A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
or why don't we just keep everything as is because it's not a big fucking deal despite what bigots say
if you really wanted to "fix" or "save" womens sport, just start by fucking paying them the same as men and giving women's sport the same attention on tv
Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that's sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now
Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are "stronger" pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That's dumb, that's a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.
This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.
Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they're too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That's not a sport getting better or worse, that's just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.
We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.
Me, I'm a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that's a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn't exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like "get ball through hope" or "throw guy out of ring" and then I don't need any more to it, I'm right there with you.
I think because guys are pound for pound stronger than girls. I've read stories on Reddit years ago by girls who are wrestlers or fighters and get into a playful tussle with some random guy and they describe it as terrifying.
On average, but there's outliers.
Like, there are women out there with higher testorone than the average man, and crazy is a huge factor.
I played rugby in college and we hung out with the women's team and drunk coed wrestling was definitely a common thing.
Every once and a while a non rugby player would think it was just an excuse to roll around with a hot chick, and they would get absolutely demolished. Like I'm not talking about underestimating the woman and losing quickly due to technical skill. Just getting absolutely manhandled by a girl without the socially ingrained fear of violence and pain. Like, I was one of the biggest guys on the men's team and had wrestling experience, I still lost to some of them. Women almost a foot shorter and that I had more than 50 pounds on. Because they really wanted that W and kept trying till they got it.
Hell, for two years we had coed practice including full speed tackling and scrimmages. Top end speed was usually the only clear difference, and even then the fastest five players on the field was never all guys.
There was a story on Reddit from a soldier, his squad ended up in a fight with rugby players in a bar in Australia and after the fight they had a drink together and when a soldier told the players they were pretty brave to start fighting people in the army, they replied "the only people we fear is women who play rugby because they're completely crazy".
Every once and a while a non rugby player would think it was just an excuse to roll around with a hot chick, and they would get absolutely demolished. Just getting absolutely manhandled by a girl
The perfect deal if they're into that
Like, there are women out there with higher testorone than the average man
No, that doesn't happen, the adrenal glands and ovaries do not produce enough t to reach even very low male levels, testosterone for the most part is produced in the testicules which cis women do not have. that much testosterone would transition a woman into a man, they would grow beard and get a deeper voice, that's how HRT works for FtMs.
they would grow beard and get a deeper voice, that’s how HRT works for FtMs.
Plenty of people with XY chromosomes can't grow facial and have a high pitched voice well into their 20s or even after
And plenty of people with XX chromosomes shave/wax/bleach facial hair and have deep voices.
Hormones aren't binary, there's a bunch of different hormones that can be in a lot of different ranges
And that's not even getting into the other options besides XX/XY
Stop trying to make everyone conform to your binary views on gender.
She's not talking about gender he's talking about sex. Someone born with testicles with XY chromosomes is always going to produce more testosterone than someone born with ovaries with XX chromosomes - assuming both sexual organs are functioning as expected.
Sorry this is bothering me a bit but if by "He" you meant me, I use she/her pronouns I'll put It in my bio :)
Oh, nice to know that girl who beat me (in the same weight class) at wrestling was cuz her sexual organs weren't working properly.
We're talking about testosterone in blood not wrestling abilities. A 300lb woman will beat an 110lb man in wrestling. Doesn't mean she has higher T.
Amazing how one can dismiss another's personal experience by simply insisting a different scenario happened.
What personal experience am I dismissing? Please explain. I'm talking about human anatomy. The organ that produces testosterone are the testicles. Ovaries produce a token amount.
We are talking about T % in blood. Not personal experiences.
Bro, don't pretend you know what a woman's T levels are if you never met them.
Weight is the wrong criteria to use. Why not just have it classed by skill level. Enforce equity in school sports by mandating that a meaningful distribution of skill-based leagues are funded. This seems like a very simple solution to me that would address gender-based inequities in general as well as improve sports overall.
Because a man tends to be stronger, faster, and more athletic than a woman of the same weight. It won't work for football, track, or soccer.
It would work for marathons though. Figure that out
Testosterone also increases red blood cell count, so even male endurance athletes have an advantage. Look at Tigst Assefa who holds the women's World record for a marathon at 2:11, she's 120 lbs, the top 5 male marathon runners are all at 120 lbs too and run 10 minutes faster.
soccer
"Male" soccer is not restricted to men. Both genders are allowed. There are only men because they outperform women.
edit: Although FIFA forbids women from access to the main World Cup. Also the statement above is true generally, but not everywhere.
ok cool what about the op's thoughts?
He addresses them with that statement. There are plenty of women that are in similar weight classes as men but you don't see any in male sports.
Even though male sports does not have a gender requirement. This is essentially an indirect way of saying that there are biological differences between male and female that go beyond weight.
There are various differences you could point out. Males have lower body fat %, which means more muscle. Their bones are shaped differently and are more dense. Men tend to be more aggressive and competitive. Men tend to have stronger bones, joints, tendons, and ligaments.
Men have more red blood cells, their hearts are bigger so they can pump more blood, and greater lung volume relative to body mass. So even a male and women same weight and height the man will be able to circulate oxygen more quickly.
There are many more examples if you go do some reading.
One of the differences may not be huge by themselves. But when you take the differences above and combine them, it creates a situation where in almost all sports, men play virtually unopposed by women.
Look up the Serena Williams interview. She's undoubtedly the best female player in the world. She doesn't stand a chance against a the 203rd best tennis male player.
This difference even applies to areas like chess. The highest ranking a woman ever got was 6th in the world, Judith Pulgar. Amazing player, but out of the 2500 or so grandmasters in the world, 42 are women.
Some of these differences can be explained by women around the world not being encouraged to play chess, but that does not explain all.
There are large biological differences when you look at the population in a statistical sense. And when you look at the most extreme samples from the edge of the normal distribution.. that's where the best athletes / chess players are going to come from.
Chess? What percent of woman players are GMs and what percent of male players are GMs? Because it sounds like sampling bias.
Women make up roughly 15% of US Chess Federation members. They make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.
That's an order of magnitude difference.
The purpose is to oppress the queers, logical compromises are not welcome.
Unfortunately that’s just not true. There are a ton of people who use this as an excuse to oppress, and fuck them. But pound for pound, a person assigned male at birth is still going to have competitive advantage over someone assigned female at birth.
I don’t love the way this study words the problem, but I’ll quote it here: “Male physiology cannot be reformatted by estrogen therapy in transwoman athletes because testosterone has driven permanent effects through early life exposure.”[1]
I really wish it were as simple as it feels like it should be: trans men have the testosterone levels to compete with cis men, and the same for trans women and cis women. It’s really not that simple though, and pretending like the only barrier is hate won’t help things.
I could train as hard as possible, for years, and I promise you I couldn't beat a single woman in the WNBA on a 1 on 1 game. I think it is important to remember, that yes, statically, men have an advantage, but each individual is unique. I think it would make more sense 1. Remove the profit motive from sports. 2. Have leagues based on skill, not gender. Of course, that will never happen. Match making in video games is a clear example of how it can work. If I was really into any competitive game, every time I played I'd be playing against people that were roughly equal to me. I suppose that is harder to do in team sports though, especially when there is money involved for the players.
I could train as hard as possible, for years, and I promise you I couldn’t beat a single woman in the WNBA on a 1 on 1 game.
Yeah, but we both know that's because you're a short-ass weakling, be honest.
Hot take: Sports are not that important, and it's not the end of the world if someone in the other team is "physically better" than you.
Sports should be just played for fun and for making exercise, not as a profession. And the whole sports industry should be taken down all together. Make all sports amateur and just for the fun of it and suddenly it really doesn't mather who is on your team or in the other team.
Most sport is played by amateurs and for fun. It is still no fun to play against someone who is way stronger/weaker than you, of course!
Martial arts already has weight classes and gender on top. Weight doesn't cover gender differences
And for most people it is hard to acknowledge that there is a biological difference to the body of male and female. Same rights to everyone doesnt imply same bodytype for everyone
I'm still a fan of just removing all the rules around drugs and bodies. Let's see what 21st century science can do!
It would be a kinda fun league to watch, but I dont want to hear about athletes dying because they took obscene amounts of steroids to be the best.