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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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One of those truths is someone who went through male puberty will always, in every single case, have a competitive advantage over a woman.

Are you saying that every single person who went through male puberty can beat any woman, including top-level female athlete?

Nope, that's a straw man. You can have a competitive advantage and still lose. Male puberty gives you a competitive advantage, not a guaranteed win. You even make the same point yourself:

the advantages of modern nutrition, sports science etc. can outweigh male puberty without it.

There are other advantages. That does not negate the puberty advantage.

I competed in swimming, and I was slow, often slower than many of the women, who were straight up better swimmers than I was. Yet the shorter the race, the closer I came to the fastest women, the greater advantage my sex gave me, the less being a better technical swimmer could overwhelm being bigger and stronger.

What do you mean by competitive advantage? It sounds like you're saying males have a raw physical advantage (e.g. being bigger and stronger) against females in every single case but that females can have better techniques/training, which is what I disagreed with. Male puberty by itself gives you larger and stronger bones, increased muscle mass, higher circulating hemoglobin, etc., but you can still end up with a weaker physique in absolute terms than a genetically lucky female with access to the best nutrition and sports science while growing up. What competitive advantage do you have then?

You can argue that male puberty gives you a competitive advantage all else being equal - same environment, same nutrition, but different sex - but in absolute terms, you don't necessarily have an advantage because you went through male puberty. What competitive advantage does a 5'4 twink with slender body type (narrow shoulders, small joints, etc.) have against say, Brittney Griner? I doubt any amount of training could bridge that gap.

I mean, sure, maybe that 5’4” scrawny dude would lose a one-on-one contest to freak of nature Brittney Griner. Maybe.

I don't want to speak for KMC, but is the commonly understood usage of the term "competitive advantage" not generally understood to apply to the performance gap between the n percentile man and nth percentile woman? Like you might define it as a factor that positively affects performance in a given discipline. In that definition an 80 kg lifter has a competitive advantage over a 70 kg lifter, even though the 70 kg lifter might be stronger. Or as another example, you could take an average amateur cyclist and dope them to the gills with EPO and they would still get instantly dropped by the worst Tour de France rider. That doesn't mean EPO isn't a competitive advantage for a cyclist.

At the risk of getting bogged down in semantics, the "in every single case" clause in KMC's comments was what made me raise an eyebrow - while sure male puberty (or EPO) is a competitive advantage, the way it was phrased could be interpreted ambiguously as meaning people who went through male puberty are at an advantage by always being bigger and stronger while female athletes can have superior technique/training - see KMC's subsequent comment. Best to clarify to avoid a potential motte and bailey.

I wrote up this whole musing about how I thought you were wrong, only to realize that I’d misread you as saying “comparative” advantage.

Anyway, I still want to chime in and say that I read Mihow as making the extreme claim: any man would have an advantage over any woman. Not necessarily an overwhelming one, but that we’d expect the man to win more than 50% of the time.

This seemed hyperbolic to me, and I think your read makes a lot more sense.

Maybe but it is far closer to the truth than people realize.

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