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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.

I want to take issue with the first part of this.

The quote from the Atlantic article is cherry-picked- Yes, it's dumb. Yes, the article used the silly "but gender and sex is a complex issue that isn't so cut and dry" gambit, but if you actually read the article, it's arguing (couched in progressive applause lights and signalling) that sports should have weight/size divisions rather than sex-based divisions, which I entirely agree with. Divisions based on physical attributes neatly sidesteps the transgender problem, it's more obviously fair, it would be fun to watch - it's a fantastic solution. We could split up divisions based on attributes that fit the sport- height or leg length for running, size and weight for football or boxing and so on. Large, muscular women would square off in the higher categories against men, while underweight men would compete against women their own size.

I read through a few comments, and no one seems to have clicked through to the source article and read it - everyone is just using the quote as a jumping-off point to bitch about their issues with modern academia or with those damn progressives that are ignoring biology.

EDIT: fixing some weird phrasing

I can't argue against an anecdote from your life, because (obviously) I wasn't there. I will say that I don't think anecdotes are a slam-dunk argument against weight classes in sports and that I've met women (rarely) who were stronger than I am. I'm not a small or a weak man.

Lastly, if we imagine a system like what I've described- if larger men reach weight requirements by gaining fat rather than muscle and then compete against smaller men who are stronger, they just lose. If a woman did the same then she would lose. She would either need to lose weight to fit into a lower weight category or spend the time to gain enough muscle to hold her own in the category that she wants to compete in.

Convince me that men are mostly stronger than women? I'm already convinced, man. Convince me that divisions based on measurements are worse (in some way) than divisions based on sex? I'm honestly not sure. If women who are the same weight, height, body fat etc. lose at very high rates when competing against men, that would do it- I'm not sure how you get that data without actually setting up widespread non-sex based competitions and then tracking win rates for a while.

Hey, let me add to the anecdotes: I am a small and weak man and I never met a woman stronger than myself despite doing mixed-gender martial arts for years.

Which makes me wonder: What kinds of women are these strong ones you mentioned? Must one imagine them as female strongmen who spend every waking moment lifting weights, or do they work tough physical jobs, or what else?

I don't know how the women I mentioned became strong- I wasn't close with them. There were several in the military and a few since that could out-lift me along various dimensions- mostly squats. Only one, maybe two that were stronger in the upper body than I was, although I may be stronger now than they were then.