting lifting is the experience of putting in effort and seeing results. There's a strong debate about privilege hidden under there, in that for some people it will be easier than me and that for some people it will be harder than me, but for everyone there is effort put in and there are results.
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