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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The triumph of the blank slate

an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it ‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.’

On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’

Just recently, Scientific American stated that ‘Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.’

Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

Rather than blank slate-led ideas falling to mockery and obscurity, the opposite has happened — they’ve proliferated and spread. Pinker was obviously right, yet seems to have lost.

i recently was in a seminar discussing fixed versus growth mindsets, and it was argued that believing in any innate/genetic component of intelligence was connected to a 'fixed' mindset. we were discouraged from using the idea of 'talent' as it implied that some people were just naturally better at some things than others. it seems like a core part of the 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' mantra that is finding its way everywhere - the idea of innate difference is anathema to the principle behind caring about equity versus equality.

There's so much that's wrong about these sorts of claims regarding gender parity in sports, but something that I feel usually goes unmentioned is just how belittling and condescending it is to female athletes. The sport that I have the most personal experience with is running, so I'll focus there for this point. Running happens to be a sport where there are smaller gaps between men and women than sports that rely more on size and strength, but there remains a persistent 10-12% difference in speed at every single distance (see world records here if you're curious)). Less statistically provable, I see the same sort of differences pop up at pretty much every level of the sport, including my mediocre hobbyist level (e.g., I can run 20K in 1:18, women with similar weekly mileage, similar physical build, and similar apparent fitness run roughly 1:26-1:26).

So, what's it saying about women to say that the difference is culturally constructed? Well, it must be saying that their training is, in some way, inferior. That when a Kenyan woman blazes an incredible 2:20 marathon and wins the female side of competition, the reason she's so much slower than the men is that she wasn't supported enough or didn't work hard enough or didn't eat right. That seems false, since the men and women do exactly the same thing. Or that in the 20K mentioned above, when I finish like 20th in a local race, but ran by the second-place woman in the last couple miles, she just wasn't pushed hard enough to succeed, or didn't train right. That's even more wrong though - I know her, I know she ran in high school and college (I didn't start running till my mid-20s and have never had a coach) and know that she runs more miles than I do.

This mentality that physical differences between genders are constructed strips these women of the respect they deserve. When I narrowly beat a female runner, I know that she's a better runner than me. I know that she's likely more talented than me, has likely outworked me, and that every bit of speed gain she gets is harder to come by than my testosterone-fueled improvement. The perspective that the reason I'm faster is because of culture rather than biology denies her the respect that she deserves for her hard work, instead making her an object of pity, insisting that if it weren't for some ephemeral oppression, she'd be just as fastest as the boys.

I hate it.

Different context, but I had exactly the same reaction to the girlboss approach that Rings of Power took to Middle Earth. If women warriors are everywhere, and nothing unique...what about Eowyn's entire character arc? Tolkien presented her as accomplishing something rare and difficult; that it was hard for her, but she pushed through and achieved greatness. If half--or even much less!--of the Riders of Rohan were female, then Eowyn just comes off as whiny, not heroic.

I hate it too for the same reasons, and I appreciate men who are willing to support female athletes and not patronize them.

Anyone remember the Battle of the Sexes? Serena Williams, and I think Venus too played far lower ranked male tennis players - and lost decisively.

What would those who deny biology matters have to say about that? She just lacked equal opportunities to men? Not if you know her history. Come on, she was once the Number 1 ranked woman in the world. That she just doesn't try her best? Please.

Martina Navratalova has been very outspoken on these issues as well. Exceptional female athletes with loads of experience are speaking, but non-athletes with agendas just plain aren't listening.

Women's sports ought to be thought of not as a lesser version of men's sports, but as similar yet different sports in their own right. In women's sports rules and uniforms and equipment,etc. are all designed around women's bodies, just as men's are for their own sport. That's as it should be.

I give Curling as an example of a sport I prefer to watch the women's game than the men's. There's a distinct difference, in that the men throw much harder, and as such there tends to be less rocks in play, which makes the women's game more exciting.

I'm just getting into it, but I get the feeling Disc Golf is the same way...that the best men in the world can overpower the courses in a way the women can't, and as such, the women's game is more enjoyable for people to watch. Similar to what I've heard some people say about Tennis, where the power of the men actually hinders the enjoyment.

Coincidentally now that you mention it, the other day Quillette published an article about the controversy surrounding trans women competing in female disc golf events.

https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/

I feel similarly about ultimate Frisbee, which I think has a similar phenomenon as tennis. At the top levels, most male players can throw the full length of the field, and there's more room for error in bad throws due to higher acceleration, jumping height, and top speed, which results what I would consider mostly boring points where whichever team starts with the disc scores without trouble the majority of the time. But even at the top levels, there's only a handful of women in the world who can consistently throw the full length of the field, and the greater likelihood of a turnover from bad throws means there's much more volatility in every point, with possession changes being much more common.

"WNBA players are better at the fundamentals." From what I've heard, this is actually true, and I think for the same reasons you mention with curling and disc golf. If you are a young basketball player trying to learn those fundamentals, the WNBA is better to watch. For entertainment purposes...well, the NBA has a much larger market.

I'm not a basketball fan, I know very little of the strategy of the game. I go to the occasional NBA game because it's fun to watch superhumans fly.

It's interesting; I finally met, in the wild, a woman who claimed there were no biological differences in terms of strength, agility, speed, etc. between men and women. I had thought they were just caricatures on the internet, but I guess they really exist. She was in the army and claimed to have 'outperformed' 90% of the men there before she was injured. She was about 5'6 and maybe 120 pounds, so while I'm not too familiar with the army, I'm a bit skeptical of that one. She claimed testosterone had no effect on athletic performance and that literally the only difference physically between men and women is that men have a wider pelvis. Scientific papers describing any effects of testosterone are just transphobic.

This all grew out of the casual [sport] league I played in over the summer that went out of it's way to encourage inclusion of trans players. Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.' Traditionally, we played co-ed and matched genders on the field, and trans players (100% trans women in this league at least) would match with the gender they identify as. The women on the field were getting absolutely wrecked. Like, every now and then someone would absolutely blast by me uncovered before I realized it was a trans woman and her defender was struggling 10-15 feet behind her before I'd peel off and try to salvage the situation.

It honestly doesn't affect me and all the most strident pro-trans commissioners in the league are female, so I don't particularly care, but this is just...a step too far. There's no way this can be covered up in smokescreens about hormones or whatever else, it's just an immediately obvious fact that this is true. You just need some video footage of trans women absolutely destroying people at [sport] and it's not really sustainable.

I tried the same argument you just brought up as it seemed the most likely to elicit sympathy from a strident feminist, i.e. that it cheapens the accomplishments of female athletes, but she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy. Thankfully, people with that point of view are a vanishingly small minority - on my team of very left-leaning players, it was about 13 people arguing with her and her reluctant boyfriend trying to mediate.

Every woman I've ever met who claimed this has been young without exception. I think it's just a filter you pass through as a woman - you're young, reasonably attractive, men want to impress you and using force on you that might make you feel unsafe or even inferior is verboten, even in a situation like sports where you might expect it. If you're middle class or higher, men using any sort of force is socially unacceptable so you can pass your entire life without realising how much stronger men are.

Eventually you hit the filter - hopefully in the 'my brother/cousin/friend showed me how easily he can manhandle me while wrestling' and nothing worse, and you realise the truth. I have a lot of sympathy for women who believe this and then discover it. I can't imagine finding out that you're almost completely vulnerable half of society is a pleasant feeling.

I don't disagree with what you are saying but you can easily come away with an alternative conclusion - that this demonstrates the average young woman's privilege in our society.

You could easily analogise this situation to a young ignorant rakish noble who isn't aware that he is at the mercy of peasant rabble potentially rising up to kill him, until one day he he is confronted by an angry mob he has to defuse because he raised taxes too high. But the noble is still in the privileged positon, we shouldn't pity him.

Similarly a young woman who remains remarkably ignorant about reality about the differences between men and women enjoys a similar privilege. The fact that a young woman can go decades without a single man even daring to demonstrating a modium of physical strength against her (or even for her) shows how much social power she has.

I think the above post was saying that it's not simply an inherent privilege of gender/sex so much as an inherent privilege of age. The further one gets from being a little girl, the likelihood of experiencing how rough things can get increases.

It's the logical conclusion of the first principle, "gender is merely a social construct."

I often see gendercritical feminists battling what they see as the overreach of transgender ideology but not seeing the root of the issue.

A lot of gender critical feminists would say that they're at the root of the issue.

Sex is not a social construct, but that gender is. Once upon a time wearing powdered wigs might have beeen manly, so too wearing tights, or heeled shoes that today we'd definitely see as looking more feminine. If you met a Leslie or a Sam a hundred years ago, you would probably be meeting a man, not necessarily true today. Some of what we think of as masculine or feminine is true for our culture in our time, but not necessarily for all cultures in all times.

Gender critical feminists tend to believe that sex is real and important but that gendered assumptions and gender roles are what is problematic. And then you would have more conservative feminists who agree that sex is important, but don't really have a problem with gender and gender roles, so long as there is no discrimination placed on women in society. I think gender critical women would say you can't have your cake and eat it too - that as long as there are different gender roles for men and women you will have discrimination, and conservatives would probably disagree that that is a foregone conclusion, and that gender roles serve no benefit to girls and women. Gender criticals would argue what about lesbians and others who might defy gender roles, and find those roles stifling? More conservative feminists would argue that's fine, they can certainly do their own thing but if those roles seem comfortable for the majority of people, it doesn't seem to make sense to abolish them.

Mostly, these people are trying to put aside their differences right now to oppose those who demand we pretend that sex itself is not real, that sex is what is actually the social construct, while gender is what is real, biological and unchangeable.

Feminists tend to believe that gender is MERELY a social construct. I think the reality is that gender is rooted in sex, biology, and evolution.

Most of feminist activism is kicking against the pricks of biological evolution at the expense of society's health.

But I should acknowledge my strong antifeminist bias.

Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.'

Ultimate Frisbee? I'm still getting used to seeing "FMP" and "MMP" in team emails.

Alas, I've been doxxed. Time to delete my account.

You think the sports thing will generally solve itself organically, as trans/female competition becomes more prevalent and more people see the effects for themselves? Or does it generally not seem to be that much of a deal? People like their sports, but there's a lot more going on than just the top end, so maybe they just tough it out?

You think the sports thing will generally solve itself organically, as trans/female competition becomes more prevalent and more people see the effects for themselves?

I think right now we have the worst of both worlds: we have men transitioning to female (and the major problem is MTF, I haven't yet seen anyone complaining that the 5' 5" FTM who weighs eight stone has an unfair advantage over the guys on the rugby team) who waited until they conveniently went through their male growth spurt and so retain the height and breadth of shoulder advantages (I realise that sounds bitchy but looking at Lea Thomas and how much taller they are than their cis female fellow competitors - well.)

What will happen when the current crop of trans youth mature enough to go into sports? When you have a kid who went on puberty blockers aged ten and then into hormonal/surgical transition as soon as legally old enough, so they're shorter and weaker and more in line with natural cis female biology? I think we'll have to wait and see. Right now, though, I'm not convinced.

I don't think there's any impetus in my league; if anything, it's the reverse. Nobody is conservative, if they are they're closeted big city conservatives who still like most of the conveniences of blue tribe society, have a distaste for the homeless/wokeness and hide their power level to get laid. The men in my league don't really care and would probably be happy playing without the women if it weren't for the sizable fraction who want to play with their girlfriends. The women are broadly and emphatically pro-trans and diversity.

Moreover, there's such a broad range of skills at this level that it doesn't matter all that much and the highlight for many people is hitting the bar after the game. I've at times been matched up with players who are as far below me as the women on my team are below the trans women. Amusingly, trans women are the new ringers and I suspect a quietly sought after prize for many a captain; everyone wins!

I don't know where the professional leagues are headed.

I haven't met anyone that carries that argument all the way to the extreme, but I've met a surprising number of people that seem to believe something approximating it, or at least they wildly underestimate just how large many of the physical differences are. When I first met my wife, we were goofing around, and she claimed that she could sprint across a tennis court faster than me. I was absolutely incredulous that this was a sincere belief - she's a decently fit woman, but not an athlete and had never played any organized sport (I'm not a serious athlete either, but I'm a fit looking guy). Just on priors, I know that I'm faster than something like 99% of women. I laughed at her, we sprinted across a court a couple times, she lost by quite a bit, and just had a weird dismayed look about it. We had a couple other physical tests that we wound up doing (goofy stuff, like who can jump on a kitchen counter without a running start), and it kind of set in that we really aren't close physically. I was absolutely stunned that this was surprising to her, but she'd apparently just never played sports and never had a guy tell her that it wasn't going to be close.

On other occasions, I've had female friends claim that they could beat me in a fight, because I'm skinny. Which... well, I am skinny. But at 5'8", 140, fairly lean, and lifting a couple times a week, this really isn't going to be close. I don't think they'd claim that men and women only differ because of culture, but they do perceive themselves as being something like twice as strong as they actually are, so it's probably not too much of a stretch to convince them that whatever small difference they think exists is constructed.

she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy.

This is the part that's so weird to me. There's not really any plausible proposed mechanism there, just a handwave at generic oppression. I'll certainly admit that until fairly recently a hypothesis along the lines of "women might be just as good at endurance sports as men, we don't know because they've never trained for it" was tenable. There was no women's Boston Marathon until 1972! That's just 50 years ago, there are women alive and well that personally fought to be included. There are even plausible sounding reasons for women to be just as good at endurance sports, and pretty much no one was training optimally for it until quite recently. But strength things? Like you said, it's simply too in your face, too obvious, there's just no plausible way to defend the idea that's constructed.

On other occasions, I've had female friends claim that they could beat me in a fight, because I'm skinny. Which... well, I am skinny. But at 5'8", 140, fairly lean, and lifting a couple times a week, this really isn't going to be close.

People who beleive this have never been in a fight.

I don't have the url on hand(and I'm not sure how we want to be linking to reddit anyways), but I recall a long thread on a female-centric reddit forum that discussed the moment when they realized just how much stronger men were naturally than women.

I distinctly remember a fair number of those moments could basically be summed up as 'I kept pushing my brother/SO/friend to treat me seriously when playing/wrestling/competing and when he did he promptly shut me down cold without even trying'.

I wonder how many women whom claim 'They could win in a fight' are going off of faulty information, because every man in thier life have been playing with them and/or treating them gently, while the woman in question thinks they've been treated seriously.

This is the part that's so weird to me. There's not really any plausible proposed mechanism there, just a handwave at generic oppression.

One proposed mechanism I saw online about 5 years ago was the claim that, throughout history, men underfed women in their patriarchal society, resulting in women being undernourished and thus weaker than men on average and in the extremes. It seemed to subscribe to a Lamarkian-esque view of evolution except descent along sex instead of actual parentage, and also seemed pretty ahistorical with respect to the level of nutrition people used to get in the past. I wish I had saved it somewhere, because it was a really fascinating and deranged idea, and I recall it being passed around approvingly within my circles.

How do you underfeed the person who is doing the shopping and the cooking to begin with? Or if you go back to the farm, the person who is cooking the stew over the hearth, and gathering the eggs and milking the cow and making the bread and canning the vegetables, etc.? If you're the farmer or the cooper or the smithy, you can't stand in your kitchen all day to make sure she's not eating. She'll go pick apples off the tree and berries off the vine and make herself a whole damn pie if she wants to.

How do you underfeed the person who is doing the shopping and the cooking to begin with?

Internalized misogyny is a hell of a drug fully general explanation for any behavior by women that seem to go counter their interests.

One proposed mechanism I saw online about 5 years ago was the claim that, throughout history, men underfed women in their patriarchal society, resulting in women being undernourished and thus weaker than men on average and in the extremes. It seemed to subscribe to a Lamarkian-esque view of evolution except descent along sex instead of actual parentage, and also seemed pretty ahistorical with respect to the level of nutrition people used to get in the past. I wish I had saved it somewhere, because it was a really fascinating and deranged idea

Ooh, ooh (raises hand). Was it from Charlie Stross? I didn't bring that to The Motte's attention until last year, but you might have first seen it in the wild.

and I recall it being passed around approvingly within my circles.

And now I'm wondering if it wasn't Stross, but rather you saw the same idea independently invented elsewhere. Even on his own blog, full of left-wing fans, Stross was getting pushback, and about the closest thing he got to approval was the idea that, if we see sexual selection when women insist on marrying taller husbands, that might not quite be the same as women being underfed but it still ought to count as patriarchy too.

It was indeed not Stross, at least I don't recall it being someone by that name. It was a tweet thread online by some woman I had never heard of before or since. It does seem that the concept was largely the same as that 3rd bullet point in the post you linked, though the Twitter thread I'd read expanded on it quite a bit more, including explicitly making the claim instead of the implausible-deniability-language of "Consider, for example, that a restricted diet stunts growth, and that average adult stature tracks food availability by a generation or three, and ask why men are, on average, taller than women" that tries unconvincingly to make a claim without taking responsibility for it. The fact that the thread was passed along approvingly within my circles is likely more a reflection of how niche and extreme my circles were than anything.

The claims I usually see are that spending more money (and thus, presumably more food) feeding men than women is discriminatory, with the implication that this contributes to performance differences. For example (emphasis mine):

But he said the university failed to show it’s in full compliance with Title IX relating to travel and per diem, and needs to update its policies to ensure equal treatment for both men’s and women’s teams.

...

Schreiner said they’re working on travel and per diem policies and hope to submit a plan to the court within the next few weeks.

It will cover how frequently teams travel by bus or plane, how far they travel, hotel stays and per diem for meals.

It is so dumb, because if you take two men - say a lightweight boxer and a middleweight boxer - you don't put them in the same fight (unless it's some kind of gimmick stunt). Everybody recognises this. A good lightweight will be beaten by a good middleweight. It's down to physical difference in height, weight, reach, etc.

But then you get people trying to deny that women in general are smaller, lighter, slower and weaker than men in general and it's just - do you not have eyes? Have you ever struggled with opening a jar and had to get a male family member to do it? Or lift something heavy for you?

The boxing analogy is instructive, heavyweight was the big draw but I don't know if that is still the case today (my late father used to watch boxing, so I absorbed some by osmosis but haven't watched any myself in years). There is a difference between fighters and boxers, one is generally considered to be more skilful in the art of boxing. The ideal, of course, is to have someone like Ali who could both box beautifully and also slog it out, soaking up punishment and landing heavy hits.

Heavyweight went down for a while because too many big, heavy, guys who were slow and clumsy but their main advantage was they could soak up punishment for the majority of the bout, then if they landed one big punch that was it for their opponent. (That's why lighter weight bouts were more enjoyable, because you got actual fighting and boxing, not one big behemoth lumbering around the ring being a human punching bag until he landed the killer punch). So a big, heavy, clumsy guy will slaughter (metaphorically) a woman who may be more skilled and faster than him, but who can't take the same beating and certainly can't stand up to one huge punch.

Katie Taylor is a great female boxer. She is never gonna stand in a ring with a guy, because he'd hammer her. You watch her bouts for the same reason you'd watch men boxing: skill and stamina. But there is never going to be a man versus woman boxing match, even at the same weights, because it just would not be level. Okay, maybe get a flyweight guy and some Soviet-era style big heavyweight female athlete, but even then I don't think it would be that equal.

I'd been meeting these people in the wild since at least 2014. I remember, for example, when I mentioned this particular technological breakthrough which allowed people to reconstruct audio in a room from capturing vibrations in papery substances on video. I mentioned that the tech wasn't always good enough to be able to actually hear what was said, but was capable of being used for figuring out whether the speaker was male or female, and then I got yelled at from 5 different directions saying that some women have deeper voices than men, and you couldn't generalize about such things.

some women have deeper voices than men

True. I've known some women with deep voices, and at least one guy who had a high, fluting voice

and you couldn't generalize about such things.

False. Yes, you can, because it's general. In general, women will have higher voices than men. Even a deep-voiced woman may not sound like a man's voice, or a high-pitched male voice like a woman's voice. Some women will sound like a man and some men will sound like a woman, but in general you can tell which is which.

I saw a shitpost the other day on 4chan in which some anon argued his litmus test for whether he was speaking to a stupid person or not.

Essentially, if he makes a statement like "Asians are shorter on average than Caucasians" and someone rebuts "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"", then he knows he's dealing with an unintelligent person.

It's staggering the number of people I've met - people with Master's degrees, people who've succeeded in their chosen fields - who seem completely unable to grasp the concept of averages and distributions. There are so many people who hear a statement like "on average, women have lower sex drives than men" and interpret it to mean "literally every woman is less horny than literally every man, there is not a single woman anywhere in the world who is hornier than a man". Like, the idea of outliers is built into the concept of an "distribution". The entire concept of an average presupposes that there are members within that set which fall above and below it.

It's incredible to me how so many people think that "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"" or "I'm a woman and my sex drive is way higher than my boyfriend's" is some kind of "gotcha".

There was no source for it I was able to hunt down, but I'd really love to find out that the half-recollected factoid about Piraha children being able to learn the arithmetic their parents never could (that I read here recently) turns out to really be true. The common first-world adult inability to grok distributions reminds me of nothing more than the typical Piraha adult inability to work with numbers, and yet if there's hope for their future generations then maybe there's hope for ours too.

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