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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Obviously the average man is much stronger than the average woman, and elite female athletes cannot compete at all against elite male athletes, but I think you and a few posters here are exaggerating the disparity because there’s no way the “slow boys” can compete with actual athletic women.

When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.

Like, I was in OK-ish shape and could do a 5k in 21min, and there were girls who did it in 17mim. Sure, there were boys who could do it in 15min, and most girls did it in 25min or more, but I didn’t stop to think about the statistical distributions, I just saw that there were both boys and girls way ahead of me.

Just look at female athlete records in any sport, compared to the mean or even advanced male performance.

When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.

The existence of such a person is a failure of the public schools.

I agree with you with regards to comparing elite female athletes with average guys. But the fact is almost no high school has even one such elite female athlete. Under a proper physical fitness regimen, if the school held a 1v1 tug of war competition girls would win against guys like 5% of the time. That there are so many weak and feeble men is a choice propagated by the system that not only doesn't prioritize physical fitness, it actively discourages it for all but the top percentages. That is why you have guys thinking girls can beat them at things. Because those 20% are working out everyday while he eats potato chips and does nothing. If he merely did 20 minutes of running and 20 minutes of lifting every other day he'd instantly be in the top 5% of females.

I am by no means an elite athlete. That said, I once faced a girl who would go on to be an Olympian in a 1v1 match. I won. It was not close. I wasn't even fully into puberty at the time. I was embarrassed by the existence of the match.

The fact is, if you are losing to girls as a guy in basically every sport but super long distance swimming they are substantially outworking you. If you told George Washington that his country would be dominated by places of child education wherein the average kid just sits all day and cant run a 2 mile sprint to notify the neighbor you need some butter for a pie, he'd be appalled. Movement is the solution. It is, of course, pain as well. But pain is weakness leaving the body.

Eh, when talking about specifically "autistic nerds" (i.e. like 1% of the population), there are certain caveats on that. Autists typically have retarded* co-ordination, and the top end of the "nerds" (i.e. aspie savants) sometimes get accelerated. A 13-year-old boy with garbage co-ordination against a 14-year-old girl isn't such an uneven match.

*I use this word precisely; adult co-ordination is usually normal, but it takes longer to get there.

I don’t disagree that it’s appalling that physical fitness being neglected for the majority (although calling men “weak” and “feeble” as opposed to just unhealthy is an odd choice of language). It doesn’t really matter for the main point that there’s elite female athletes, but it’s still important to know that the delta is not that big at the extremes. The top female athletes are about ~10% worse than the top male ones, and if you look at something like a 5k run, the top females today are better than the top males from the 1930s. That’s way closer than most posters here would suggest, and to compete with female Olympians in most sports you’d still have to be in like the top 0.1% fittest men. The average Joe, even with a decent amount of training, doesn’t stand a chance.

But that’s getting aside from the main point. How exactly is knowing that he can easily surpass most women at sports with relatively little training supposed to dissuade the hypothetical autistic teenage boy from transitioning? If anything it might backfire and make him stop exercising altogether to match more female levels of performance/muscularity (and on estrogen, male performance is drastically reduced anyway).