Man are stronger than woman (?)

Oh yeah Total war, really neccesary when you have planet killing superweapons.

Yes. Because the super-weapons can not be used when you are on the same planet and they have them too. Super-weapons deter total war, but they are not an opener nor a finisher. They really have no use except as a threat. There only functions if war breaks out is terms to sue for peace.

Edit: Argh! Derailing again. This system is to rigid.

edited 14th Apr '11 4:35:26 PM by TheDeadMansLife

The media. They see one female body type held up above all others and try to emulate it, in much the same way that young men are implicitly encouraged to put on weight, bulk up, and not look like weedy little guys.

edited 14th Apr '11 4:40:42 PM by Penguin4Senate

You guys should watch a documentary called "Bigger, Stronger, Faster". In one segment, a doctor talks about how aesthetics regarding musculature have actually increased in favor of muscle mass despite the growing use of advanced technology that should make physical labor easier. Day laborers 200 or 300 years ago probably didn't care about getting a six-pack like the guy on the American Eagle posters.

I'm not sure what impact this has had on perceptions of male-female strength standards, but my guess is that with the greater scrutiny comes greater exaggeration of what really constitutes male strength or female strength. Now that women have more opportunities in society at large, we consequently expect more out of them, and various feminism groups are torn on this trend. Now that the playing field has been leveled a little bit more (but still not enough in some cases), we give women and men fewer political or sociological safe zones (i.e. excuses) that they can use to exculpate their physical or intellectual shortcomings. The old "that's women's work" or "a lady does not do X without the aid of a strong man" ideas are fading, slowly but surely.

We need to look at the basic facts without politicizing those facts and using them against each gender for malicious purposes. In other words, just because men are stronger than women on average doesn't mean we should use that fact to justify cases of sexism.

That sounds false. Historically 6 packs where loved by the romans. They loved perfection and even their uniform reflected this. There is a historical account that describes the military as perfect in stance and form with even their armor and clothes designed to better accentuate their form, while the barbarian horde on the other side are grotesque with their muscles huge and uneven. Being a farmer or a farmhand has the side effect of giving you large muscles, so the only ones I imagine as not wanting muscles would be the affluent upper-class.

I think you might be missing my point. I'm speaking of this change in aesthetics on a large-scale population basis, rather than particular sub-cultures such as that of the Roman military or the Greek artisan class. Because if we go by what you're saying, then that means we also have to take into account the pre-Tokugawa/Greek aesthetic of the beautiful boy/bishonen. And there were plenty of ancient civilizations that appreciated heavy-set people. I'm not totally dismissing what you're saying, but you see where I'm going with this.

The trend in increased muscle definition has a lot to do with greater leisure time afford to a rising middle class that itself emerged from the late Middle Ages, give or take a few centuries from culture to culture. Now that more people have access to leisure time, more people have the chance to reach their fitness and aesthetic goals, men and women both. This is quite different from the fixed classism of many ancient civilizations where people were not of the mindset that they could take a stroll to the gym if they were born into the merchant class or the farmer class. If you're a fat aristocrat in, say, the Victorian era, you probably wouldn't have people telling you to hit the gym or follow a Billy Blanks video. Edit: In contrast, look at how overweight celebrities are treated by the media, even if they aren't truly overweight, and especially if they're females.

Now that more freedoms are afforded to the middle class and lower class, more responsibility falls onto the individual to be in shape. I suspect this partially explains the advent of the whole "obesity epidemic" concept that sprung up after the mid-90's. If we lived in a rigid caste system, there would likely be less pressure to lose or gain strength. If you're a slave girl, you weren't expected to be a gladiator. Today, if Serena Williams complains that she can't play tennis because she's a woman, she'll be ridiculed and fired rather than pitied and comforted.

edited 14th Apr '11 5:01:39 PM by Aprilla

I see. I misunderstood what you meant and thought you where talking about all over humanity only is beginning to grow larger muscles. That, plus I though day labor meant manual labor like labor that only is done in the sun.

Well, I worded it funny in the last post.

I don't think that's over-the-top feminism so much as people not liking to lose. I probably would have done the same, to be quite honest. It's like two years ago, in my physics class, my friends and I were always competing to get the best grade on the exams. Now, I could have gone and told them "I'm sorry, this situation can not be equalized, I am mathematically and physically more intelligent than you, and there's no way you can match my grades," but I highly doubt that would have prevented them from competing.

Even if men are physically stronger than me, I will not accept this number two position! Losing is for pussies!!

Actually, at the top levels of competition- the Olympics, for instance, the difference between sexes tends to overshadow the differences within either sex, since everyone who's competing is several standard deviations from the norm for their sex. If you look at the results for the 100m dash, for example, the fastest woman tends to clock in at approximately a second slower than the fastest man, a greater difference than that between the fastest man and the slowest man.

Yes, but we are working under the assumption that the Olympics are the epitome of human ability so the one second seems insignificant on the whole but when the difference from the tenth place and first for males is .3 it becomes more apparent that the gap is significant.

After we broke up, I found out that she had a history of mental illness. I recall her using feminism as a smokescreen for her hyper-competitiveness, but considering how of a nut job she was, I highly doubt you'd do the same at her level. You would have to know her to get a feel for just how clinically obsessed she was about success and being the best. The accusations of sexism were tacked on when it had more to do with her psychological instabilities. But that's not the point. The point is that we sometimes apply this one-size-fits-all mentality to physical fitness that really isn't appropriate on a large-scale and may even be dehumanizing.

Did I mention that she was batshit insane?

edited 14th Apr '11 6:14:58 PM by Aprilla

Ah, that's different then. Well, in any case, even if I can't bench-press the same amount as my boyfriend, I'm smaller than him, and I can bench-press a higher percentage of my weight than he can, so that's good enough for me. :P

Really, I agree. A one-size-fits-all mentality isn't appropriate for anything, not just physical fitness.

Competitiveness in the gym is a universal thing. People who share a gym tend towards a similar ceiling in weight usage, throw in someone much stronger and this ceiling goes up because everyone is trying harder.

There is a hypothesis that the lower ceiling for women is related to this, that women don't let themselves become as strong because women are simply perceived as not as strong.

I admit to being a little competitive with the men in my gym. But I can't simply will myself stronger. I do outscore the average man on several metrics of physical strength, but I'm still weaker than pretty much any man who strength trains himself.

Women are equally as strong as men in two metrics of strength:

1. Each individual muscle fiber in a woman is as strong as an individual muscle fiber in a man.
2. The uterus is the strongest muscle in any human body.

But if you look at overall lifting power, which is usually what is meant by strength, men win hands-down. This is because men have more lean body mass than women do.

By the way, there's a disorder called myostatin related muscular hypertrophy, which leads to, on average, twice the muscle of a normal person. But there was still a bodybuilding contest in which a normal man won over a person with the condition. This is pretty analogous to men and women, I think. Men have, on average, nearly twice the upper body strength of women, but a woman who trains hard can certainly win over a man who trains less.

• # The average guy's largest muscles - his quadriceps vs. uterus
• The uterus—as it is a part of the female reproductive system—is a muscle found only in females. The uterus may be the single strongest muscle in comparison to body weight across both sexes.

Double Citation needed I think I need to go clean wikipedia. From the article on muscles.

The "strongest" human muscle

Since three factors affect muscular strength simultaneously and muscles never work individually, it is misleading to compare strength in individual muscles, and state that one is the "strongest". But below are several muscles whose strength is noteworthy for different reasons.

• In ordinary parlance, muscular "strength" usually refers to the ability to exert a force on an external object—for example, lifting a weight. By this definition, the masseter or jaw muscle is the strongest. The 1992 Guinness Book of Records records the achievement of a bite strength of 4,337 N (975 lbf) for 2 seconds. What distinguishes the masseter is not anything special about the muscle itself, but its advantage in working against a much shorter lever arm than other muscles.
• If "strength" refers to the force exerted by the muscle itself, e.g., on the place where it inserts into a bone, then the strongest muscles are those with the largest cross-sectional area. This is because the tension exerted by an individual skeletal muscle fiber does not vary much. Each fiber can exert a force on the order of 0.3 micronewton. By this definition, the strongest muscle of the body is usually said to be the quadriceps femoris or the gluteus maximus.
• A shorter muscle will be stronger "pound for pound" (i.e., by weight) than a longer muscle. The myometrial layer of the uterus may be the strongest muscle by weight in the female human body. At the time when an infant is delivered, the entire human uterus weighs about 1.1 kg (40 oz). During childbirth, the uterus exerts 100 to 400 N (25 to 100 lbf) of downward force with each contraction.
• The external muscles of the eye are conspicuously large and strong in relation to the small size and weight of the eyeball. It is frequently said that they are "the strongest muscles for the job they have to do" and are sometimes claimed to be "100 times stronger than they need to be." However, eye movements (particularly saccades used on facial scanning and reading) do require high speed movements, and eye muscles are exercised nightly during rapid eye movement sleep.
• The statement that "the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body" appears frequently in lists of surprising facts, but it is difficult to find any definition of "strength" that would make this statement true. Note that the tongue consists of sixteen muscles, not one.
• The heart has a claim to being the muscle that performs the largest quantity of physical work in the course of a lifetime. Estimates of the power output of the human heart range from 1 to 5 watts. This is much less than the maximum power output of other muscles; for example, the quadriceps can produce over 100 watts, but only for a few minutes. The heart does its work continuously over an entire lifetime without pause, and thus does "outwork" other muscles. An output of one watt continuously for eighty years yields a total work output of two and a half gigajoules.

I read that the shin muscles were the strongest, because even a completely untrained person can put a few hundred pounds on their lap and still raise their feet onto the toes. But that might just be the strongest voluntary muscle.

I can easily believe that the uterus is the strongest muscle overall. There have been occasions when just by twitching slightly, mine forced me to remain in bed.

edited 16th Apr '11 12:19:42 PM by Karalora

Zing!

Hey! I thought that wasn't allowed!