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Notes -
Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
I'm sure we all believe false things but tbh, to have reached this conclusion, this guy must be quite underdeveloped in certain aspects of intelligence, curiosity, and yes, even rationality. I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype, whereas he might consider holding all his beliefs more lightly and questioning his assumptions a lot more. His argument might go a bit better if he gave examples of 'experts lying to his face'; rather, all his examples are Marvel-type movies and video games, which he should never have expected to map the real world in the first place.
More that he has built his life in a way where the maximum required level of strength for any task he performs is within the range of a reasonably athletic woman. My wife is in great shape, we can move furniture together in most Craigslist pickup cases. If "moving a couch" was the most strength I ever expected to display in life, I wouldn't really have much of a test to prove one way or the other how strong my wife is relative to me. I don't know that I would even call this author to help me move, so he might be below that level of maximum displayed strength. Jean ValJean never reveals himself if he never sees that cart in the street.
Certainly if this man is as wildly unathletic as he purports himself to be, he would experience hearing from PMC women in his circle about athletic feats they've performed that he would be unable to perform, with very little context for what he might be capable of. Hell, I know a half dozen women who have qualified for the NYC Marathon which in my age range is a 3:13 Marathon, and I sure can't do that. If I never looked up the qualifying times for men, I'd just hear that they ran a marathon in three hours and change, which would also be a pretty good time for a hobbyist man, and assume that if women tried they are just as good. Similarly in rock climbing, I know lots of women who could smash everyone in this forum by grade.
Your point about marathons supports a belief I have about womens' sport leagues. I am not sure how many others share it.
Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.
That we don't have a competitive league for unathletic men like Brodski reveals that league segregation is not really about fair play. Arguments about "not putting in the same amount of effort" are essentially my point -- Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status. It is even difficult to say it in English. We still call them "athletic women" because all the words we will use for this concept (like "weak" and "athletic") are status-laden and graded-on-a-curve.
Because the way we talk about athletes (of all sexes) uses fuzzy terms instead of objective ranks, someone like Brodski can hear about women qualifying for marathons and being strong and he will continue to be blind to physical reality.
Contrast in Chess, where the definition of Grandmaster is actually the same for men and women. However, there is a different title called Woman Grandmaster which has fewer requirements. Presumably, being a woman is also a requirement to hold the title, but I am not sure. Maybe a man who can't quite make GM can call himself a WGM. It would be an unconventional for sure. But, nobody can deny that the purpose of the WGM title is the same as any other title, which is to assign status.
You know, it's funny you point that out, because I never thought of it like that, but it really crystallized something for me from reading so much pre-current year literature lately. At no point in any novel I've read pre 1980 is any woman ever described as physically strong. Not in Dickens, not in Howard, not in Homer, Tolkien, Niven & Pournelle, Lovecraft, Ellison, Twain, or Burroughs. Women are not described as strong, even graded on a curve, there are no feats of female strength (though cunning is fair game). Though perhaps Gibbon occasionally describes the women of certain barbarian tribes as possessing manly or warlike virtues. I don't have quotes on hand.
Point being, there was a before time, when there wasn't the constant cultural obsession with giving equal time to flattering women as being "strong".
Certainly in Howard. Valeria is described as being strong (while still being feminine). Maybe the original Red Sonja (who inspired the later Red Sonja in Conan comics) might count.
"She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance." - This is the start of the description of Valeria. He does say she is unusual in her strength though.
"Then with a yell and a rush someone was at his side and he heard the quick splintering of mail beneath the madly flailing strokes of a saber that flashed like silver lightning before his clearing sight. It was Red Sonya who had come to his aid, and her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper." - She is splintering mail with sword strokes and reaping men like grain, which takes some level of strength.
"With a croaking cry Tshoruk ran at her, scimitar lifted. Before he could strike, she crashed down the barrel of the empty pistol on his head, felling him like an ox. From the other side Rhupen slashed at her with a curved Turkish dagger. Dropping the pistol, she closed with the young Oriental. Moving like someone in a dream, she bore him irresistibly backward, one hand gripping his wrist, the other his throat. Throttling him slowly, she inexorably crashed his head again and again against the stones of the wall, until his eyes rolled up and set. Then she threw him from her like a sack of loose salt." - Red Sonja again rescuing the main character - overpowered a man, throttled him, then throws his body away, like a sack.
So noted! I don't recall the exact description of the lady in Queen of the Black Coast either. But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal. Although I recall even in Red Nails, Valeria was disabused of any notions of superiority to Conan, and the people they fought were a fairly degenerate and sorcerous bunch.
I mean, yes, Amazons were a trope, and lost parts of the Greek Epic Cycle even had them. Maybe I over stated my case that "at no point" were the authors of those works describing women as strong. But it was rare, and far short of the almost compulsive behavior of modern creators of culture trying to give equal, or even superior time, to the ability of 90 lb totally normal women to overpower hulking 6'4" 300 lb manly men.
Absolutely. Belit throws herself at his feet, Valeria is certainly not his equal, this version of Red Sonja does save a European warrior giant who is fighting the Ottomans, but while she can overpower the "average" male warrior with strength she isn't shown to be a strength match to Gottfried directly and can't lift him out of a moat in his full armor on her own, she can only half lift him, though that is probably still reasonably impressive as he is in full armor, soaking wet and fully armed.
Celtic history and myths do have some warrior women as well:
From a Roman soldier:
“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”
You can find others in Celtic myth cycles like:
"Aife also known as Aoife in modern Irish, was Scáthach's rival and by most accounts, her sister, or even twin. She was reportedly fierce in battle, shattering Cú Chulainn’s sword with one of her blows when the two went head to head in an epic fight. The mighty Cú Chulainn had to resort to trickery to defeat her"
But usually they are portrayed as being unusual examples of womanhood in and of themselves.
As for modern media it's certainly more common I'd agree, but as long as they do the work I don't mind it. i.e. Buffy being explicitly powered by magic, Black Widow being augmented by a shadowy Red Room especially in a world where a man with apparently only peak human strength can hold down a helicopter. They are our modern version of the mythologies of the past (or as with Wonder Woman, the actual past mythologies), reinvented.
It's a little more jarring in more grounded pieces I agree but even there they have a tendency to show one man being able to beat 5 men at the same time or what have you, so they are obviously juicing everybody up for the sake of looking bad-ass. I imagine having to show a guy just about win a fight with an equal but be exhausted then sit around healing for a month from his cracked ribs, concussion and shattered knuckles isn't exactly conducive to a fast based entertainment product. So almost every character in an action series or movie is effectively superhuman for unspecified reasons.
I have met a single woman who was as strong as I was but she was a fit 6'2 black ex D1 basketball player. And I am a 5'11 schlubby gamer, and a decade older than she was. So I don't have any illusions about average strength comparisons. A woman needs very very significant size and fitness advantages in order to match male strength. My first wife was 5' even and 90lbs and there was no possible way she could overpower me hand to hand, even if she were trained by ninjas.
Where is this from? All I could find was unattributed copypasta with a Google search.
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