Physicality and the Female Body

Physicality and the Female Body

Systematic physiological differences between women and men has been a popular topic over the ages. In my own time, there are certain platitudes that I’ve heard thrown around about women as a population, such as women having inferior upper body strength and greater flexibility than men. I have not heard a clear and satisfactory account of what this claim and others like it really mean when you break them down. For example, this particular statement could be interpreted as the claim: “The average woman with no athletic training has inferior upper body strength and superior flexibility compared to the average athletically untrained man.” That sounds reasonable, but then what would we mean by “average woman” and “average man”? Any average is defined relative to a sample of data. Do we really have enough data to say anything meaningful about the average physical capabilities or potential of women and men around the world? And what about measuring these physical attributes over the entire set of situations people care about — strength to carry groceries, or flexibility to bend down and reach things, and on and on? The key question I start exploring in this post is the following: Even if we did have enough data, how useful would it be?

I suspect that if we had more accurate information about physical capabilities or potential for women and men, that would probably be very useful at the level of societal decision making, but not all that useful at the level of individual decision making. This is a common tension when it comes to adapting statistical information to different purposes. In this domain, imagine if we better understood the mechanics of the female body during a car crash. We would probably discover that the female body simply behaves differently than the male body in the same situation. After all, the sexes do have statistically different physical properties, such as centres of mass. Moreover, we might find that if we subjected the male body to a vehicle design that’s optimal for the female body, we could expect men to die more often than women from car accidents. [Pointed aside: Should we then conclude that men are more fragile than women in all situations?! No. So what should we not conclude about women?!] We would hopefully then feel compelled to design vehicles that are equally safe for all sexes.

[Aside: We actually know very little about how the female body responds to car crash impacts! We know that women die at significantly higher rates from car crashes than men. Instead of blaming this on “female fragility”, we should be doing more research and designing universally safer cars. For more on this and many other data asymmetries, see the excellent book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women).]

This post is now about to get a lot more personal, to illustrate the second aspect of my main hypothesis, which is that you, as an individual, knowing general statistical facts about the physical characteristics of the sexes doesn’t necessarily help you live a healthier or happier life. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it’s true that we have adequately measured the global population to say with a certain level of statistical confidence (e.g. 95%), that the set of all women measured is more flexible and has less upper body strength than the set of all men measured. Or maybe we eventually characterize peak attainable physical performance between the sexes along various dimensions and find that women score higher along some and men score higher along others. Okay, cool. Now what do I, Julia Gibson, do with those fragments of statistical knowledge? If I’m not very self-aware or questioning, then maybe I don’t even try to do a particular physical activity, such as attempt a pull up, because I overgeneralize from a statistical fact and assume that such a thing would not only be more difficult for me to learn than it would be for a man (which is also an overgeneralization!), but would actually be impossible. Then I would never even get the partial strength gains of training and trying and failing. Those gains could have been useful in other areas of my life! Hello self-fulfilling prophecy. Hello sadness.

As an individual, I strive to not limit myself when what is known or even knowable has very little to say about what my limits are. This is basically all the time, in all situations. I am definitely not limitless, that’s for sure. Neither is my potential; life is finite. But finding out what my limits actually are isn’t a very tractable problem at either the practical or epistemological levels.

So, in my day to day, my strategy when it comes to uncertainty about the sexes is to do my best to disregard every message resembling “You can’t do X because you’re a woman.”, or the also-insidious “You’ll have a harder time doing Y because you’re a woman.” Because whether or not it’s true, acting as though it’s true does not make me healthier or happier. I can do a set of 10 pull ups. I couldn’t always! I trained until I could do one. Then two, etc. I climb harder grades than most of the dudes I see in the rock gym. And I’ve seen other women do far more difficult things than me — one-handed pull ups, muscle-ups, and all sorts of other super impressive upper-body feats. I’ve also seen men who are wildly flexible — far more so than me! What I see most, however, is people of both sexes who don’t put in any effort to train their bodies, and I wonder how much enjoyment of life is lost because of that. I’m especially concerned for other women who don’t experience the benefits of physical activity, arguably because they’re not expected to be very physically competent or trainable, whereas men are. From there, learned helplessness and a progressive cycle of reinforcing weakness can set in quickly. More avoidable sadness.

Coda: For any women reading who are concerned about how becoming stronger might affect your physical appearance, please consider choosing your strength and vitality over some popularized ideal of how women should look. If you’re afraid that you will “bulk up” by lifting weights, I’m talking to you!! Also, below are some photos of yours truly. I don’t claim to be every straight male’s type, but I’m not so repulsive that I don’t get that kind of attention, either. You have to work so very, very hard in a very specific way and eat so very, very carefully to bulk up with muscle in a way we think of as masculine nowadays. My life is so much richer and more varied, energized, and joyful now that I’ve been dedicated to building fitness and strength for several years. I started small and patiently grew that seed.