There is a genre of online video and social media post that is revealing of our time. In one such video, an online fitness influencer posts herself crying in her car outside the gym. The words accompanying the tears: “Just saw a teenage boy (who’s just been taught how to bench for the first time) start repping a weight that took me 2 years to hit as a PR.”
In a similar message board post, a female caddy realizes that the male caddy her age is so much stronger than her.
On the flip side of the same coin, one poster describes the moment when his top-tier athlete girlfriend, after six months of dating, told him to stop going gentle on her while wrestling. He promptly finished her off with no sweat. Twice. She was shocked and dismayed, in his telling.
If any of the dozens of such posts are legitimate, rather than pure clickbait, it tells us two things about our culture: We are both very civilized and very dumb.
The West, particularly the United States, has very strong norms against men being violent with women. This isn’t true in every culture, but in 21st-century U.S., a man who assaults a woman is seen as a scumbag. Our major professional sports punish domestic violence as harshly as they punish anything.
One result of this cultural virtue is that most women make it to adulthood without ever learning firsthand what male violence feels like.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that feminism, transgender ideology, and a broader blank-slate, hyper-individualistic anthropology have made us really dumb.
National Public Radio a couple of years ago declared that there is “limited research” into “whether transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over other female competitors….”
Champions of transgender ideology often claim that girls can match up with boys fine, they just have to show their boss-girl fierceness.
A teacher in Madison, WI, who uses the pronouns she/they/him, offers advice to females who are required to play basketball against males who pretend to be girls:
“Get in their faces” and “throw up your hands” because you just “gotta box them out!”@Riley_Gaines_ pic.twitter.com/cdZiaBlvxV
— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) March 7, 2025
So where does this insane belief system come from? How did so many Americans come to believe that an above-average female could hang with an average male?
One culprit, of course, is our school system that tries to deny any natural differences between the sexes.
But another problem might be our action movies. Mission Impossible, X-Men, and Kill Bill all feature awesome fight scenes where svelte and flexible women kick bad-guy bruisers in the face and win the fight.
WE NEED MORE BABIES AND LIBERALS CAN’T HANDLE IT
Like Ethan Hunt fighting a man on a biplane or Wolverine’s super-healing, the bad-ass-woman-fighters are fantasy — but somehow some of the younger audience didn’t realize it.
This fantasy isn’t harmless, and let’s hope it is dispelled fairly quickly.