Why are men stronger than women? The answer may surprise you | Mickey Z.

[Tace]

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Dec. 29, 2015

Recently, a group of Aymara women amazed the world by doing something unexpected. They not only took on the 19,974-foot high Huayna Potosi Mountain in Bolivia but did so while dressed like, um… well, women (read: traditional Aymara clothing). This got me thinking about the carved-in-stone “reality” that the vast majority of men are supposedly bigger, faster, and stronger than the vast majority of women.

We’ve all heard the immutable biological factors -- skeletal structure, testosterone, lung capacity, etc. -- but absent from most discussions is the possibility that a social construct like, I don’t know, maybe patriarchy is playing a role. Could our beliefs be causing us to make girls smaller, slower, and less powerful?

In a 2009 Newsweek article, Sharon Begley wrote about a study in which mothers were asked to estimate how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. “Moms of boys got it right to within 1 degree,” Begley explained, but “moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by 9 degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls.” (emphasis added)

She wondered if this prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children -- sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent -- shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them,” wrote Begley. “Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains -- the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture.”

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http://worldnewstrust.com/why-are-men-stronger-than-women-the-answer-may-surprise-you-mickey-z

[Tien1985]

1. We keep proving this stuff...

and then completely ignoring it.

I'm a trans guy. I'm 5'2", and unfortunately plenty out of shape. My favorite oddity was working in an environment where the 5'8", gym-rat cis afab coworkers would ask me to retrieve large, heavy boxes from high shelves (which I'd use a ladder to access). I didn't mind doing it, but it was rather silly in reality.

[Igel]

4. Yes, we do.

It's like male/female behavior in cats. There's no difference.

Until well into puberty. Neuter a male cat and it's more "female" in many ways. And spayed cats stop showing a lot of female-cat behavior.

Even then, the behavior of non-neutered cats shows a statistical pattern and isn't absolute. There are female cats who never go into estrus and fail to show the stereotypical female behavior, and male cats kept in company with other males from an early age (and isolate from other males later) who never show the territorial behavior. That doesn't mean there is no difference. It just means that "simple" analysis may be "simplistic" analysis. Sometimes it's done by simplistic people, but at least as often (I suspect) it's a kind of motivated reasoning--we know where we want to get to and ignore pesky complications that make the path from here to there longer, harder, more challenging.

It's a question of genetic endowment, opportunity, development, and statistical variation at each stage. But we act like we have to argue that it's all in terms of unchanging absolutes, and once we have a category that category must hold absolutely for each member of the category. Otherwise arguments get very messy and statistical, and for an innumerate population all that statistical reasoning just hurts.

Men are taller than women. Mostly. When adult. But in middle school girls are often taller than boys. And if you go to a country where the genes and environment predispose to shorter height and compare then men there to women from a region where genes and environment predispose to greater height, you'll find that the generalization fails.

It's why every elementary school kid should learn the abbreviation "cet. par." Ceteris paribus. "All other (things) being equal." Then again, I think 9th graders should learn Gricean maxims and be taught something akin to prototype theory.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. If society valued muscles in women, the fashion ads would be a lot different.

Incredible pressure to keep "the weaker sex" just that way.

BTW....recommend seeing the 2015 movie The Suffragette.

[niyad]

3. it seems pretty obvious--if girls aren't allowed, encouraged, to be physically active, to engage

in active movement, and TOLD that they are weaker, gee--wonder how that turns out.

reminds me of a line from a book I read years ago about not including children in society and then bemoaning their savageness. or, in the case of victorian england, creating fashions for the upperclass women requiring them to wear nearly thirty pounds of clothing, with corsets laced so tightly they could barely breathe, and then saying they were not physically capable of running, etc. I was glad to see that the article in the OP cited another article that talked about the problems fashions cause even today.

[SunSeeker]

5. Today's women's high heeled shoes are only slightly better than Chinese foot binding.

Pair that up with a tight skirt, dress or slacks and women are essentially immobilized, barely able to clip clop their way from their car to their doorway.

[geek tragedy]

6. I would disagree that men are stronger than women as a general claim.

Women live longer, typically endure childbirth multiple times, and bear more than their share of the burden of maintaining social cohesion.

That there's some degree of sexual dimorphism due to genetics is really uninteresting as a subject--so what? People don't bench press their way to becoming CEO's or elected office.

[CTyankee]

7. I have always wondered if a man could endure childbirth pain better than women.

I think there have been tests delivering pain resembling childbirth to male study volunteers and the men gave up and asked for it to stop. But of course women have access to medication that can numb most of the contractions.