Are women now better than men? The Frailty Myth, pt. 1

I was originally an anthropology major with a sociology minor. As a consequence of that training, I have read an awful lot of papers on how minorities are treated, and so I genuinely thought I understood what it meant to be a(n often feared or hated) minority. However — as I discovered when I read S. Andrew Swann’s Forests of the Night — I was in actuality breathtakingly ignorant on the subject. As the book demonstrated, science fiction has a way of holding up a mirror to reality and thereby enabling us to see more clearly.

Similarly, I have often wondered why both women and men buy so thoroughly into the social construction which unequivocally states that men are stronger than women. Actual empirical data proves this is not so — so why does this myth maintain its powerful hold in society? It was when I read Barbara Hambly’s fifth “Benjamin January” mystery, Die Upon A Kiss, that I suddenly understood what was going on.

There is a scene where Ben — a tall, strong free man of color in New Orleans in the early 1800s — is faced with a drunkenly aggressive, knife-wielding white man in a dark alley late at night. Reading it, I expected Ben would easily triumph over such an impaired combatant — and then Hambly laid out Ben’s reasoning. Ben knew he couldn’t beat the white man: not because he wasn’t capable of it, but because the cultural scripts of the time would not permit him to do so. The culture taught the oppressive whites (including this one) that black men were either slaves at heart — cowardly, weak, and ineffectual — or they were dangerous, raving beasts that had to be put down as swiftly as possible. Ben had to somehow distract the white man, then fade back out of sight until the drunk forgot him — because if he’d done the logical thing and simply disarmed the drunk, the outrage against a black man who refused to follow the social “rules” would be widespread and bloody retaliation against any convenient black male scapegoat.

That’s why oppressive social myths remain in place: they are presented as a Truth that “everybody knows.” Even if there are numerous examples of the falsity of the myth, they are never collected together, since that would weaken the myth’s hold. Instead these examples are deliberately ignored, or misrepresented, or mocked, or presented as freakish accidents. Further, those who openly defy such myths often receive (or bring down on others of their minority) furious and sometimes bloody retribution until the status quo is restored.

I thought of this often while reading Collette Dowling’s The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality. True, I’d heard much of what she writes about before — but never before had it all been collected into one place, so that the myth of women’s weakness, which “everybody knows,” couldn’t misrepresent or ignore or obscure the examples. The collected examples were all right there, with none of the ordinary cultural qualifiers of beating around the bush to obscure the bluntly empirical data proving that:

[t]he myth of women’s frailty has been so systematically entrenched that it could fairly be called a hoax… a conscious deceit… driven by men’s repressed wish to preserve dominion. To make the myth viable, society constructed elaborate ways of keeping women cut off from their strength; of turning them into physical victims and teaching them that victimhood was all they could aspire to. (6)

There’s lots of historical references for the social support of this myth, of course: the solemn medical warnings against overly active women damaging their ability to bear children (16), the pathologizing of pregnancy and menstruation (17), the unacknowledged racism as well as sexism (22), the artificial conceptions of gendered sport (28)… and this misogynistic nonsense still takes its toll on women and girls, damaging them and unjustly lessening them. I found myself wincing in sympathy as the author described a girl getting dressed for school in the morning, struggling incessantly with what to wear, unutterably miserable on how to wear it, “all in an effort to create some relationship between what she sees in the mirror and what she sees in her mind — then you know that something profound and terrible is going on: your daughter is fighting for her psychic integrity” (120).

I was bleakly amused — though unsurprised — to read as well that recent research shows that routine exercise actually helps prevent pregnancy-related issues (37), helps regulates the menstrual process (40), and practically halves the risk of death past the age of 60 (220). Startlingly, modern studies are also showing some amazing things about men’s physicality. For example, it appears it’s not women’s, but rather men’s reproductive capabilities which may be damaged by physical exertion (215). Endocrinology advances are also demonstrating that androgen (or testosterone) “enhances spatial ability in women but inhibits it in men” (215), while women’s estrogen “buffers them against muscle soreness after exercise… [which] may help explain why women can endure longer exercise sessions than men” (214). Interestingly, men higher in estrogen (the despised “woman’s hormone”) are also being shown to have sturdier bones (215).

Unfortunately even if they do not recognize it, men frequently disdain what is considered female. For example, cheerleading was initially an all-male sport “considered too rambunctious for females” until women did it anyway — at which point men dropped out and it “became ‘naturally’ female” (28). This cultural dismissiveness is horribly insidious — to the point that women or people of color who are taking tests on subjects at which they excel will do poorly if reminded of their gender or race! This tragic reaction is called “stereotype threat” (53): remind someone that they are part of a strongly culturally disdained group, and they will non-consciously limit themselves.

This is particularly egregious in childhood, since studies demonstrate that “[m]otor development… stimulates cognitive development” (58). In a nutshell: if you aren’t encouraged to enjoy yourself with vigorous exercise as a child, your brain doesn’t develop as much as it could, and you are likely to not be as smart as you could have been (82). Not only that, your bones do not develop completely, which means you’re at a higher risk for fractures and osteoporosis later on in your life (80). Even more dramatically, studies show that girls who participate in competitive sports in high school also have better grades, more self-respect, higher educational aspirations, and are less self-destructive (77). Why on earth wouldn’t we want that for all our children, instead of just boys?

Not just encouragement, but also training is a big part of this too. We’ve likely all heard or stated the mocking yell, “You throw like a girl!” The strange part is, everyone throws that way before they are trained to throw with more power — but have you ever heard anyone laughingly say, “You throw like an untrained kid!” rather than sneering at girls? Think about how most dads react, too: they usually just laugh when their little girls throw like a girl, but they wince when their little boys do so — and then they spend the hours practicing and teaching the boy to throw more strongly. Why don’t they do that for their little girls as well? This isn’t biological determinism, for heavens’ sake — it’s just teaching a kid how to throw a ball! This sort of gender-based expectations and preferential treatment isn’t just stupid — it’s bad for the kids. We should know better by now.

Actually, it appears expectations are another huge part of this (86): if you expect to do poorly at a sport because you’ve been told all your life that you’re not good or strong or smart enough — that you simply can’t — then frequently that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Encouragingly, however, the reverse is true too: children who believe in themselves tend to have a very good idea of what they’re capable of. As an example of this, I loved the following quote from a study mentioned in the book: “If prepubescent girls are physiologically capable and data from several studies have found no significant differences between boys’ and girls’ performances on fitness test items, then why are American fitness test standards noticeably different for boys and girls of the same age?” (88; italics theirs).