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You’re conflating physical strength with gender, but when it comes to who can do the work, only one of those is relevant.
I think we’re on the same page, I’m just pointing out that the statement “women can do any work a man can, as long as high physical strength is not required” is just as inaccurate as saying “all men can do work that requires high physical strength”. As a man, I’ll be the first to say there are a huge number of women who are more physically capable than me. Turns out, a task that requires high physical strength doesn’t need a man, it needs a person with high physical strength.
I don’t think you were replying to me, but objectively the average man, of similar size, is going to be stronger than me, in the brute force, or explosive force aspect. It’s just an unfortunate fact of human genetics. Men typically have denser bones, ligaments, and tendons, muscle fiber, more muscle mass, and testosterone to help build and maintain all of it. Women are said to be something like 60% as strong as a man on average. HOWEVER, women typically have better stamina, longevity, are better at enduring trauma, etc.
I am by no means frail or weak, and am probably stronger than a lot, but I will never be as strong, or as lean as a man with equal work put toward it.
There is no disagreement that, in the current day and age of the human species, men are biologically predisposed to be more physically capable on average. There is no contention about that.
The point I am making is that two bodies with similar bone density, muscle mass, testosterone, etc. are going to be physically capable of the same thing, regardless of their genders. The gender is a red herring, what matters is the capability of doing the work.
As I told the other commenter,
Lol. Are we? Maybe it’s just my small world but I don’t see that at all. I encounter sexism CONSTANTLY. Hell, scroll down to the bottom of the comments on my main reply, it’s right there for everyone to see.
But gender does matter because one gender is predisposed to be bigger, stronger, have more testosterone, and has the ability to be stronger/build muscle more easily. I’d love to agree with you, that in a perfect world, gender didn’t matter in brute strength, but it does. All things are not equal out of the box.
Now, as I have clearly proven, brute strength isn’t everything, in fact most of the time it only means so much, but it’s still there regardless. I think a more accurate statement would be something like “strength only gets you so far, capability is more important”
Lol I meant it more in a “you’re smart enough to stop leaving the milk out of the fridge, child!” kind of way. I agree sexism is still rampant, and I guess I’m implicitly saying people in the past are somehow excused because they weren’t as intelligent, but what I’m intending to saying is that we’re smart enough now, so we have no excuse.
I see this as a heuristic at best, and an excuse for sexism at worst. In my example above I’m specifically referring to two people who are equally physically capable of doing a task by definition. The man shouldn’t be given preference simply because he’s a man, and men happen to be stronger on average. That’s not relevant when picking someone who can do the job.
Sure but you are probably aware that all boys being born have higher strength than females, just because of biology. Then of course in life as we grow, some men don’t maintain that strength and lose it. But I think it’s still accurate to think that men in general are stronger than women, even if there are exceptions.
Otherwise we are just ignoring a fact of how our bodies are different.
But due to how natural selection works, that’s a self-fulfilling argument. Men are biologically stronger specifically because people have made the argument you’re making for hundreds of thousands of years, thereby selecting for the pattern you’re claiming exists.
When you’re looking for someone to do a task, you aren’t looking for a biological explanation, you aren’t looking for a man, you’re looking for someone who can do the task.
I don’t think people have selected for that. It was necessary in the past to be strong to survive and provide for your family. So those genes were selected because those people could survive long enough to have kids. If you were too weak, you didn’t make it.
I’m not saying it was deliberate (i.e. artificial) selection, the selection was natural. I’m just saying, think on it more.
But you’re saying those genes weren’t required by females for some reason? Why? Honestly the only answer is: because it just happened to work out that way. The evolutionary coin could have just as easily flipped the other way and resulted in women being biologically predisposed to be stronger. We see this in many animal species, in fact.
We have a history of giving jobs to men because we’ve conflated their gender with other capabilities, not because they actually are the most capable. But my point is, we’re smart enough as a species to not do that anymore.
Of course, coin could have flipped the other way. Its not like men did anything to get higher strength. Just like woman didn’t do anything to be able to have children.
I think we should celebrate that we are different. Sometimes it feels like people thinks higher strength means “better gender”. It doesn’t mean that at all. :)
I love that woman are different from me. I love everything about it. And my partner loves that im a man. I think we should just celebrate that we have two genders that are different in many nice ways.
As for job history, tall men are paid more than women, and found by girls to be more attractive, at least where I live. I think it’s similar to young girls being preferred by almost any man. We have our biological patterns inside and we are not going to get away from them very easily.
The brain is like “this is not right” but our emotions are like “yeah but it’s fun”. Humans are quite interesting in that way, because we are both emotional and intellectual.
But people are different. It’s not a homogenization to treat each person as an individual, exactly the opposite. Just as the coin could have flipped the other way, the coin could have been a 1 sided, or an N sided. If someone identifies strongly with their gender, then that’s great, celebrate who they are as part of their gender. But other people want nothing to do with the social associations people make between them and their gender, often because they don’t apply. Gender norms are great for people who identify with those norms, but they’re a prison for people who don’t.
We do have biological patterns, but they’re not nearly as clean-cut as Leave it To Beaver, or a high school text book might paint them to be. In some cases, there are very real, very measurable biological patterns that society refuses to accept as real, instead insisting that every human falls into a simple “male” or “female” bucket that they can be defined by. That simply doesn’t reflect reality.
I know it may feel like I’m going on a tangent, but it is relevant. Humans are far more interesting and different than just “men and women are different”, and we should celebrate that.
I can absolutely see your point about not fitting in to a gender role. I think many people in technology felt something similar growing up, way before computers were popular. They were considered geeky and people who used them were strange and a bit weird. Absolutely not popular.
It hurts to be treated that way, because you just want to be yourself. And I understand that feeling very much myself. It’s the same when you are ugly by the way. Life is completely different when you are ugly compared to when you are beautiful. It’s just a different world because every single person will treat you differently. But sorry, that’s me going on a tangent…
It makes sense that when you feel like that, you want people to stop treating other people like that.