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I haven't met anyone that carries that argument all the way to the extreme, but I've met a surprising number of people that seem to believe something approximating it, or at least they wildly underestimate just how large many of the physical differences are. When I first met my wife, we were goofing around, and she claimed that she could sprint across a tennis court faster than me. I was absolutely incredulous that this was a sincere belief - she's a decently fit woman, but not an athlete and had never played any organized sport (I'm not a serious athlete either, but I'm a fit looking guy). Just on priors, I know that I'm faster than something like 99% of women. I laughed at her, we sprinted across a court a couple times, she lost by quite a bit, and just had a weird dismayed look about it. We had a couple other physical tests that we wound up doing (goofy stuff, like who can jump on a kitchen counter without a running start), and it kind of set in that we really aren't close physically. I was absolutely stunned that this was surprising to her, but she'd apparently just never played sports and never had a guy tell her that it wasn't going to be close.
On other occasions, I've had female friends claim that they could beat me in a fight, because I'm skinny. Which... well, I am skinny. But at 5'8", 140, fairly lean, and lifting a couple times a week, this really isn't going to be close. I don't think they'd claim that men and women only differ because of culture, but they do perceive themselves as being something like twice as strong as they actually are, so it's probably not too much of a stretch to convince them that whatever small difference they think exists is constructed.
This is the part that's so weird to me. There's not really any plausible proposed mechanism there, just a handwave at generic oppression. I'll certainly admit that until fairly recently a hypothesis along the lines of "women might be just as good at endurance sports as men, we don't know because they've never trained for it" was tenable. There was no women's Boston Marathon until 1972! That's just 50 years ago, there are women alive and well that personally fought to be included. There are even plausible sounding reasons for women to be just as good at endurance sports, and pretty much no one was training optimally for it until quite recently. But strength things? Like you said, it's simply too in your face, too obvious, there's just no plausible way to defend the idea that's constructed.
People who beleive this have never been in a fight.
I don't have the url on hand(and I'm not sure how we want to be linking to reddit anyways), but I recall a long thread on a female-centric reddit forum that discussed the moment when they realized just how much stronger men were naturally than women.
I distinctly remember a fair number of those moments could basically be summed up as 'I kept pushing my brother/SO/friend to treat me seriously when playing/wrestling/competing and when he did he promptly shut me down cold without even trying'.
I wonder how many women whom claim 'They could win in a fight' are going off of faulty information, because every man in thier life have been playing with them and/or treating them gently, while the woman in question thinks they've been treated seriously.
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One proposed mechanism I saw online about 5 years ago was the claim that, throughout history, men underfed women in their patriarchal society, resulting in women being undernourished and thus weaker than men on average and in the extremes. It seemed to subscribe to a Lamarkian-esque view of evolution except descent along sex instead of actual parentage, and also seemed pretty ahistorical with respect to the level of nutrition people used to get in the past. I wish I had saved it somewhere, because it was a really fascinating and deranged idea, and I recall it being passed around approvingly within my circles.
How do you underfeed the person who is doing the shopping and the cooking to begin with? Or if you go back to the farm, the person who is cooking the stew over the hearth, and gathering the eggs and milking the cow and making the bread and canning the vegetables, etc.? If you're the farmer or the cooper or the smithy, you can't stand in your kitchen all day to make sure she's not eating. She'll go pick apples off the tree and berries off the vine and make herself a whole damn pie if she wants to.
Internalized misogyny is a
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Ooh, ooh (raises hand). Was it from Charlie Stross? I didn't bring that to The Motte's attention until last year, but you might have first seen it in the wild.
And now I'm wondering if it wasn't Stross, but rather you saw the same idea independently invented elsewhere. Even on his own blog, full of left-wing fans, Stross was getting pushback, and about the closest thing he got to approval was the idea that, if we see sexual selection when women insist on marrying taller husbands, that might not quite be the same as women being underfed but it still ought to count as patriarchy too.
It was indeed not Stross, at least I don't recall it being someone by that name. It was a tweet thread online by some woman I had never heard of before or since. It does seem that the concept was largely the same as that 3rd bullet point in the post you linked, though the Twitter thread I'd read expanded on it quite a bit more, including explicitly making the claim instead of the implausible-deniability-language of "Consider, for example, that a restricted diet stunts growth, and that average adult stature tracks food availability by a generation or three, and ask why men are, on average, taller than women" that tries unconvincingly to make a claim without taking responsibility for it. The fact that the thread was passed along approvingly within my circles is likely more a reflection of how niche and extreme my circles were than anything.
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The claims I usually see are that spending more money (and thus, presumably more food) feeding men than women is discriminatory, with the implication that this contributes to performance differences. For example (emphasis mine):
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It is so dumb, because if you take two men - say a lightweight boxer and a middleweight boxer - you don't put them in the same fight (unless it's some kind of gimmick stunt). Everybody recognises this. A good lightweight will be beaten by a good middleweight. It's down to physical difference in height, weight, reach, etc.
But then you get people trying to deny that women in general are smaller, lighter, slower and weaker than men in general and it's just - do you not have eyes? Have you ever struggled with opening a jar and had to get a male family member to do it? Or lift something heavy for you?
The boxing analogy is instructive, heavyweight was the big draw but I don't know if that is still the case today (my late father used to watch boxing, so I absorbed some by osmosis but haven't watched any myself in years). There is a difference between fighters and boxers, one is generally considered to be more skilful in the art of boxing. The ideal, of course, is to have someone like Ali who could both box beautifully and also slog it out, soaking up punishment and landing heavy hits.
Heavyweight went down for a while because too many big, heavy, guys who were slow and clumsy but their main advantage was they could soak up punishment for the majority of the bout, then if they landed one big punch that was it for their opponent. (That's why lighter weight bouts were more enjoyable, because you got actual fighting and boxing, not one big behemoth lumbering around the ring being a human punching bag until he landed the killer punch). So a big, heavy, clumsy guy will slaughter (metaphorically) a woman who may be more skilled and faster than him, but who can't take the same beating and certainly can't stand up to one huge punch.
Katie Taylor is a great female boxer. She is never gonna stand in a ring with a guy, because he'd hammer her. You watch her bouts for the same reason you'd watch men boxing: skill and stamina. But there is never going to be a man versus woman boxing match, even at the same weights, because it just would not be level. Okay, maybe get a flyweight guy and some Soviet-era style big heavyweight female athlete, but even then I don't think it would be that equal.
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