this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Maybe. I've always heard that women mature more quickly than men. Certainly women hit puberty earlier. Its very hard to sus out the differences from nature and nurture.
The 2 often feed off each other too. E.g. men are slightly stronger than women, on average. Men are then expected to take on the strong protector role, while women are expected to act weak and subservient. This amplifies the original slight difference massively, reinforcing the social stereotype.
Women seem to have a preference for cooperation, with their ranking within the group mattering most. Men seem to err towards intergroup competition, where your teams ranking matters most. These necessitate different types of social skills, which feeds the stereotype, which feeds the original difference.
Men being slightly stronger on average than women has a LOT to do with culture.
When I was a kid, girls weren't even allowed to do the same calisthenics in school. There was severe social opprobrium for women doing strength training, learning martial arts, etc.
This is one of the things about the patriarchy, the things it enforces are seen as natural. Women are put in clothes that limit their mobility, beauty standards demand frailness, etc.
It's also an unfortunate fact that testosterone makes it a LOT easier to put on muscle mass. A good chunk of men don't take advantage of it, but the biology still holds. It's also worth noting that men are on average taller than women. Our volume of muscle is often bigger to start with.
My wife does quite a bit more strength based exercise than I do. The force multiplier on my exercise however means I can easily out power her, when it comes to brute strength.
It's worth noting however that a lot of the initial strength gain of exercise isn't muscle increase, but better control. Both men and women can increase this, fairly evenly. The difference tells most once that caps out.
The high end of height, upper body strength and mass, sprinting speed, etc definitely favors higher-test systems. .
But I remember reading an ethnography of a Chinese village in the early days of the PRC, when they were still basically living the Imperial-peasant lifestyle.
Women there at the time of writing were not generally esteemed as beautiful slender luxury possessions, but instead for virtues such as their ability to carry heavy loads on a yoke, and the male/female strength split was not nearly that big.
We don't need to live in a society where we assume that "generic man" is assumed to have an essential advantage in physical combat over "generic woman". That's a choice.
As a counter example, I remember listening to a radio interview with a woman who accidentally joined a boxing gym, and decided to roll with it. Even after 3 years training, it apparently took new men about 6 weeks to blast past her in strength.
And jumping back to my earlier comment. Societies tend to amplify differences. Men are stronger, so are expected to do jobs requiring strength. This, in turn leads to stronger men, reinforcing the stereotype.
In short, there's not much baseline difference between men and women. There are however differences. Societies and cultures often amplify them, particularly when it improves division of labour. In an agrarian society they might not be able to afford the split, so the situation you read about plays out. Men can't afford to powerhouse, while women need to pick up significant physical labour.
I trained shotokan for a bit having come from a gridiron/rugby background, and there were some exercises (like ring-out shoving exercises) where I was a laughable mismatch with anybody else in the room. One of the trainers was a woman that I had 35cm and 50kg on, if she tried to square up, it would have been hopeless.
But strength isn't all of it. There was another three-step positional sparring exercise, and that one trainer tied me into knots every time. I wouldn't have been able to touch her in a real fight, and she would have popped my kidney like a balloon every time.
I'm mostly pissed off about stuff like amateur rugby and field hockey not letting trans women compete. In sports like that, at the pro level, the top team would be all men no question.
But for a bunch of random people in their 20s playing amateur rugby? Piff, the safety/dominance issue is really overblown.
Imagine believing this in 2026. There’s a reason most sports are separated by gender and it certainly isn’t “culture”.
The fact that there are things called "sports" and "genders" is cultural my peer.
No, those are words for things that occur in nature, across many animal species.
If they were a law of nature, society wouldn't have to punish people who "do sports and/or gender wrong"
Then what about animals’ genders and sports? Are they not natural?
What sports and genders do animals do? Give examples.
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yeah i have no idea what they are saying. my nephews are all plenty mature for their age. it could be that the parents of those kids just suck.
and not all of their friends, male, or female, are on the same level. mostly as a product of how overbearing/controlling their parents were.