Increase in violence against men by women. Decrease in violence against women by men. Increase in women opening their own bottles and jars. Decrease in men moving furniture. Men will still have to kill the spiders.
The biggest change will be women working at jobs requiring physical strength, and no need for double standards.
It would be interesting to see if there are any existing societies where males and females are naturally closer in size and then examine whether behaviors like domestic violence or rape tend to be lower for those groups.
Why? I mean, there already are women who as big and strong as the average men - my sister, for instance - and they’re no more aggressive than any other women.
Women are, by your OP, going to be as large and strong as men on the average. There is a pretty wide variation on size and strength among men. The strong will still victimize the weaker or the more easily intimidated. Rapists are gonna rape. They will simply select for weaker women. Children and the elderly will still be targeted.
So, despite your response to TheSeaOtter in post #3, you really are specifying magic. It thus would have been simpler to omit the GE aspect.
But with fewer weak targets, it will be more difficult. I don’t think it would eliminate rape, it would just reduce it.
I see all the guys are ignoring my version. Go figure.
Well, not a guy, but I’m seriously wondering which people you know. Because I know quite a few women who wouldn’t be particularly good at that “calmly” thing, and quite a few small guys who’ll beat the crap out of anybody who hasn’t managed to get them into a headlock.
At 3/4ths my size I’m still considerably larger and stronger than most women. So two average sized women aren’t going to make any difference, and I know how to get out of a headlock also.
It doesn’t really matter though, the hypothetical is based on men and women having the same size and strength.
I, too, have known enough mean little guys to think your version is going to make any difference.
Let’s just keep shrinking them until it does. Maybe men will end up the size of beagles.
Then we will be like male spiders and in a really bad situation.
I really believe the differences the OP is getting at - domestic abuse, physical violence - is not particularly driven by size. Testosterone drives aggressive behavior more than anything else. If you take an aggressive guy and a passive guy, it really doesn’t matter what their sizes are - you are already pretty certain that the aggressive guy is going to win.
To put it a little bit more concretely in the current world: firearms are the great equalizer. There isn’t a single woman in the woman who can’t stop an attacker/abuser dead in his tracks with a firearm. When you put guns into the equation, there is no relevant gender differential in anything but aggression. And yet how many victims of domestic abuse even try to shoot their abuser? Making a woman bigger and stronger isn’t going to make her more likely to fight back. As long as she doesn’t fight back or leave, the abuse continues.
So I think the change that would matter is a fundamental change in how aggression is expressed and responded to. (i.e. reduce aggression overall, or make all people more likely to fight back against an aggressor.) Maybe we could achieve that by suppressing testosterone or maybe we could achieve it through cultural means, but that’s the target our genetic engineering program needs to go after.
This is rather vaguely stated, as “men” run the gamut in size from less than five feet to seven something, depending on genes and random hormones. So are we talking “average” size?
Anyway, I can see some complications:
All those woman who put “tall” as the number one attribute in their Match.com ads are going to be disappointed. Especially if we adopt Ulfreida’s option.
I’m willing to bet that there’s some cultural/evolutionary conditioning in (heterosexual) men to prefer certain feminine aspects of feature and body shape. Not sure what happens when you supersize those features, although I can guess. At the very least, it’s going to take the culture some time to catch up with the “me want snoo snoo” aspects of larger, more muscular women. Worst case, we’ll have a generation that finds that they just aren’t sexually attracted to each other.
Fashion will change. Will stiletto heels, short skirts and other stereotypical feminine garments look as good when worn by women whose proportions are more masculine? (We know from the fine documentary Avatar that 10 foot women can be sexy, but that was on a planet where mountains floated. In real gravity, things might be different.)
You will lose certain benefits – gymnastics will be very different. Those Olympians can only fly through the air because they weigh approximately the same as hummingbirds. Apparently women are generally more dexterous (smaller fingers?) and better at certain kinds of mechanical assembly. I don’t know if smaller size lends any benefit to child rearing, but it’s possible that children would thrive better when rocked by someone more maternal in shape than a linebacker. Or, if you make everyone a bit smaller, then you have problems finding people to do physically heavy labor. The world has to retire the world championship caber tossing belt.
From an ecological standpoint, making half the population bigger would be a problem. You’d have to produce a bit more of everything – more food, more cloth, more fuel to push bigger people around. Houses might have to be made slightly bigger as well – people might find they psychologically need more space.
Really, not to be glib, but if you’re looking for a purely technical fix to end sexual harassment, I’m not sure you can beat tasers.
Only if tasers are instantly available and cannot be used against the victim. Like, if women can stun people by shooting a laser out of their fingers or something. Let’s face it, this discussion is about men harming, oppressing, overpowering, women. There no magical physical change nor technical fix that makes aggression go away. You’d have to make women into giants, or make them absolutely impervious to weaponry. And even then, I don’t know.
If an average-sized woman was physically aggressive, competitive, arrogant, with a sense of entitlement and a cultural norm of that being the upright and valued way to behave, I’d be just as wary around her as around any asshole with testicles.
Maybe if women were simply gifted with the power to pick any irritating male up by the head with giant pinchers and let them dangle for awhile before putting them down. I bet it would at least reduce cat calling.
And there are plenty of little guys who are jerks.
Men don’t attack women because they are bigger, they attack women because they are men. Now by that, I don’t mean that all men attack women, because obviously, they don’t, but enough people have pointed out that testosterone drives a lot of attacks against women, regardless of the size of the attacker.
Look at it this way: dogs attack strangers pretty much according to their personality and upbringing, not their size. Chihuahuas are some of the most attack-happy little putzes I’ve ever seen, because people don’t bother to train them not to, and most big dogs would get put down if they were as aggressive as half the Chihuahuas I’ve known. Some of the least aggressive dogs out there are giant dogs, like Giant Schnauzers, mainly because they’ve been bred for things like herding. Great Danes are big babies. In fact, IMO, the bigger the dog, the gentler it is, although I think that mainly has to do with the fact that when people know their little puppy with weigh 100lbs some day, they put a LOT of effort into non-aggressive training. But nevermind. The point is, the odds of actual success in taking down whatever the dog is attacking seems to have little influence over whether or not the dog decides to attack.
I think that’s true with men as well, except that men who can’t depend on bare-handed brutalization bring a knife or a gun. And that’ll still be the case after we scale up women.
FWIW, making women more muscular means increasing ligaments and tendons, and making bones harder, and might have the unintended effect of making childbirth more difficult, something animals that don’t walk upright don’t face.
Humans have difficult births, because we have pelves made for upright walking, which is the exact wrong kind for giving birth, and on top of that, we have the big heads. Women produce a hormone late in pregnancy that loosens up joints, and gets the pelvis ready to open up. All of that might get a lot more complicated. Pregnant women might be more prone to sprains and ligature tears, falls, and other problems, and it might take more of the hormone, and more women might fail to deliver vaginally, leading to more c-sections. This is pure speculation, but there are always unintended consequences. No matter how we try to think of everything, there’s always something we miss.
The thing that comes to ind is the question is their a advantage that men and women are physical different and what is the downside to making them more the same?
Can’t parse this at all. No idea what you’re trying to say.
I recall reading an article on the evolutionary origins of the differences between the genders commenting that if you wanted men and women to be equally strong women would actually have to be larger than men; not the same size. One reason for male size is to contain the internal organs needed to supply all those muscles with what they need; women on the other hand actually have internal organs larger than what they normally need so they can go through the extra stress of a pregnancy just with discomfort, instead of dropping dead afterwards like some animals do.
So women would need internal organs of the same scale, *plus *the excess capacity to survive sustaining a pregnancy. If their still supposed to look like pre-alteration women that ups the size even larger; much of a normal woman’s appearance is due to having more and differently distributed body fat than a man, and a woman’s proportionally smaller torso would have to be scaled up more to hold the same mass of internal organs as a man and still stay the same shape. Plus they’d need to eat more than men.
On a social level I doubt it would make much difference; strength really doesn’t matter as much as some people like to say. Mostly it would make women more desirable for heavy physical labor. If you want men and women to be socially equal the important differences are psychological, not muscle mass.
Give women the same tendency to form extended social networks and alliances as men and I expect that we’d have been largely equal throughout our history. Men haven’t historically dominated women because we’re individually stronger; men have dominated because usually any dispute between the genders was a matter of one or a few women against every man in sight. Bonobo chimps aren’t male dominated like the lowland chimpanzees because males who try to push females around get ganged up on by the other females, not because the females are as big and strong as the males.
Rape’s common in all-male prisons; so no, it doesn’t work like that.
Men and women as we are have the advantages of biological specialization. A woman with a man’s strength would be more of a generalist, and it would take more food and bulk for her to match the capabilities of either a normal man or woman. Quite likely the reason why we have two genders in the first place instead of being hermaphrodites; a specialized male and specialized female will typically out-compete a hermaphrodite that’s trying to fill both biological niches at the same time. Especially in places and times where “needs more food” wasn’t a minor concern.
Theiyr’re is you’re problem
