It just baffles me that people can say this with a straight face. I can only assume that they have never played a sport or done any physical activity in their lives.
So while there are some people who might actually believe it, I am sure, this is more of a “thing I want to be true” for some. For most, it’s a shibboleth for being on “the right side of history (tm).” People don’t like to be excluded from their chosen group.
An interesting hypothetical: good liberal couple profess to believe that there is no physiological difference between males and females in sports. They then discover their daughter is about to face a male opponent in a contact sport, who did the Lia Thomas - “transitioned” like right before the season.
A physically fit woman can pass the army training regimen. Can carry 50lbs loads on a 5k. Can do the pullups and pushups and all that.
She's not going to be the best in the regiment, no way no how. But she'll be fine.
Goes double if you give her some testosterone (and the Dems seem fit to pretend that the androgens they're giving for F2M aren't doing anything psychological. Pull the other one, nitwits).
It is not a fraternity prank. A fraternity prank is stealing the other fraternity's cannon and driving it across the country to your fraternity (Yes, these are pencil-necked geeks).
It is instead fraternity hazing. A nigh-on impossible job you give to Frosh to test their dedication. (The principle of hazing is solid, the US Military uses it in Boot Camp, esp. the Marines. What's doesn't work is letting somewhat drunk college students decide what "hazing" is.)
I hear this in running too and it just ignores the fact that in swimming and running, the best men aren’t doing this silly non-renumerative ultra-distance exercise addiction/cult hobby stuff. The best male ultramarathoners are like 20 minutes slower at the marathon than elites. Female ultra athletes are passable at the longer standard distances The men doing these sports have big fish in small pond syndrome.
I worked with a guy who was top-ranked in the 100-mile events, years ago. He was a pretty ordinary young man, until he started talking about his diet and workout. Extraordinarily dedicated and fit.
There is no high like completing an impossible physical feat like that; had a glimmer of it myself at much less demanding levels, days long past.
I’m not ragging on ultra runners. It is its own kind of exquisite torture ordeal. I was a 2:34 marathoner (Sub 32 10k, 1:08-1:09 Half so not great at longer stuff beyond that) so I could never do any of those ultra events. But all these 2:00-2:10 marathoners would dominate that sport but there is famously no money in it apart from sponsorships. I’d say on average if you took the best female ultra runners and the best male ones, the females would probably be more competitive at standard race distances. And the other thing about ultras is things can go tragically south in ways they can’t in other races which can lead to surprising order of finish in races. And women do indeed give up less at super long events. Still not parity, but they give up less.
Something worth pointing out here that wasn’t established when Knecktle wrote his paper about the Manhattan marathon swim – Diana Nyad (1975 winner of this race) is an unreliable data point. She’s been credibly accused of embellishing her times, and the norms around exhibition swimming being shapeless and fuzzy is how she was able to pass this off. The unstructured character of these exhibition events lends itself to fabulist nonsense.
>They seem to think it’s mean to admit that the average man is bigger, stronger, and faster than the average woman
This is nitpicking, but the debate is actually about comparing above-average men and women, not average people. Referencing average people, like you do here, leads to another talking point that female athletes are more fit than the average man. Another commentor even brings that up:
>Besides any decent female college athlete will destroy an ordinary guy in most sports.
Of course, it is also true that elite men are much stronger than elite women. But someone like Adam Conover would probably latch onto your sentence about average people as a way to dismiss your thoughts on the differences between elite men and elite women.
This argument only works if you purposefully select for men that dont play sports at all. The issue with doing that is you are no longer evaluating the delta between males and females and are instead evaluating different life choices. Saying that an elite female athlete can beat some fat guy who's only exercise is walking to the fridge for beer isn't meaningful.
The reality is that your typical male amateur club player of a given sport, who does it as a hobby, is going to be competitive with, and often superior to, elite level female athletes. These are men who have day jobs and are nowhere near elite level as males.
Sure, that would be a reasonable counterargument. But it is better to just avoid the argument entirely. A commentor brought up a comparison between elite women and average men, so it seems like the piece could have avoided that by being more precise.
Really a click bait topic. The essence of being a human being is the capacity of one gender to push a newborn with a grotesquely large head through a birth canal shaped by an odd pelvic structure. Anatomy is destiny. Also for men, but more in terms of sexual performance. Not a popular subject here. Besides any decent female college athlete will destroy an ordinary guy in most sports.
I suspect a member of an under-15s football team is better at football than the archetypal "ordinary guy".
Actually, I might BE the archetypal ordinary guy. Middle aged, average male height, a bit overweight but you wouldn't write home about it. And I'm sure the woman and the 14-year-old boy alluded to above are both way better at football than me.
I wrote this to dismiss the perverse suggestion that female athletes aren't athletes. I believe that they are far more athletic than most of the male readers here.
Read the comments again. The original post made the trenchant observation that elite male athletes are better than elite female athletes. From this, the subject seemed to turn to how much better. Pointless, to me. But each to her own
The discussion is whether elite female athletes outperform ordinary guys. Therefore, kind of hard to have it without comparing elite athletes and ordinary guys. We'd have to discuss something else.
Why? Elite male athletes crush elite female athletes. High school male athletes crush high school female athletes. We all know what happened when they had an exhibition match between high school boys and a world champion woman's soccer team. Are you suggesting there's relevance in comparing elite male athletes to high school female athletes? If women were physically as strong or fast as men, there'd be very little rape or domestic violence.
Soccer is not the only sport in the world. Women absolutely dominate men at gymnastics, which is much more impressive to watch anyway. Dance, acrobatics, ice skating. Women dominate.
No, I'm talking about the thing I'm talking about, not the thing you want me to talk about instead. Why you think my comment about ordinary guys somehow has any bearing on elite male athletes is beyond me.
Men are such crybabies that they got their own entire class of gymnastics events so they don't have to be compared to women as much. Even the best male gymnasts land like a ton of bricks. They can't keep their feet together in the air to save their lives.
Meanwhile, the WNBA doesn't even get goals adjusted for the shorter average female height.
Girls and women absolutely dominate boys and men at gymnastics, acrobatics, dance, singles figure skating, and much more. Little girls destroy grown men at gymnastics. So in no way are male people "better at sports than women" across the board or even on average. They aren't. It's just that all the value and societal importance has been given to abilities men have while ignoring and downplaying the ones women have.
This is essentially saying "male olympians are significantly faster than female olympians." (I mean, high school is the normal olympic age, right? It's only noteworthy when 12 year olds start winning skateboarding competitions).
Track has high jump, which is apparently one of those "men are MUCH better at this than women."
But see? that provides a "look, here's something you didn't know, from actual research."
Not trying to cover up "let's compare best in America" with "best of world" and say "oooh, Best of america is pretty good." (Um? No duh? There are a few sports that other countries win very, very hard. Kenyans and marathons, say. But America cleans up with a lot of medals -- and so does China when they try.)
Wow that's one of the dumber takes I've seen in this topic and that's saying a lot. Elite athletes train for years to become Olympians and even then only a few make it to the Olympics. But suddenly it's logical that random high school boys can beat Olympic athletes because they're the same age? JFC that's a bad take.
"Elite athletes train for years" -- well, yes, in Certain Sports. In others, they just do their job and show up to do it in the Olympics. Just another shot, taken on the world stage.
I don't put these up to shame someone who spends concentrated time "getting good" -- I'm certain there are sports where women start to train that early. Just not all of them (pretty sure I can pull the converse for boys).
"The sport is odd" is not really a good excuse here. The longer a race gets, the more women win it. Women are just as strong as men if not moreso. Strength includes resilience/endurance, not just brute force or fast twitch.
This article reminds me of the quote, except about women's physical achievements instead of their writing:
"She didn’t write it. She wrote it but she shouldn’t have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist and it isn’t really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. She wrote it BUT… "
*Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing*
Men are not actually stronger; we've just been lied to about what strength actual entails for the purpose of dismissing and demeaning women's abilities.
It just baffles me that people can say this with a straight face. I can only assume that they have never played a sport or done any physical activity in their lives.
So while there are some people who might actually believe it, I am sure, this is more of a “thing I want to be true” for some. For most, it’s a shibboleth for being on “the right side of history (tm).” People don’t like to be excluded from their chosen group.
An interesting hypothetical: good liberal couple profess to believe that there is no physiological difference between males and females in sports. They then discover their daughter is about to face a male opponent in a contact sport, who did the Lia Thomas - “transitioned” like right before the season.
A physically fit woman can pass the army training regimen. Can carry 50lbs loads on a 5k. Can do the pullups and pushups and all that.
She's not going to be the best in the regiment, no way no how. But she'll be fine.
Goes double if you give her some testosterone (and the Dems seem fit to pretend that the androgens they're giving for F2M aren't doing anything psychological. Pull the other one, nitwits).
Point of Order:
It is not a fraternity prank. A fraternity prank is stealing the other fraternity's cannon and driving it across the country to your fraternity (Yes, these are pencil-necked geeks).
It is instead fraternity hazing. A nigh-on impossible job you give to Frosh to test their dedication. (The principle of hazing is solid, the US Military uses it in Boot Camp, esp. the Marines. What's doesn't work is letting somewhat drunk college students decide what "hazing" is.)
Just another way in which Jeff’s Evergreen State College education was deficient.
I hear this in running too and it just ignores the fact that in swimming and running, the best men aren’t doing this silly non-renumerative ultra-distance exercise addiction/cult hobby stuff. The best male ultramarathoners are like 20 minutes slower at the marathon than elites. Female ultra athletes are passable at the longer standard distances The men doing these sports have big fish in small pond syndrome.
I worked with a guy who was top-ranked in the 100-mile events, years ago. He was a pretty ordinary young man, until he started talking about his diet and workout. Extraordinarily dedicated and fit.
There is no high like completing an impossible physical feat like that; had a glimmer of it myself at much less demanding levels, days long past.
I’m not ragging on ultra runners. It is its own kind of exquisite torture ordeal. I was a 2:34 marathoner (Sub 32 10k, 1:08-1:09 Half so not great at longer stuff beyond that) so I could never do any of those ultra events. But all these 2:00-2:10 marathoners would dominate that sport but there is famously no money in it apart from sponsorships. I’d say on average if you took the best female ultra runners and the best male ones, the females would probably be more competitive at standard race distances. And the other thing about ultras is things can go tragically south in ways they can’t in other races which can lead to surprising order of finish in races. And women do indeed give up less at super long events. Still not parity, but they give up less.
The notion that women >= men in sports is akin to earth = flat. And people don’t want either believer making ANY public policy, right?
It's apparently logical because someone's sister was a star pitcher in little league once. Or so I've been told on that dumpster fire Facebook.
Fabulous. One missing tidbit from the Monty Python clip: Ron’s jump had been sponsored by a brick company.
Something worth pointing out here that wasn’t established when Knecktle wrote his paper about the Manhattan marathon swim – Diana Nyad (1975 winner of this race) is an unreliable data point. She’s been credibly accused of embellishing her times, and the norms around exhibition swimming being shapeless and fuzzy is how she was able to pass this off. The unstructured character of these exhibition events lends itself to fabulist nonsense.
You can’t even talk about this at cocktail parties. It really sucks. Why read at all?
>They seem to think it’s mean to admit that the average man is bigger, stronger, and faster than the average woman
This is nitpicking, but the debate is actually about comparing above-average men and women, not average people. Referencing average people, like you do here, leads to another talking point that female athletes are more fit than the average man. Another commentor even brings that up:
>Besides any decent female college athlete will destroy an ordinary guy in most sports.
Of course, it is also true that elite men are much stronger than elite women. But someone like Adam Conover would probably latch onto your sentence about average people as a way to dismiss your thoughts on the differences between elite men and elite women.
This argument only works if you purposefully select for men that dont play sports at all. The issue with doing that is you are no longer evaluating the delta between males and females and are instead evaluating different life choices. Saying that an elite female athlete can beat some fat guy who's only exercise is walking to the fridge for beer isn't meaningful.
The reality is that your typical male amateur club player of a given sport, who does it as a hobby, is going to be competitive with, and often superior to, elite level female athletes. These are men who have day jobs and are nowhere near elite level as males.
Sure, that would be a reasonable counterargument. But it is better to just avoid the argument entirely. A commentor brought up a comparison between elite women and average men, so it seems like the piece could have avoided that by being more precise.
Really a click bait topic. The essence of being a human being is the capacity of one gender to push a newborn with a grotesquely large head through a birth canal shaped by an odd pelvic structure. Anatomy is destiny. Also for men, but more in terms of sexual performance. Not a popular subject here. Besides any decent female college athlete will destroy an ordinary guy in most sports.
Not in soccer. In soccer, the olympic female athletes regularly lose to the under-15 age category. (they do this for training purposes).
Women's soccer needs to have the field resized, or something.
I suspect a member of an under-15s football team is better at football than the archetypal "ordinary guy".
Actually, I might BE the archetypal ordinary guy. Middle aged, average male height, a bit overweight but you wouldn't write home about it. And I'm sure the woman and the 14-year-old boy alluded to above are both way better at football than me.
What is the point of comparing elite athletes to ordinary guys in this discussion?
I wrote this to dismiss the perverse suggestion that female athletes aren't athletes. I believe that they are far more athletic than most of the male readers here.
Who suggested female athletes aren't athletes? Can you quote the text that suggested it?
Read the comments again. The original post made the trenchant observation that elite male athletes are better than elite female athletes. From this, the subject seemed to turn to how much better. Pointless, to me. But each to her own
The discussion is whether elite female athletes outperform ordinary guys. Therefore, kind of hard to have it without comparing elite athletes and ordinary guys. We'd have to discuss something else.
Why? Elite male athletes crush elite female athletes. High school male athletes crush high school female athletes. We all know what happened when they had an exhibition match between high school boys and a world champion woman's soccer team. Are you suggesting there's relevance in comparing elite male athletes to high school female athletes? If women were physically as strong or fast as men, there'd be very little rape or domestic violence.
Soccer is not the only sport in the world. Women absolutely dominate men at gymnastics, which is much more impressive to watch anyway. Dance, acrobatics, ice skating. Women dominate.
No, I'm talking about the thing I'm talking about, not the thing you want me to talk about instead. Why you think my comment about ordinary guys somehow has any bearing on elite male athletes is beyond me.
(Just remembered I'm talking to Americans. Find "football", replace "soccer".)
Oi, we do that automatically. : - ) At some point, during a read, we get the "this isn't an American" and then football flips to soccer in our minds.
Yes, American football, which rarely uses feet, is a silly name for a handheld pigskin game.
Men are such crybabies that they got their own entire class of gymnastics events so they don't have to be compared to women as much. Even the best male gymnasts land like a ton of bricks. They can't keep their feet together in the air to save their lives.
Meanwhile, the WNBA doesn't even get goals adjusted for the shorter average female height.
Girls and women absolutely dominate boys and men at gymnastics, acrobatics, dance, singles figure skating, and much more. Little girls destroy grown men at gymnastics. So in no way are male people "better at sports than women" across the board or even on average. They aren't. It's just that all the value and societal importance has been given to abilities men have while ignoring and downplaying the ones women have.
Boys high school records in track and swimming are significantly faster than women's Olympic records. Why would you just make shit up?
The longer a race gets, the more women win it. Olympic races are dinky compared to ULTRA races. The longer they get ..the more women win.
Not even close in marathons. How far are we talking before this female dominance takes place?
So you don't know about the women who've won ULTRA races. Your willful lack of knowledge may not be the amazing counterpoint you think it is.
In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.
This is essentially saying "male olympians are significantly faster than female olympians." (I mean, high school is the normal olympic age, right? It's only noteworthy when 12 year olds start winning skateboarding competitions).
Track has high jump, which is apparently one of those "men are MUCH better at this than women."
But see? that provides a "look, here's something you didn't know, from actual research."
Not trying to cover up "let's compare best in America" with "best of world" and say "oooh, Best of america is pretty good." (Um? No duh? There are a few sports that other countries win very, very hard. Kenyans and marathons, say. But America cleans up with a lot of medals -- and so does China when they try.)
Wow that's one of the dumber takes I've seen in this topic and that's saying a lot. Elite athletes train for years to become Olympians and even then only a few make it to the Olympics. But suddenly it's logical that random high school boys can beat Olympic athletes because they're the same age? JFC that's a bad take.
"Elite athletes train for years" -- well, yes, in Certain Sports. In others, they just do their job and show up to do it in the Olympics. Just another shot, taken on the world stage.
Here's an actual competitive person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_Yoshizawa
Three years of actual training (which, granted, is a significant portion of her life).
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sidney-Crosby
Crosby's skating by age 3. This is not unusual for hockey, as you need to learn the innate sense of momentum on ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemi_Panarin
Playing hockey games at around age 5.
I don't put these up to shame someone who spends concentrated time "getting good" -- I'm certain there are sports where women start to train that early. Just not all of them (pretty sure I can pull the converse for boys).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusuf_Dike%C3%A7
Here's this chap. Doesn't start actually shooting competitively until he's in his thirties (yes, he was in the military before that).
Is that why the US
Women’s soccer team lost 5-2 to an under 15 high school boys team?
"The sport is odd" is not really a good excuse here. The longer a race gets, the more women win it. Women are just as strong as men if not moreso. Strength includes resilience/endurance, not just brute force or fast twitch.
This article reminds me of the quote, except about women's physical achievements instead of their writing:
"She didn’t write it. She wrote it but she shouldn’t have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist and it isn’t really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. She wrote it BUT… "
*Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing*
Men are not actually stronger; we've just been lied to about what strength actual entails for the purpose of dismissing and demeaning women's abilities.
Happy Columbus Day to those who celebrate!
"One of the authors of that paper is a Swiss physician and endurance athlete named Beat Knechtle." I'm sorry, his name is what now?