Memo to Netflix: Women Cannot Beat Up Men

The trope is getting old.

I have to pack for a trip, so I am just going to do a short post today, on a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

By now, we’ve all seen movies and TV shows with 100-pound women regularly beating up 200-pound men. Depending on the type and frequency of your entertainment consumption, you’ve seen this dozens of times or more over the last 25 years.

In the real world, for all intents and purposes, this is not possible. The average women is weaker than 499 out of 500 average men. Even a relatively weak guy is stronger than nearly all women.

It’s not the patriarchy—it’s just biology.

It was perfectly fine when, for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer offered an actual explanation for why this teensy tiny girl was able to defeat giant men in hand-to-hand combat. Her ability was supernatural/preternatural. There was a reason.

(As info: I was an extra on a couple of episodes of Buffy and at one point I was standing right next to Sarah Michelle Gellar. She is really small.)

Eventually, however, TV shows gave up offering any sort of reasonable explanations for why women were beating up men with such frequency and thoroughness. We were just supposed to accept that the hero(ine) of any story could just do that. Just because.

Sometimes shows will throw us a bone and indicate that she has had some fight training, and that’s the reason why she can toss men twice her size around like rag dolls. Whereupon they have her doing that to men who also have plenty of training.

It’s just silly.

This subject came up on another show on which I worked for four seasons as an extra and stand-in. I just happened to mention that men are generally stronger than women in front of my boss (one of the assistant directors). She was definitely a strong woman, mentally and physically, and I admired her for both. She would run up and down the sound-stage stairs (a long flight!) 25 times at lunch. She was impressive in many ways.

When she heard me say this, she said something along the lines of “No way” and put her arm up on the table in the let’s arm-wrestle pose. So I went over, took her hand, and beat her in three seconds.

I am not a particularly strong dude. I am tall, so I have some length of muscle, but I am also very thin (I have difficulty gaining weight, in fact). There were a lot of body-builder guys on that set, and I would certainly have had difficulty beating them in a fight. But that was not true of a single woman there. Not even the athletic ones. Not because I am especially strong, but because men are just stronger than women in general. It takes an extremely frail man not to be.

I actually enjoyed the female action-hero genre for a while (Buffy, Xena, etc.) back in the day. It was fun and refreshing. But then they just took it too far and made it dumb.

And it also has infected people’s thinking. After a quarter century of this trope, people have gotten it into their heads that it is reality.

Indeed, the subject came up at a party recently and when I said the truth, a woman emphatically said, “Oh, I don’t know,” as if there is some question as to the veracity of the notion that men are generally stronger than women.

There isn’t. Netflix and other entertainment to the contrary notwithstanding.

Let’s use soccer as a means to demonstrate the point.

My high school had a tradition: the 9th-grade boys soccer team played the varsity girls every year at homecoming. And beat them every time, going back into the mists of school history.

In my year, the 9th-grade boys team was terrible. I don’t remember our record, but it was bad. Two wins and eight losses? Something like that. But when we played the girls varsity, we were suddenly awesome. I never spent so much time down near the opposing goal. I myself (not a great player) narrowly missed a head-in goal, and we basically ran circles around them for the whole game.

Not only were we younger, but we were also terrible, and yet we still beat the varsity girls easily. Because that’s the way it is.

There have been far more extreme demonstrations of this in recent years, so I will conclude with those. In the first video, the best female players in the world get crushed by 15 year old boys. In the second, the best lose to a bunch of retired dudes.

We will call this a #FreedomShorts post. It’s a reminder to set yourself free from the delusions of Netflix and the rest of the entertainment world.

Nature and Nature’s God made the sexes different. Not better or worse, just different. We serve different purposes in life. Men are better at some things, women are better at others. Vive la difference.