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Old 04-04-2020, 04:41 PM   #11
Huinesoron
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Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
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Huinesoron is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Huinesoron is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin View Post
That, at least, is an easy one: when it comes to competitive athletics, certainly soccer and the like, men are better at them. Fact of biology, and Nature doesn't care that it's not fair. They have women's football because women couldn't make the men's teams; and the latter is shown down t'pub because it's a higher caliber of sport on display.
(In the interests of harmony I will not respond to your closing remark.)

To avoid getting tangled up in my own answers, I hope you won't mind me turning them into a list? It's not any kind of structured response, just an attempt not to Too Many Paragraphs at you.
  • I totally get why they separate the two, but I didn't make that clear, so thank you.
  • 'Higher caliber of sport' is an interesting phrase here. I'm pretty sure having external gonads doesn't increase your tactical or technical skill, so what I think you're really saying is that it's more energetic. And sure, I can accept that - but why is that the only factor that counts in making it a 'higher caliber'? Could it be because that's the attribute men outperform in...?
  • Setting that aside: think of a field where women generally outperform men. Is it split into 'thing' and 'men's thing'? Or is it 'women's thing' and 'men's thing'? What the language around football etc does is establish being a man as the norm, on a planet where actually, there's a slight majority of women.

And yes, both of these are very minor things in the scheme of things. But they're minor things that lean in exactly the same direction as countless other minor things - malewards.

In a community like the Downs, it's okay to have a lean or explicit bias: we all angle Tolkienwards here, and that's fine because people can just not join if they don't like that. But when the community is a country, that option isn't there.

hS
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