[viridian]

It's not society and nurture stopping a woman from deadlifting 800lbs, or a man from breastfeeding. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species.

My girlfriend and I were just talking about how it's pretty unfortunate that there are basically no top level female smash players, but the fact is that reaction time is such a huge advantage that only a fraction of a percent of men can perform at the top level, and the female bell curve just doesn't stretch that far. The opposite is true for some traits as well, like top percentile flexibility.

[tptacek]

Well, what's stopping men from deadlifting 800lbs? Because only a tiny fraction of men can deadlift 600lbs (the women's deadlift record), let alone 800lbs.

Will a man hold the deadlift record? Most assuredly. Does this in any way matter? It sure doesn't seem like it does.

[viridian]

>Well, what's stopping men from deadlifting 800lbs?

In a lot of cases, time and value. My brother has a squat of 500 and some change, and a 405 DL, but it's not worth it to him to improve those much further. He's foremost a football player and second a wrestler, and lifting is a means to those ends. He could likely hit an 800 DL if he focused on it, and heck, I might even be able to bump my shoddy 315x5 to 800 if I really worked at it, but that's flat out not an option for any woman.

The main reason I get so annoyed by this argument that "women can do basically anything a man does, if they weren't held back by socialization etc" is because I used to be a huge proponent of it, myself. Engaging in almost any type of sport or competitive activity quickly dispels you of that notion. While a female comp black belt could delete me from the face of the earth, I'd be very surprised if there's a female black belt alive who could beat even the best black belt in Columbus Ohio, and it's not like Cbus is a jiu jitsu mecca. We split sports by sex for a lot of reasons.

[moduspol]

It matters when the 800lb deadlifting community is accused of rampant sexism, and counter-productive policies are put in place to correct this perceived injustice.

[subjectsigma]

People's lives literally depend on whether or not you believe in physical and mental differences between men and women.

https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/blog/2012/07/05/get-over...

https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2014/09/why-women-do-not...

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-special-...

[tptacek]

Oh come off it. If it mattered to the actual discussion, women serve along men in the IDF infantry. But it doesn't matter; it simply begs the question. Nobody is debating whether peak male lifting performance is better than peak female lifting performance. Women are also much better at giving birth than men! The issue is: why does that matter?

[subjectsigma]

I'm not sure if you're intentionally being dense or we're talking past each other about different things.

1. Progressive and liberal-minded individuals think that promoting the idea that there is no functional difference between men and women will help fight gender inequality but this is not only untrue, it is dangerous. See the linked articles in my comment; people absolutely are debating this, these people are driving real policy changes, and you misrepresent them saying they are not.

2. Part of this agenda is shaming people for treating men and women differently, like in the OP. In this case they're right to do this, it's not productive or fair to write science articles about women differently than ones about men. But in other ways there is definitely a culture being created where it is taboo to treat men and women differently in any capacity and maybe that's not entirely a good idea. That's why it 'matters'.

[tptacek]

You're pretending to address what I wrote without actually engaging with anything I wrote. But that's OK, right: lives are at risk!

[subjectsigma]

So you are being intentionally dense. I'm sorry I tried.