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from the *you*-try-keeping-up-with-a-bunch-of-children-all-day dept.
From Medium article:
https://elemental.medium.com/what-makes-women-strong-2c927bf286ef
"What Makes Women Strong?
Science is revealing that when it comes to physical prowess, women may actually be the more powerful sex""If discussions of human physical strength used endurance as the yardstick, women would be strongest. Women have already caught up to, or surpassed, men in some sports like long-distance swimming and ultrarunning, racking up the wins in mixed-gender races (with less support and training than the men). Recently, Camille Herron won 2018's Desert Solstice run, which lasts for 24 hours (she ran 162.9 miles in that time) and Courtney Dauwalter has won 11 mixed-sex ultramarathons, including the Moab 240, a 238-mile race along the Colorado River in Utah. Dauwalter beat the next-fastest competitor there, a man, by 10 hours.
In fact, plenty of research points to the idea that the longer the distance, the better chance a woman has in beating a man, possibly due to a combination of factors like high pain tolerance and less muscle fatigability. There could also be metabolic reasons — some researchers theorize that women burn energy in a way that supports long-distance energy needs. As investigative reporter David Epstein notes in his book, The Sports Gene, when a man and a woman are evenly matched, "the man will typically beat the woman at distances shorter than the marathon, but the woman will win if the race length is extended to forty miles."
[...] "Women are also bodily powerful (the definition of strong) in other ways: Women are also more flexible. "Women tend to have somewhat more laxity in their tendons than men; they are more limber," Dr. Steve Jordan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, told The New York Times. Limber people are less likely to get hurt — less time spent on the sidelines or in surgery. Woman also have a very high degree of accuracy — and depending on the physical pursuit, that can make one athlete stronger than the next. Women on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour regularly significantly outdrive professional men. And according to the National Rifle Association's Colonel Kenneth Haynes — a military logician in the Army who taught both men and women to shoot over a multi-decade career — women shoot guns more accurately: "My units had around 20 percent female personnel in both officer and enlisted ranks. All the women fired Expert their first day, but less than a third of the men did so," writes Haynes."
So, I really wanna hear the fireworks....
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 14 2019, @02:39PM (4 children)
I assume what TFA was talking about was the balance of driving distance vs. accuracy. From later in the article you quoted from:
That article basically seems to be arguing that aside from driving distance off the initial tee, women tend to excel over men in golf due to higher accuracy of hits and making less risky choices (e.g., a man might choose a higher powered club for a similar shot but then have a lower chance of hitting an accurate shot).
Anyhow, it depends on your definition of "outdrive." I would argue that focusing solely on distance is a very stereotypically "masculine" way of evaluating driving performance. ("I'll just beat the crap out the ball and swing like hell...") Looking at driving accuracy, LPGA women do really well, though, many with much better stats than top PGA men.
This kind of stuff is what makes TFA incredibly annoying to me, though. I was really excited to read it. I love hearing about great achievements of all sorts of people, and hearing about some recent achievements of women in some sports is great. Getting hints about what physical or genetic aspects may be behind these gains is fascinating too.
But it seems like over half of TFA's cited stats or anecdotes are misleading and presented in such a way as to distort the claims from "women are doing really well, and in some cases better than men" to an argument like, "Women might actually be physically superior to men!" Maybe the latter is true, depending on your definition of "superior," but I prefer a more nuanced and accurate perspective. For example, regarding golf, why not just say, "LPGA golfers have made significant gains in driving distance, outperforming even very highly skilled amateur men. In other metrics, though, they are outperforming even pro men -- the top three dozen LPGA golfers have higher driving accuracy than the best men on the PGA tour." Or something like that.
That would still be awesome and interesting to read. Instead, though, you get these more vague and sometimes deliberately misrepresented claims in TFA, which just allow trolls and jerks to shoot holes through the article and get annoyed at "feminism."
Why can't an article like this be written in a more balanced manner? Celebrate the cause of women, celebrate their achievements, point out in some places they may even be surpassing men... and just be fair in quoting your sources and presenting their data. Why is that so hard?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 14 2019, @02:53PM (2 children)
Your manner of stating things does sound more accurate. But, I'm not digging into the trivial details to figure it all out.
One note, regarding shooting: As a wee little guy, I was told by an uncle that girls are more "natural" shooters. Us guys have to figure out how to shoot, whereas, girls just pick up a gun, and shoot. Generally, guys pass the girls up, because we keep at the shooting, and continue to learn. Girls tend to get bored with shooting, so many of them never improve from their initially high plateau. On those occassions when I meet a chick who can out-shoot me, I am only very mildly surprised. As I see it, girls are genetically better shooters. But, someone will take offense at that, I'm sure.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 14 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
No one here will ever take offense to you saying girls are better at something. Only if you say they're worse at something. Then you're sexist incel scum like James Damore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 15 2019, @03:56PM
Um, have you seen the rest of this comment section?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday June 14 2019, @04:05PM
a man might choose a higher powered club for a similar shot but then have a lower chance of hitting an accurate shot
Obligatory Simpsons clip [youtube.com].
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