The new Wheel of Time television show has a scene where an Aiel woman totally smashes a half a dozen male soldiers with her skilled usage of her spears (this deployment of spears comes from the books, where the Aiel women do fight). The scene was well done overall, and some pathos was added by the fact that she was in labor (this is from the book too). But watching it I couldn’t help but think of this piece, Male and Female Athletic Performance: Worlds Apart. Here’s a relevant chart:
Here are the ones that jumped out to me re: male strength advantage:
– Grip strength, 57%
– Total upper strength, 90%
– Punch power, 162%
It’s a fantasy TV show. But I really hope that people aren’t taking the wrong lessons from this. I remember here some idiotic Late Night TV show host asking Scarlett Johansson how she fought so well, and ScarJo laughed it off and said “they make me seem tough,” as she found the question ludicrous.
“Young children are often viewed as being unable to differentiate fantasy from reality. This article reviews research on both children’s and adults’ beliefs about fantasy as well as their tendency to engage in what is thought of as ‘magical thinking.’
It is suggested that children are not fundamentally different from adults in their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality: Both children and adults entertain fantastical beliefs and also engage in magical thinking.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9418217/
Those in the entertainment industry figured that out long ago and have been pushing agendas for decades.
One obvious thing (not really an insight) that seems here is that the items with *massive* differences are the product of items with relatively smaller differences. Grip strength is probably like heightXleanmassXtendonresistanceX&c. Like with sex differences in brain structure, or any kind of genetic group separation, we can draw small differences* in a particular trait/SNP/etc into a clear differentiation between clusters when multiple traits/SNPs/etc are considered jointly.
*I say small differences, but if we saw these expressed in within sex SD, even 9% height difference would be look radical!
Note also the 52% difference in baseball throw.
I recall how some sports journalists once thought then-undefeated female martial arts fighter “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey might be able to compete with male boxers. That was before she was beaten up by another woman. But now we have trans-women to improve the distaff performance measures.
It isn’t about a “feminist agenda.” Women warriors maximize audiences. Boys like to watch combat and have no problem seeing women do that. Girls like to watch dramas in which women have important roles. No fights, no boys. No leading women, no girls. Women warriors are the best of both worlds from the point of view of maximizing audiences. And fantasy, by definition, isn’t about replicating reality.
Also, modern warfare isn’t actually about personal bodily strength in hand to hand combat. Even front line warriors are mostly button pushers and switch flippers, much of the time.
I watched when Scarlett Johannson appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, after Ironman 2 had been screened in theatres. Ironman 2 was the film in which the Black Widow (played by Scarlett) appeared for the first time, taking down multiple large male opponents (and in which Scarlett upstaged everyone including Gwyneth Paltrow). Scarlett was talking about how hard she had to train for the film, and how she had done most of her own stunts. Letterman: “So now you know how to defend yourself.” Scarlett: “Now I know how to look like I know how to defend myself.” She is 5’3″.
I just watched The Rhythm Section (2020) on Netflix which got panned by the critics, and was the biggest box office bomb ever for a film that was released in 3,000 theatres. I loved everything about the film, in part because it depicted realistically the distinct disadvantage the female protagonist has when trying to fight with men. It also depicted a realistic and fairly short car chase in which she was constantly panicking, and her emotional inability to kill someone when she needed to. My conclusion: the pandemic no doubt played some part in the film’s poor reception, but not all, as demonstrated by the way that audiences plummeted over the first three weeks – film critics and audiences definitely don’t like realism when it comes to women vs men.
Also, modern warfare isn’t actually about personal bodily strength in hand to hand combat. Even front line warriors are mostly button pushers and switch flippers, much of the time.
this sounds stupid. do you have friends who are soldiers? i have a few who fought in Afghanistan and it seems demeaning to say he was a button pusher and switch flipper.
Eh, she’s using a spear anyways against a bunch of guys using swords. I think the reach is more important than the difference in strength.
It is, however, true that modern warfare makes the differences in body between men and women much less relevant for combat. A rifle that can kill can be fired just as easily by a 5’2″ woman as a 6’1″ man, and the latter is both higher profile (IE bigger target) and consumes far more food and water.
Technique and training matter. I am an ok swimmer, there are plenty of short girls that wipe the pool with my ass. I am quite stronger overall, they just know how to do it better. I bet fighting one on one with throwing weapons has some of the same issues.
Not that the WoT scene was realistic. Being in labor is completely debilitating. I midwifed my son’s unplanned delivery in the middle of the street, and before that my wife could not walk without help.
This isn’t a new trend. At least since the 1980’s we’ve had movie and TV shows which commonly show 90 pound women throwing around 240 pound security guard types. On the screen, it looks fun and if I were in movie and TV production, I would probably have a lot of such scenes. Who can forget Xena Warrior Princess from the 90’s? It’s good entertainment!
Unfortunately, a generation of just that sort of entertainment has taught us that men and women are basically equal physically, and a well trained woman is superior to a well trained man in hand to hand combat. It’s the total opposite of reality.
To the “button pusher” gang who reduces modern warfare to a simple tap of the keyboard, that’s the opposite of reality as well. Combat Arms is an extremely physical occupation. Sometimes you have to walk up the side of a mountain with 120 pounds of gear in order to push that button. My prediction for our new combat arms females, that unless they wind up working in the orderly room or some other sit down position, all of them by the time they complete their service will be VA patients to treat the debilitating injuries they’ll sustain just trying to keep up in the training.
Hasn’t the success of that “woman” swimmer from Penn put paid to all this?
Some of the comments here prove that twenty years of this kind of entertainment has had an effect.
A rifle can be fired with success by a 5’2” woman without doubt. Whether it can be supplied with ammunition by that same woman is another question.
I tried to watch that clip and gave up midway through. It requires the kind of the suspension of disbelief that I am no longer willing to engage in (and, yes, that means I can’t watch 99% of stuff onscreen these days).
At some point, I commented at length about women beating men in fights on Unz. I don’t want to repeat all that here in detail, so I will try to be as brief as I can. There are basically three scenarios under which women might (not can) beat men in combat:
1. Surprise – a woman intent on causing harm attacks an unsuspecting man.
2. High skill disparity – the female is highly trained in fighting while the man is not at all.
3. Weapons – the woman is armed, the man is not.
Typically, even one of these scenarios is not enough. Often, it requires all three conditions and a huge amount of luck for a woman to overcome a man. If, of course, one of these scenarios is extreme, yes, a woman can beat a man. For example, under item 1, the man is sleeping and the woman attacks him. Item 2, the woman is Kayla Harrison* (two-time Olympic Judo gold medalist and a world champion) and the man is a small, penicil-necked IT geek who gulps soda all day and sits on his game chair. Item 3, the woman has a shotgun and the man is unarmed.
*Okay, that’s a bit unfair to Kayla. Her coach, Jimmy Pedro, hardly an unsober person, did mention that, in training, Kayla would often beat second- to third-tier male Judoka in her weight category (but would get beaten silly by a first-tier male)… and only within the context of Judo rulesets, of course.
A few additional points. People often talk about upper body strength disparity between men and women. Yes, that’s important. But in reality, bulk of punching, kicking, throwing, and grappling power comes from the hip (and hip rotation), and men are MUCH more powerful in recruiting all the major core muscles, ligaments, and skeletal structure, including those around the hip, and outputting massive power. There is simply no comparison.
Second, men are much more aggressive mentally. Fighting requires the ability to not flee and, far more importantly, not freeze mentally and physically like a deer caught in a headlight. That freezing tendency is hard enough to train out of a man, but it is incredibly hard to train out of women, for reasons that appear well outside my (admittedly limited) scientific ken. I just know it is exceedingly hard. The only thing that seems to work is engaging the maternal protective instinct (“If you don’t fight like a crazy person, your little girl is going to be violated heinously!”), and that’s not something you can reliably turn on and off.
Third, where military training goes, even very strong women have very high injury rates. They just wear out much more quickly when doing ruck marches, for example. Even if they grow their muscles well, their bones and joints seem to be poor at load-bearing for an extended period of time. And high injury rates mean lower amounts of training time, ceteris paribus, and much lesser skills.
So all these fantasy scenes we see these days onscreen of women beating men, and even more incredibly, of a single woman beating multiple men, are beyond unrealistic. They are unintentionally comical and absurd. It’s basically the Babylon Bee.
And, on a personal note… My wife was an elite athlete in college when we met – she was freakishly strong for a woman. After we started dating and got to know each other well, at one point she wanted to wrestle with me and see how strong I was. And we did, with me using only one arm. I ragdolled her and she was quite chastened. To be fair, I was a competitive Judoka, so I wasn’t your average young male. Nonetheless, it was funny and telling to see this Amazon of a woman struggle while I was laughing uproariously and one-arm big-brothering her. It was basically Andre the Giant vs. Wesley in “The Princess Bride” (“Are you just playing with me?” “I want you to think that you are doing well!”), minus the strangle at the end.
By the way, kinda funny moment from the Judo world:
A while back, Japanese brother and sister Judo competitors, Abe Hifumi and Abe Uta, made history by becoming both world champions in their respective weight categories the same day – the first time siblings have achieved such a thing ever in Judo (they both would go on to win Olympic gold medals in Tokyo this year).
Now that she was a world champion, Uta was asked in a following interview what one of her remaining life-long goals was. She quickly replied, “I’d like to throw my brother.”
A bit startled, the interviewer asked, “What? You have not thrown your brother? Ever? You’ve trained together since childhood. Not even in training?”
Uta said, “Well, I have, only because he let me. But I haven’t really thrown him. Not for real.”
The Western interviewer was dumbstruck for a moment. I guess that’s the kind of a thing a “girrrrrl power”-raised Western female reporter would never say publicly or even expected to hear.
(One caveat: Hifumi is 14 kg/31 lb heavier than Uta, fighting at 66 kg to Uta’s 52 kgs. Still funny to see that reaction on the reporter’s face.)
Regarding button-pushing: I’ve heard some gun rights activists say that firearms put men and women on a roughly equal footing, and I think there’s something to that. Of course, people on the front lines of battle aren’t just pushing buttons (the people sitting in control rooms guiding drones are though); they have to exhibit a lot of skill and courage (also strength), with the trigger being only a small part of what they do.
On the central question of this post: I do think popular media has contributed to increasing wokeness in society. When people see women doing stuff in TV shows (or movies) exactly the way men do, they internalize that notion and then feel aggrieved when they see differences among men and women in real life, which they then attribute to insidious discrimination. Something similar occurs with race as well; show enough black physicists or software engineers and black peoples’ lack of representation in those fields in the real world starts to seem a lot worse.
I wonder what people here think about the Vikings TV show. I binge watched it earlier this year when I didn’t have much else to see in my spare time, and I thought it completely veered off into fantasy land when it came to portraying Norse society and warriors. (The “history” it portrayed was complete crap but that can be ignored if you watch the show for its action and drama value.) After the first season or so, it looked like half of every Viking army or raiding party was female. They took the real phenomenon of a shield maiden and turned it into an army of Wonder Women.
I am friendly with a very good Scandinavian archaeologist (I have proof-read three of his books in English as a favour to him, and he has been good enough to give me credit in the prefaces and give me a free copy of each of the books) and he says there is zero archaeological evidence to support the notion of shield maidens. There was one female burial found with some weapons, so it is just remotely possible that she might have fought alongside men, although not necessarily.
But shield maidens as a general thing are purely mythical. They didn’t happen.
Scythian women are known to have fought along with men, but they fought as mounted archers where, aside from being able to draw a bow powerful enough, upper body strength was not a factor. Shield maidens fighting on foot against men with spear, sword and shield? No, pure fantasy.
Been training for some time. I can deadlift 465, squat 300×10/315×8 below parallel (in a more volume heavy block, so haven’t 1 RM in a bit), and can pause bench 265 at 175lbs. For a man, if I competed, this makes me an ultra mediocre powerlifter.
If I were a woman, this would make me elite.
I think even the Scythian women fighting alongside the men was mostly fiction.