r/HonestHotTakes • u/Equivalent-Long-3383 • 10h ago
The average person sees men as being more capable, but doesn’t connect that view to misogyny
They’ll say “men and women are equals with equal capabilities, except men have considerable physical advantages”
And then turn around and claim that that’s not the same thing as thinking men are superior
But think about it. If two things are equal, except one is better in a broad area, then those two things aren’t equal.
You will never overcome patriarchy and misogyny with this view intact.
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u/Plastic_Sea_1094 10h ago
Hammers are better at banging nails in. Therefore they are superior to screwdrivers.
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u/Equivalent-Long-3383 10h ago
That’s not analogous
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
I think they’re making a point that, while hammers are objectively better as banging nails in, it’s irrational to say that they are better at something else with different abilities. (Men are stronger than women but that doesn’t make them better all-around)
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u/thealt3001 10h ago
Name three things that women are better than men at, and don't say something dumb like giving birth.
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
Kay
- faster at long distance running
- better flexibility
- Stronger immune system
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u/thealt3001 5h ago
Debatable. Men are faster than women in most distance runs. I guess you could say women have the potential for higher endurance because they have less muscle mass and require less oxygen but that's highly individual. Also debatable since the majority of women (in the US) are obese. So I guess this is another one that has to do with potential. Sure, I'll give you that last one.
But how do any of these things benefit society?
Most women will never live up to that potential either. Most men are better at every physical task.
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u/MustachioedBean 5h ago
I mean…in what way does marginally extra strength help society? It’s a personal skill just like flexibility. Also ~40% of Americans are obese, not just women, so why shouldn’t I flip that on your argument and say that most men won’t live up to most of their strength capabilities?
The sexes have some natural inclinations to certain skills, but, in many ways, skills are shared cross-sex. Men nor women are going to “think better” or “be better” as a blanket statement. You can’t compare the two, really.
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u/thealt3001 4h ago
Extra strength? Literally most aspects necessary to building society??? Every blue collar job. First response. Police. Firefighting. Hunting. Providing food. Protection. Construction. You make it. You've clearly never worked a job that isn't behind a desk from that response.
You could, but obese men will still be magnitudes stronger than women who aren't obese so it's a moot point.
Yet that's what we're doing here. My claim is that men are better at nearly all tasks.
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u/Kwaku-Anansi 9h ago
Longevity, pain management, flexibility, endurance, metabolic efficiency, dexterity, etc.
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u/Plastic_Sea_1094 10h ago
Hammers are better at some things. Screwdrivers are better at other things.
I choose to only pay attention to the single aspect of hammering things in, therefore hammers are considered superior
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u/Equivalent-Long-3383 10h ago edited 10h ago
That makes sense. I get what you’re saying
I agree. We don’t highlight women’s advantages enough and so people come away with the impression I laid out in the op.
I would fully expect that if you set up 2 communities, one led by and primarily composed of women, and one led by and primarily composed of men, then the former community will more often than not be living under drastically better conditions
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u/OverallSpecific5792 10h ago
So you believe women are superior
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u/Kwaku-Anansi 9h ago
I choose to only pay attention to the single aspect of hammering things in, therefore hammers are considered superior
Regardless of whether or not their statement is accurate, you are falling into the same tendency
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u/OverallSpecific5792 9h ago
No I’m just extrapolating based on the last paragraph there where she believes a society of only women would be better off than a society of only men
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u/FinnAgain12 10h ago
This seems like a really wild thing to have a definitive stance on with no evidence
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u/ScarletMenaceOrange 10h ago
And what if people would value hammers more, as people can choose what they value over others, and are not bound to some cosmic truth where all things would be equal and some things can just do some things better than others?
Isn't that how people create all reality, just decide that X is better than Y without care if it makes truly sense? And if you question this, then you question also if any human belief truly holds any value?
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u/thealt3001 10h ago
It's really not a proper analogy op. I'm with you. A better analogy would be saying an adjustable wrench is better than a fixed wrench because it's better at the vast majority of tasks.
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago edited 10h ago
Fun fact:
Men, due to testosterone, are scientifically, on average, stronger than women. They have higher muscle mass, aerobic capacity, and bone density.
Women, however, have a tendency to outperform men in terms of endurance. They can work for longer and more consistently. They also have better temperature regulation (which helps with the endurance thing), more flexibility, a stronger immune system, and better pain tolerance/sensory abilities.
The subtle sexism doesn’t lie in admitting that men are stronger pound for pound, it lies in saying that and then refusing to acknowledge where women surpass them.
Edit: evidently, women do not have higher pain tolerance on all axis (I’ve been myth-ed and fooled!), but they do experience pain differently (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1526590023006077) which is interesting. There’s also a whole rabbit whole of sensory processing differences between the sexes
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u/katiecakes03 9h ago
I feel like you’re just falling into the trap again of arguing which sexes are better at things, when the point is random metrics like strength don’t suggest we aren’t equal in value as human beings, or that women are inferior.
You don’t have more inherent value than someone else because you can lift a big thing. I do get your comment tho and it’s really interesting
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u/MustachioedBean 9h ago
I mean, either sex has incomparable advantages from the other, but being good at something doesn’t and shouldn’t impact your worth as a person. I didn’t intend to imply that at all
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u/katiecakes03 9h ago
No I know! I totally understand your comment but idk it’s just something I thought about whilst reading the comments. I feel this ‘debate’ always gets bugged down in arguing about the things that weren’t supposed to be the point to begin with😭
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u/MustachioedBean 9h ago
Oh, okay! Fair enough
Perhaps I should have specified: we have different skills, so it’s useless to determine worth based on any given skill because people are diverse on purpose, lol. It just irks me that soooooo many people know that men have stronger strength as a baseline but don’t know that women excel in other ways.
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u/Schantsinger 10h ago
Men and women are roughly equal in ultra-endurance.
Better pain tolerance is also false, men have way higher pain tolerance unless we're talking about a very specific type of pain (ab cramps) that women have to endure and get used to.
Better flexibility and immune systems is true, as well as better fine motor skills, colour discrimination and a couple of other things.
On average of course. The best women in any field destroy average men, and vice versa.
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
Oof! Thanks for pointing that out; I’ve been mythed!
Though, women do have a higher endurance in incredibly long distances (>195 mi) which is really interesting (https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/cwyzx1gxwqlo). They’ve got better fatigue management and a couple other things, so the other advantages (aerobic, muscles) start to even out as women’s kick in.
And yes, an expert guy would beat an average woman and an expert woman would beat an average guy in pretty much anything.
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u/Schantsinger 8h ago
Every world record is held by a man.
Men's Record vs Women's Record
50 km - 2:38:43 - 2:59:54
100 km - 6:05:35 - 6:33:11
100 miles - 10:51:39 - 12:42:40
6 hours - 98.496 km - 85.712 km
12 hours - 177.410 km - 153.600 km
24 hours - 319.614 km - 278.621 km
48 hours - 485.099 km - 436.371 km
6 days - 1,045.519 km - 928.577 km
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u/WarningFree8742 8h ago
Men also tend to have a slightly different shape to their bell curves for basically all trades. You have more extremely tall men and more extremely short men. So you will tend to have both more men who are extremely talented or physically suited for a specific task, and more men who are extremely poor at or physically ill-suited for a task
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u/Equivalent-Long-3383 10h ago
I think men would look at that comparison and still conclude that the men are better. They’d even cite Olympic records and world records and shit.
But I think women are clearly operating with better brains. They may not have the same level of athleticism. But they far exceed men’s mental capabilities. They have a stronger higher baseline and more consistently contribute to communal wellbeing overall.
I think we sleep on women’s advantages
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
I think we just have to admit that one of the great benefits of a species with (mainly) 2 sexes is that we evolved with 2 different skill sets that assist best in 2 different situations.
Men have better 3D object comprehension, non-landmark-oriented navigation, short-term/working memory, spatial memory, and physical coordination.
Women have better verbal abilities, pattern recognition, fine motor-abilities, and emotional intelligence/self-regulation.
Both of these things are valuable. The big gross bit is when we ignore one (usually women’s) in favor of the other.
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u/bluecgrove 9h ago
"clearly"
The only thing clear here is that you have quite the bias against men.
We are different... evolved that way... and through that evolution we have specialized bodies for different tasks. By that nature... there will be tasks women are suited for better than men and vice versa.
It really isn't deeper than that and your "hot take" can only be a hot take for a bunch of degens online as a person with an iota of common sense would know this already.
Of course, you are probably just a nefarious bot posting to cause division in the west.
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u/Specialist_Taro8087 10h ago
Why do we not see any women in the top 100 chess players? I have a bit of anecdotal experience in this realm, I've played and placed in multiple games while placing in the top 0.1% of players and never once seen or played against a woman once in my 30 year long career or tournament gaming. Do you have an explanation as to why I have never seen a women in my field?
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
Well, chess is old enough to have established itself as an activity when it would be improper for women to act in such a cognitively challenging competition. So, only men played, and the stigma of chess being a “male only” activity has remained. It’s hard to be a woman in a male-dominated activity like that, and it dissuades many from participating.
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u/Specialist_Taro8087 9h ago
I feel like this is a copout explanation, surely we would see outliers in other games. I have never once faced off or seen a woman in the top tiers of games I have played and participated in 30 years.
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u/MustachioedBean 9h ago
I don’t know what to tell you. Men have better spatial navigation, but that’s only a mild advantage. Other than that, nothing but “it’s not a space with many women, so new women aren’t encouraged to be there” is all that comes to mind.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax195 10h ago
We sleep on woman’s advantages because they are boring. Everything you listed just states that women are much more compliant than men.
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u/FinnAgain12 10h ago
Come on now, what are we doing?
Men obviously have considerable physical advantages. That doesn't make men superior, because having considerable physical advantages doesn't make you superior. Yes, in a general sense, men and women are not equally strong. Is this a problem? This really isn't difficult to parse, you don't have to deny biological reality.
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u/Kwaku-Anansi 10h ago
But saying someone has an advantage doesn't mean you think they are inherently superior.
Someone who believes
"men typically have more testosterone than women and people with more testosterone can grow more muscle mass and have greater bone density than women"
isn't saying "men are superior to women" any more than someone who believes
"wealthy people have more money than working class people, and money carries the capacity for better educational opportunities, the chance to fund improved quality of living, decreased stress from financial uncertainty, and more ease in spreading those benefits the people around them"
is saying "rich people are superior to poor people" or someone who believes
"brown people typically have more melanin than pale people and people with more melanin have additional protection to harmful UV rays and delayed aging caused by sun exposure"
is saying "POC are superior to white people"
Not unless you think muscle mass is the value of a human being, in which case you are also admitting any other man who is stronger than you is also your superior.
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u/katiecakes03 10h ago
I agree with you but in conversations of gender equality strength is always brought up. It’d be like mentioning an arbitrary thing women excel in everytime this topic came up. Like “Yes we are equal but women are often more flexible btw”. It would be dumb
The point is it’s one of those things that’s always emphasised even though it doesn’t say anything about your value as a human being
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u/KingAggressive1498 10h ago
I actually agree with the title, but not so much your example.
The way this actually manifests is subtle and would usually fall under "benevolent sexism" - like employers are less likely to give women the type of arduous/risky/exacting work that propels mens' careers, women not being seen as threats even when behaving aggressively, people are more likely to step in when someone is accosting a woman, things of that nature.
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u/alone_sheep 8h ago
Stop thinking everyone is equal!!!! We aren't equal. We should all be given equal treatment under the law. But as a society we should not treat people as litterally equal when they are obviously not.
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u/Revolutionary_Lynx_3 10h ago
That's why men are used as the bodies for the war machine? and the blue collar workers that build your house?
Biology has nothing to do with social superiority, it entirely depends on how it is used, and I doubt people would say it's misogynistic that women aren't the ones carrying the fridge on moving day.
If it only becomes a problem to you when men can feel good about themselves in one particular area, that's more telling about you than men.
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u/Ornery_Tank_2782 10h ago
You must deny basic biology or else you’re a misogynist. What are your opinions when people claim women handle their emotions better than men? Or when women are far superior in raising and chairing for children? Or when people claim women handle pain so much better than men? Those are even harder to back scientifically than the fact men are physically stronger than women….
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
It’s not misogynistic to admit that men are stronger, but it is misogynistic to boast about all the ways men have biological advantages and then refuse to mention all the ways women have biological advantages or pretend like men’s somehow are superior to women’s, despite both skills usually filling different niches.
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u/Ornery_Tank_2782 10h ago
Ah yes. Let’s move the goal post from the original comment to justify our feelings…. The claim was that “They’ll say “men and women are equals with equal capabilities, except men have considerable physical advantages”
And then turn around and claim that that’s not the same thing as thinking men are superior”
Nothing is mentioned about any other claims than just saying men have considerable physical advantages.
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u/MustachioedBean 10h ago
The OP was poorly worded at best and malinforming at worst, but I do think it makes a good point given that the baseline statement that men have considerable advantages is a useless one.
Men have some physical advantages. So do women. Saying one and not the other is usually a red flag
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u/Ornery_Tank_2782 9h ago
Ah so you must know what the poster ment more than they did. Got it.
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u/MustachioedBean 9h ago
🤷 it’s worded in such a way that the intended meaning is very obfuscated, but I do typically try to ascertain intent from the things I read, yes.
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u/yourhair_lookssmall 10h ago
As well as always listing reasons why women are actually "inferior" that don't even have a scientific basis like "being emotional". We all have the same emotions ffs
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u/Schantsinger 10h ago
Emotional regulation being more difficult during the (late) luteal phase is absolutely based in science and reality.
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u/yourhair_lookssmall 10h ago
In a healthy woman, the symptoms associated with PMS, or the emotional regulation issue in the luteal phase you're talking about, is generally mild and not debilitating. A woman that experiences severe and debilitating mood swings and emotional dysregulation actually has another issue, PMDD. Also, these don't make someone inherently more emotional overall as it's an outlying response to hormonal fluctuation and doesn't mean the person will act irrationally.
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u/OverallSpecific5792 10h ago
That’s a lot of words but most men have dealt with women on a close and intimate basis, we know there’s times that they are completely unreasonable and we just have to keep our heads down and weather the storm because it will be over soon
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u/yourhair_lookssmall 8h ago
And most women have experiences where they felt they were treated like they were being dramatic for concerns they had. Or not being listened to, we know a lot of men just placate and that's the problem, we want a partner that views us as an equal and doesn't dismiss our problems because they haven't personally experienced them. We know you see us as unreasonable and irrational.
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u/OverallSpecific5792 8h ago
Well, in my life so far I’ve had like 8 long term relationships and I think only one of em wasn’t prone to being unreasonable and irrational. Men can be dismissive and ignore serious concerns and that’s a problem but I think the answer, especially where relationships are concerned, is that both sides have to acknowledge their flaws and natural tendencies and work towards seeing each other as partners. If one side does nothing to acknowledge their shortcomings then they run amok and ruin things with their antics and leave the other scrambling trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong or now they have to handle everything because the other person has rendered themselves incapable.
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u/Schantsinger 8h ago
And then follicular phase starts and they apologise for making drama over nothing and life is wonderful again.
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u/Kariya_shigatoki 10h ago
Being emotional is more due to neuroticism
But I think men are both more emotional and more likely to be apathetic. As men generally make up the extremes in variability but for most people they should be about the average.
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u/FiveFrogs_ 9h ago
Men and women are different. It is not tied to any "view" but to having met Men and women.
Seeing people as equal, doesn't mean you have to pretend they're exactly the same or deny biology.
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u/Partyatmyplace13 8h ago
When we say men and women are "equal" we mean within the law and socially.
Inferiority and superiority are relative statements on a specific measuring scale. By your own logic, its just as apt to say that saying men can't have babies is misandrist. There are some biological truths that you just can't arbitrate around.
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u/Purple-Blueberry3721 5h ago
You have to prioritize actual reality over left-wing values. Otherwise you're getting nowhere.
Denying that men are stronger than women is just delusion.
Reality doesn't vanish just because you label it as misogyny.
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u/No_Spot_6459 10h ago
Men being more capable is not tied to mysogyny it is tied to facts and observations.
You'll never see a womam equally capable of doing anything physically demanding or dangerous. So we can instantly surmise that we are not equal. And that's okay.
Stop focusing on how something makes you feel and instead focus on how true it is.
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u/Proof_Equivalent_986 10h ago
when we talk about equality, we’re not saying they’re the exact same thing, we’re saying they are equal in value.
men are physically stronger than women, but that doesn’t mean they are more valuable than women, or that they are superior to women.