Anything you can do ... I may or may not be able to do better

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Abby Wambach, from ESPN The Magazine's 2012 Body Issue.

Just wait. The moralizing character of this introductory note will be succeeded by a serious discussion of the merits of hypothetical men striking hypothetical women.  

Note: it’s never okay to abuse those weaker than you, person-to-person or in groups. Work hard, leverage strength, celebrate genius, never think a charitable thought in your life (which maybe impossible1) but don’t cruelly exploit the disprivileged or disadvantaged: mental, physical or social 2.

Sports and other controlled competitive arenas may be the exceptions. During the Olympics global audiences gather to watch the triumph and complete physical and psychological destruction, objectification and commodification of both men and women of all colors and sizes, who ego bruise and in-play abuse one another and are judged as competitors and as men and women, by separate standards.

Olympic competitors accomplish feats comparable in outlandishness to asking us normal people to liquefy nitrogen from the air to use as fuel for DIY rockets to the moon. Half of these athletes (of all people) are women and in the case of Olympians, women who would kick our normal ass.

It's easy to look to boxing for evidence. These women hit for a living and in 2012, in the games for the first time, are bringing more than everything they have to the fight - but let’s go to the runners first. We’ve all seen Lolo Jones and Jessica Ennis’ stomachs because track outfits seem to be getting smaller and smaller, regardless, you’d break your hand on that iron. If you, Norm or Norma Normal, crossed U.S. goalkeeper and divisive social media figure Hope Solo she’d stare you down, you’d wet yourself and she’d probably tweet photos. The women of the Olympic Gymnastics team may be 90 lb teenagers but they’re lightning-quick and could critically bruise you before you got near their tiny frames. And unless you’re an NFL lineman like lifter Holley Mangold’s brother, she or teammate Sarah Robles would, flatly, pulverize you3. Picking a fight with any of these athletes would be utterly boneheaded masochism once removed but one shouldn’t be prohibited from doing so based on gender, genetic typicality or primary or secondary sexual characteristics.

Fortunately, Olympic athletes (probably) don’t want to fight you. Who knows what they want? Outside of something heavy around their necks. Maybe they want shiny hair? In an ad endorsing Pantene, swimmer Natalie Coughlin attests: “I want to win as an athlete and shine as a woman.” Or, maybe they want to be good parents, get their kids to eat healthy yogurt, like Lashinda Demus. It’s fair to say these folks want to be judged in competition and out without prejudice, based on their personal merits and flaws.

Olympians deserve this, so do normal people.

When we’re able to consider objectifying, idolizing or slugging people without bias, it’ll be a convincing indicator we’ve overcome the sexually and gender motivated prejudices that are among the most widespread and persistent of our species.

Imagine you’re watching a movie…

It’s jazz age America. Three fellas are out for a cruise with one insufferable dame. They’re exasperated. She’s loose, tight (drunk), abrasive and aggressively imbecilic. Her utterances are unbearable to the other characters and viewer alike. The guys clench their jaws, roll their eyes and visibly redden. She exits the car. Grunts and gender-based insults ping through the cab and whip through the air as the men drive away. It’s as painful to listen as the noise from her drunken lips.

Replay the scene with four men, one of them as drunken and repellent as the woman was previously. At the end of this second car ride one of the three sober passengers turns and punches the offending man in the teeth. He sees stars and hears chirping birds. And then, smiles. Laughter. All around. They (and the viewers) are comfortable with it. With this punishment delivered, everybody’s friends again. The punch is the refresh button. Just the possibility of physical release reduces tensions in the car. But with the female passenger that potential is absent. The refresh button is missing from the keyboard. If you haven’t known the cruel injustice of typing with an absent key, you don’t want to.

For the most part in this country we’ve accorded at least nominal mental equality to individuals without reference to biology: sex, race, physical ability/disability, etc. It’s unlikely, illegal and unpopular for an individual to be denied access to a field because of what he or she is perceived to be.

Our physical biases seem to be stickier. For good reasons. But our unequal and sometimes bizarre notions about what men and women can and should physically do - like which skulls can bash which others into walls - are prejudicial and unfair 4. There's a lot of interesting cultural baggage carried in our opinions about who can hit whom. In general, men hitting men is brutish, immature and normal and female on female violence is largely ignored, except in choreographed sexual pantomime on film, to varying effect. Rationally not hitting women because of what they are is as absurd a practice as beating them because they’re women. So why don’t we? Why don’t men hit women?

Because it’s wrong. With innocent, effortless righteousness we feel it to be barbaric and immoral. The problem is that rote convictions like this don't necessarily or often serve our best interests. 

Human culture has done a lot to make things difficult between the sexes but nature has certainly helped. Among the species on this planet that have evolved to reproduce sexually, with few mammalian exceptions, the group we call male is physically more powerful than ditto the female. Explanations for this can be contentious even when narrowed to the phenotypes of our own species. Most research on the subject (sexual dimorphism) features the idea that competition for mates over time has favored bigger, stronger males, with footnotes referring to physical environment and social behavior, namely offspring care.

It’s a fine theory, if incomplete. Actually, it’s closer to what physicists call an effective theory, meaning: experimentally and anecdotally verifiable, within a restricted range of parameters. Adjacent and opposing explanations clutter the field and going over them would be a huge expense of energy. Better to look carefully at the big picture. Here’s what we know:

-        Our planet’s solution for terrestrial vertebrate life is one of infinite possibilities.

-        Having two sexes is advantageous and common because in a dynamic, frequently hostile world, allowing two organisms to combine DNA increases genetic diversity and the speed with which useful traits can proliferate.

-        Perpetuation of the species and the family relies on sexual intercourse.

-        Hormones drive the reproductive instinct; hormones are potent but temperamental and nature doubles up in a variety of complex chemical and physical ways.

-        Sexually reproducing species gestate their young.

-        Depending on environment gestation along with fundamental survival needs results in morphological and behavioral divergence between the sexes.

-        In the case of human beings both sexes have developed consciousness and conscience.

Here’s the point:

As complicated as biological systems are, theoretically, there isn’t anything intrinsic to the struggle to survive and thrive that obliges the group with the testes to be strong, aggressive and dominant and the group with the ovaries to be weaker, protective and submissive. The tendency to see a reality mandate in observed conditions and draw boxes around categories that are exaggerated in common opinions, forms the backdrop for our judgments and biases. Gifted with consciousness, we can either content ourselves with partial truths or attempt to see the boundaries of the beliefs that confine us.

Men run faster, jump higher and punch harder – and it’s a damn shame.

In a sybaritic fantasy, one can imagine the history that led to absurd and repressive gender roles never taking place or fading into the abyss of nonexistence, as inane and unreal to the humans of this fantasy world as another history would be to us. In a world like this there’d be no need for feminism. We wouldn’t be forced to waste time teaching tolerance, litigating sexual harassment lawsuits, campaigning for suffrage, marriage and property rights, or learning to objectify men and women equally – tedious, time consuming activities, the lot. We’d be free to hit (or hopefully not hit) anyone we like!

It would be simple to rest in pieces at the phenotypic differences between men and women, to contend something like: as one group has a physical advantage over the other, there will always be inequality. But that’s hollow and lazy and downright un-American. We don’t rest on assumptions, we challenge, we innovate, we integrate and we try for better futures. Go USA.

It would also be easy – accepting that the range of physiques displayed during the Olympics expose and negate ideas about standard male and female bodies and abilities – to advocate simply for the evaluation of the hitability of a person purely relativistically, on a case-by-case basis.

It’s not enough to rationalize during a hypothetical friendly (or not) bar tussle that it’s okay to hit that particular woman because she’s a professional boxer. We should try to ask ourselves: why, categorically, we didn’t think it was okay to do so in the first place5 and refine our understanding by not relying on received ideas. 

There are some annals of our history we should be proud of, stories we should celebrate often and at top voice, and others we can use as cautionary tales. Part of American culture is an unmitigated respect for individual freedom – even in our combative political present. If we respect this freedom, we have an obligation to evolve our understanding of the beliefs that may limit it.

It's a great challenge living in a time and place with a storied support for personal liberty and responsibility. It’s also great that some of our very different looking men and women kick ass at a lot of sports.

A caption taken from the NBC Olympics home page on August 2^nd read: “Americans reminded the world they were America by being all American.” Translation: individual Americans remind the American people as a group of their shared values by displaying those values fully. No one benefits from the emotional castration of boys and girls who don’t fit into traditional definitions of males and females. It's equally harmful pigeonhole or prejudge professional athletes who look a certain way or play a particular sport.

As a younger, heterogeneous, democratic nation this commitment to allowing individuality to flourish and the shared, hopeful notion that all obstacles are surmountable, that all deleterious beliefs reversible, is something woven into our identity. An awareness of our diverse sameness as a species can be a strength in creating a better environment for individuals and groups of people.

Still of Betty Hutton and Howard Keel singing "Anything You Can Do" from MGM's 1950 film Annie Get Your Gun. For full video, click here.

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1 Maybe impossible, but where’s the made-for-TV movie? Proposed title: An Uncharitable Mind.

2 Ancillary note: without advocating violence of any kind, if we must aggress, we must be open to expressing equal malice toward all.

3 Weightlifting is actually a great microcosphere this whole phenomenon. A weightlifter can be 5’2” 120lbs or 5’10 300lbs.

4 If you are one who’s fairness assessments are include only relevant body metrics and abilities, bless you – wait, do you exist?

5 Remembering that violence is deplorable. Wink.