If you have a young daughter, here’s some advice. Drive to a remote location and leave her in the woods for a few weeks. She could emerge as the next Olympic athlete — and smoke LeBron James in basketball.
That’s the thinking behind The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us about the Power of the Female Body, a forthcoming book by Starre Vartan. It argues that women are actually the psychically stronger sex, but that culture brainwashes them to think they are weak.
It’s a nonsense argument that the Left and the media are going to love. Expect to see Vartan on CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
Of course, the argument that women are as strong as men is nonsense. Vartan, a social justice activist, argues that when she was young, the culture force-fed her “the rules about what my soon-to-be-a-woman’s body could and couldn’t do. Those rules came from TV shows, school, and the way-above-grade-level pulpy horror books I read. I was told not only how weak I was—and all females were—but also that if I defied those social norms, I would be a weirdo. I was a girl, so I was less strong in all the ways—but especially physically.”
However, “my own body taught me something different. I learned other, contradictory lessons when I listened to my muscles. As an only child I spent hours playing in the woods, dragging and lifting large branches to build forts, shimmying down the steep sides of narrow gorges, and piloting my bike at top speed over bumpy roots. Failure meant dropping a branch on my foot or falling off my bike. I’ve always known exactly how far I can jump, since underestimating my stride meant losing my shoe in sucking swamp mud. I wasn’t taught how to do any of these things.”
Yet even in environments where girls are not taught they are inferior, basic science tells us that men are stronger than women. One obvious reason is testosterone, the hormone produced more abundantly in men, which causes greater muscle mass, bone strength, and spatial ability. Spatial ability is, according to the National Institutes of Health, “the ability to perceive, encode, store, retrieve, transform and integrate spatial information drawn from two- or three-dimensional space.” As another NIH study put it, “a male advantage over females for spatial tasks has been well documented in both humans and rodents,” and testosterone is the reason.
Not so fast, writes Vartan: “Recent research has determined that much of the sex difference in spatial ability is likely attributable to confidence—which comes from experience. When both sexes were given time to practice a novel task (moving an object in space), they got better at it, and testing ability evened out.”
Vartan argues that puberty is the prime time in a young person’s life for developing strength and athletic ability. Because girls usually start puberty earlier than boys, they don’t develop strength and athleticism at the same rate as boys. They are also culturally conditioned to be different: “From the earliest ages, boys and girls are taught different games and how to move their bodies in space differently. While this variance can be mitigated by family in the early years, cultural messages and expectations can quickly undo what is taught at home.”
Ridiculous. I recently wrote in the Washington Examiner about how sports were encouraged in my family growing up playing in the Catholic Youth Organization. The girl’s sports teams — and this was in the 1970s — were often more popular than the boys, especially my sister’s basketball team, which had a great coach. The CYO would eventually inspire the great WNBA player Caitlin Clark. The girls and boys in the Catholic schools were both equally encouraged to play sports.
VERMONT IS AT WAR WITH A CHRISTIAN SCHOOL OVER TRANSGENDER ATHLETES
However, there was simply no denying that the boys were stronger, more powerful, and faster than the girls and that puberty greatly widened the gap. In The Stronger Sex, Vartan actually claims that a woman can learn to swing a sledgehammer with the same force as a man — that she can “triple the amount of force (measured in the test by a machine) simply by modifying her swing.” This is dangerous demagoguery that can lead to injury.
With the rise of men invading women’s spaces and sports in recent years, it’s not an easy time to be a female athlete. The Stronger Sex will make it even tougher.