I don’t think this tells us much about the world outside of prison.
The thing that comes to mind is the question “Is there an advantage that men and women are [read: in men and women being] physically different, and what is the downside to making them more the same [read: alike]?”
Probably because it was such an obviously bad idea I read it earlier and though you were being sarcastic. If men are made weaker, then society across the board is worse off, as the half the population becomes worse at most every physical task. Making females stronger would be better for society, not worse.
On a different note, even if females were genetically as large as men, they still wouldn’t be as big in actuality because society’s physical standards expect men to be big and strong and females to petite and feminine. You can see this to some extent in current body ideals, although there is still the fact that men choose to build muscle because it’s substantially easier for them to do so than it is for females. But society’s paragons of men and women aren’t artificial–they’re based on innate desires for traits that correspond to healthiness and other factors. In other words, even if you give females the same potential strength, you’d still see have stronger men on average. Changing this would require some ethically grey genetic engineering (as if what’s being proposed isn’t already terrible enough) to change what the sexes find desirable in each other.
I just love the way that feminism is so unswervingly committed to equality and fairness.
Yep, that is the best thing about it!
Something flew right over the head here.
Unless you think that men in general are rapists, then yes it tells you a lot since the difference between the men inside and outside of prison is that there’s more criminals in prison, and no access to women. Most men out of prison don’t rape because they aren’t rapists; how much strength a woman has is irrelevant.
Well, one could argue that the proposal wasn’t “true feminism.”
(Who put this damned milk in my haggis?)
IIRC your suggestion was to make all the males 25% smaller (on average) than females; am I remembering the earlier parts of this thread right? (Not gonna go re-read it all right now.)
If we don’t concomitantly change the instinctive (?) or cultural (?) behavior of the females, then the human race will diminish and tend toward extinction, due to the widespread and entrenched reluctance of females to consort with males smaller than themselves.
I do not believe that is necessarily so. Women don’t carry the domination gene (testosterone) that men do. That is why 90% of violent crime is attributed to them not because they are bigger.
The great equalizer for women is a gun. Every time the make a gun restriction crime goes up. In Los Angeles, California, rape is up 7% over last year. But that’s not all! Violent crime is up over 7.6%… and aggravated assault is up 20%.
All of the increases in crime come right on the heels of the L.A. City Council banning high-capacity magazines in the city limits.
…and then nice Ms Policewoman would be putting you in handcuffs and giving you a trip to the grey bar hotel if I was the man. First time I could get near a phone there’d be a report. Keeping me from a phone would make it an even more serious crime. PPO’s are a great way to end relationships - “It’s not me, it’s you…the judge said so.”
It is an interesting post from the perspective of how the change would affect domestic violence rates perspective if size changed. I will grant you that.
Sure, most men aren’t rapists, but if we greatly improved the strength of women, it would be a lot harder for the actual rapists to commit rape, and many fewer women would be “easy targets”.
I wouldn’t think this is particularly controversial – if we genetically engineered all women so they had gorilla strength and bear claws, they would be much, much harder to rape. If we got rid of the bear claws and just jacked up their strength to male levels, they would still be harder to rape than they are now.
You are assuming that equal mass = equal strength, which may not be the case. A woman of the same weight as a man tends to have a higher percentage of her body mass as fat. A 170 pound woman is still generally weaker than a 170 pound man.
Men would have to be smaller than women overall - not necessarily 25% smaller as Ulfreida posits, but perhaps 10-15% on average for them to be of equal strength.
If you are assuming same size, same strength levels, same weight, then women’s fat levels will have to be reduced and then it will be harder to sustain a pregnancy, especially in the Third World (assuming this change will be worldwide).
Regards,
Shodan
For the purposes of my OP, I’m fine with cheating on the math. Maybe the engineered muscle fibers are stronger, maybe we make the women larger, whatever. I’m not particularly interested in the biology, because this is a sci-fi scenario – I’m interested in societal and cultural implications. So just accept that, for the purposes of the hypothetical, women are roughly as large and strong and men, while otherwise having the same characteristics and capabilities as before.
I think the point was simply that the idea that if the rapist and victim are more evenly matched, we’d see less rape, simply isn’t true as evidenced by the high rate of male-male rape in prison.
Also, it isn’t my understanding that rape victims tend to be smaller women on average, or rapists tend to be big men, on average. I did however, read a study that women who fight back tend not to get raped, as opposed to women who offer no resistance-- when I was a teenager, the common wisdom was that women shouldn’t fight, because it was better to get raped and live, then be killed fighting back; this study (IIRC, by the Kinsey institute sometime in the late 1980s), demonstrated that this was wrong, and it was wrong even if the rapist has a weapon.
So, the victim (or, victim-intended) doesn’t have to fight back and win, she just has to offer enough resistance to be too much trouble to be worth the effort. Now, I don’t want that to sound like I’m saying that if a women doesn’t fight back, or does, and gets raped anyway, it’s her fault. I’m talking about statistics. Some women will fight back and still get raped, and other women will be taken off guard, or things will escalate so quickly, there won’t be time to fight, or she’ll be drunk, or at a loss as to what to do, and decide that in her particular situation, not offering resistance is her best choice.
FWIW, another study I read (back in college, so I don’t have an online cite) said that very few women in the US have the upper body strength they potentially could have, while the same is not true for men. Girls are discouraged from playing sports, and from lifting and carrying things that would develop upper body strength; a lot of older women who break a hip don’t have the upper body strength for the rehab, and end up permanently disabled. On the flip side, when women take strength training, that includes weight lifting and other upper body muscle-building, they make progress very quickly-- much more quickly than men, because the first several months are basically remediation.
So a lot of what the OP is after could be accomplished just by maximizing the potential women already have, that isn’t being exploited.
One complication is that many or most women prefer male partners who are physically stronger than them, and the reverse applies to men.
Some of this is undoubtedly cultural, but it’s likely that a lot isn’t.
If it isn’t cultural, what is it?
Instinctive.
Since women have historically been weaker and less aggressive, there’s a selection in favor of women who seek out strong men as protectors.
There might be something similar for men, in which men who sought out weaker women would have been able to keep them longer and pass on more genes.
Or whatever. The above is just a bunch of speculative jive, of course. But most widespread cultural tendencies of this sort ultimately derive from some inherent mindset, which expresses itself in the culture, which then in turn reinforces it.
I’m not wary of men because they’re bigger, I’m wary of men because they’re socialized to believe they have the right to my body. Behavior, not size, is what sets off my alarms. If anything, I fear very large men less than average or small men. Very large men are often socialized to be self aware of their bodies and they act in subtle ways to minimize their intimidating behaviors in most situations. (Plus years of working with bouncers and security guys have taught me that most really big guys have never actually been in a fight, and aren’t really sure what they would do if someone called their bluff.)
For what it’s worth, my rapist was about my size. Sample of 1.
Thank you for posting. Do you think, aside from size, differences in physical strength have anything to do with the fear, or the subject in general?