I dare the manosphere to mock Tolkien! “Hobbits are stupid and should be erased from Lord of the Rings because they’re too weak to build things, so obviously they’d have actually all starved to death or something.” Hobbits are way too woke to keep. Sad face.

If you think that’s silly, just try this actual thing I heard at Debatecon 6 this month: women are too weak to build things, so without men, obviously, they’d have actually all starved to death or something. That’s almost verbatim, argued with frenzied vigor and lunchtable desperation. It’s so illogical a position I had to reevaluate committed sexists altogether. Are they sexists because they can’t reason their way out of a paper bag? (Even if it was made by a woman? Which would be hard to find because, also, women can’t invent things.)

Let’s see.

The Setup

This all started in that conference’s debate over whether feminism is good or bad. “Bad” was vigorously defended by Rachel Wilson, Andrew Wilson’s wife. “Good” was quite ably defended by British military veteran Craig McNeill. (For my own debates there, and impressions of the conference generally, see yesterday’s post.) I won’t parse the entire debate. It was pretty dumb and unserious, and definitely void of real intellection on the antifeminist side. More emotional appeals and howler assertions than anything. McNeill did as well as anyone could under that wave of WTF. But one exchange I really thought super-weird, yet ruffled the audience so much I think more than one question was asked about it, it even became a mini-debate over lunch: the claim that woman need men because if you got rid of all the men, women could not sustain civilization. I’ve heard something close to this before, but never so balls-out.

I’ve heard the version that this is because women are stupid, but I assume Wilson knew she’d get so soundly fact-pwned on that one it would hurt her brand (as well as being an own-goal: “Here I am, too stupid to argue anything, arguing a thing”). And I’ve heard the version that this is because women aren’t strong enough to fight bears or build huts (see A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology and Comes Up with the Manospheric Hooker Theory of History, in particular his initial conceits). But Wilson took it to the next level, declaring that women should have fewer rights because they can do fewer things, and men are more important because they are stronger and better warriors, and so women need them to build and defend civilization, and therefore women owe them shit (in particular, sex, housework, a pregnancy-wrecked body, and the vote—even though it was women’s indispensable contributions to war that secured them the vote).

I am not exaggerating much here. But the weirder thing is how this devolved at points into arguing things like only men can mine metals or work oil rigs. McNeill took the sensible position that there are plenty of women who can do those things, and many in fact already do. Wilson scoffed in disbelief but ended up under pressure admitting, okay, some women, but that doesn’t undo her argument. At which McNeill reminded her that it does. Even if only 10% of women can do a thing, that earns them the right to do it, by Wilson’s own logic. So they should not be barred from such industries and professions. Wilson lost here. She sort of changed the subject to women being needed to save the human race by making more babies, which appealed to the audience, but I think even she realized that wasn’t a very rational sell. This came up in my debate with her husband: Great Replacement Theory is not that defensible; nor is “we need babies, so we have to ban women from only a few arbitrarily-defined jobs” all that logical. It’s a loser argument.

But what interests me here is the “women aren’t strong enough to build and maintain a civilization” line, because the audience could not let that one go. They were so desperate for her to be right they would make up anything on the spot to rebut every fact refuting it. I’ll relate an example shortly. But in the process of all this it was posited that if all the men disappeared, women could not sustain civilization. But that’s not true even reproductively, much less physically or intellectually. If we suppose (as was posited) that all men disappeared—maybe some virus prevents any fetus from becoming a man (so half the population now had CAIS and the other half were enwombed ciswomen, and somehow no cure were ever possible for this state of affairs)—there is already more than enough banked sperm to clone indefinitely. So we’d just maintain population with IVF. But that wasn’t the argument. Nor was it “women are too stupid to build and maintain a civilization.” The argument everyone was obsessed with was “women are too physically weak to build and maintain a civilization.”

And they were bewildered when every example they tried defending that with was refuted in two seconds. Yet they would not give up. Like Luke Skywalker clinging to a pipe screaming “that’s impossible!”

The Problem

Here is how one such conversation went over lunch (paraphrased):

ME: Even men don’t really build things. They use machines. So can women. The strength required for that is average at best. Think, cranes and lifts.

THEM: But when the machines break, what then? They have heavy parts!

ME: You just use a smaller hand hoist to move the parts.

THEM: But when the hand hoist breaks, what then? They have heavy parts!

ME: I have worked with countless hand hoists. Not a one had any part an average fit woman could not easily lift.

THEM: Well, but, to make those parts requires heavy lifting, like in smelting and stuff.

ME: No, there it’s all machines again.

THEM: But what if all the machines break?

ME: Has that ever happened?

THEM: …

ME: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

THEM: But what if it did??

ME: Well. Same thing the men would do. You weld-up a manual hoist from scratch, which any woman can do. Then use that to fix one crane. Then use that crane to fix the next crane …

THEM: Well, what about mining the metals to make these machines? That requires strength. Women can’t do that.

ME: Lucy Lawless did. Lots of women do. And that’s because it’s all machines again. You don’t actually have to be super strong to operate mining machinery. Again, cranes, drills, diggers.

THEM: I don’t believe that. Surely it’s just too hard for many women to do that.

ME: Look it up.

The example that came up in the debate was “oil rig workers,” the audience scoffed and mocked the idea that women could do that when McNeill said they did. The audience literally didn’t believe it. They are so delusionally out of touch with reality (and so emotionally resistant to facts) that they cannot even believe that 5% of actual roughnecks are women (almost twice ten years ago, and rising). Many more women work on rigs as engineers and staff. And men in the industry take all of them seriously. It’s just people out of touch with what’s actually happening on oil rigs who don’t, because they’ve replaced reality with fantasies in their heads that it’s all a muscly Village People video with constant peck-rippling grunting all day long. When really, it’s all machines again. It’s true that any worksite is going to use the resources available, so extra strong men will be assigned to do extra strong things as needed, and many things will be built that way. But all those things could be done anyway: women half as strong just need to double up or use force multipliers. Indeed if we were all half our size, so would our machines and couplings and parts be. We make things as big as strongbacks can handle. But we don’t have to.

And though all of this was immediately obvious to me, that’s possibly because, like McNeill (citing his own experience), I worked with women in the military and saw them in literally every role, but I suspect, really, because I know how to think. I am not emotionally committed to a delusion about women being too weak to do things, so I am actually looking for whether it’s true that they couldn’t (because I know the only way to verify a claim is to try in earnest to prove it false and fail), rather than scrambling to dig up reasons from my imagination to maintain that they couldn’t. That’s what conservatives do. The rest of us ask, “Wait, is that even true?” The obvious test is to simply go and look (are women working as miners and roughnecks?). But you shouldn’t even have to. Because any application of basic intelligence and even rudimentary experience should get you immediately to, “Wait, whenever I couldn’t lift things, I used a machine, or doubled up with someone else, or made the thing I need to move smaller—so it’s actually logically impossible for women to be too weak to do anything men do.”

The real revelation here is why doesn’t that occur to them? Of course I always wondered, why doesn’t it occur to them to check? But the inability to even think their own way out of this paper bag is the most astonishing thing to me. It’s simply obviously false. Checking just confirms the obvious. So why don’t they immediately see this themselves? Alas, it’s because they are trapped in a delusion: they are so emotionally attached to believing a thing that they don’t even want to think how it might be false (much less “check” so as to find out)—anyone doing that is a threat who must be immediately refuted by the next armchair fantasy, rather than someone blowing your mind into the revelation that your belief was obviously false and just as easily disproved empirically. That’s why when they are finally cajoled or embarrassed into checking the facts, they will make up any excuse to dismiss those facts (the source is fake, you’re reading it wrong, someone is lying, it’s a conspiracy). They have their “own” facts (i.e. their imagination, i.e. the delusion that has thus been safely protected from any intrusion of reality).

Romans, Hobbits, and the Rats of NIMH

The Flynn Effect (globally rising IQs) has been credibly attributed to consumption of fiction (books, television, films). The more you do that, the more you exercise your Abstract Categorical and Hypothetical Reasoning, which is half of what IQ tests measure (the other half is, embarrassingly, just “experience with taking tests,” which is why IQs in people unfamiliar with tests can achieve massive gains just from practicing taking tests, a relatively useless skill, compared to ACHR). So it may be no accident that one reason I saw immediately through this anti-feminist mythology everyone was desperately clinging to was that as a teenager I had read the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (and I mean the novel, not the shitty cartoon that stupidly replaced all the engineering with magic—the novel has no magic). So I had already been taught to conceive of an entire advanced civilization built by … lab rats. Who definitely can’t compete with human men in strength—nor even human women. An average woman could crush them with her bare hands or lift their entire villages and walk off with them. And yet, these rats built and maintained a civilization. And there was nothing implausible about that. Because, obviously, they built things their size.

The rats could leverage up to build ever larger things even because they knew how to make and use machines, and cooperative labor, and smart modular designs. You make bricks of a size easy to lift. You make the components of your manual hoists likewise. You use hoists to make massive cranes. You use the massive cranes to build massive things. No humans even required, much less “men.” The same we must realize of the hobbits in my title. Or even the ancient Romans. The average man’s height then was about the same as the average woman’s today. And men of six feet were as common then as women of six feet now. Modern women could take over the Roman Empire as easily as the Romans did, if they trained up as fit as could be; even more so if they came in with modern guns, tanks, and construction machinery. Women experienced in heavy labor reach their optimum strength potential same as men. If all women did that, the “women can’t do that” fantasy would start looking like weak tea.

Which brings me to one powerful truth that these conservative delusions blind them to: How Gendered Myths of Strength Keep Women Weaker. The more gender equal a society (whether culturally, or only in the assignment of hard labor), the stronger women are. America is actually poor by this metric compared to, say, Sweden or Swaziland. The conservative fantasy rests on a cultural construct that they mistake as biological: the fact that in our sexist culture, we discourage women from perfecting their strength potential—from as early as children, but on up to adulthood, from workplace harassment driving women out of “men’s” industries to sexist pipelining and mythmaking making it easier for women to enter (thus steering them toward) “women’s” industries—and then everything we say and depict and bully and praise to get women to believe they are better if they look soft and girly, which causes a largely disproportionate number of women to end up that way. Ten thousand years ago that wasn’t a thing. The cultural construction of women as soft housekeepers is an invention largely of landholding civilizations, which classified wombs as property and treated them accordingly (again, see Ape and Gyno and Stupid).

This suppresses women even exploiting their advantages over men: while the overlapping bell curve tips toward upper body strength for men, it’s toward endurance for women. This is why women tend to outdo men in endurance running. Which means a civilization built around women rather than men would exploit machines that convert time into lift (the basic function of a pulley or lever). We just happen to have a lot of strong men and an assumption that women won’t be doing what they do, so we design everything accordingly: bigger stuff relying more on brute force than stamina. But machines conquer all that now. Yet like the Rats of NIMH, we could have built everything to work just fine with less brute force: just make parts and things smaller and rely more on machinery that converts time into force.

But even that would be unnecessary. Because anything one man can lift or push or pull, two women can lift or push or pull. “But then, won’t things be less efficient because you need two people to do one thing?” You mean like in the Roman Empire when we didn’t have earth movers, cargo planes, and powered cranes? Obviously things would be fine. That you have to redistribute where you put your labor is just a management issue. It has no effect on being able to build and maintain a civilization. You just build and maintain a civilization designed for you. Whether it’s all women due to a freak pandemic, or hobbits, or tiny intelligent rats. And if it was just women, just as if it were just rats, skyscrapers and things can be smaller and cheaper to build because the people in them are smaller and weigh less. And likewise the parts of everything. And so on.

But more than all that: if women’s culture changed to promote optimizing their strength, the average strength of a woman would become significantly greater than it is today, and correspondingly, far more women could step in to all the jobs men do today. In essence, the fantasy that women are weak is a product of a sexist culture telling us all that they are supposed to be weak, and thus should not spend time becoming strong. Dump the sexist culture, and you lose the sexist effect. And then the 5% of women who are lumberjacks could easily be 10 or 20% or more—and even more with an intelligent adjustment of the tech and procedures to suit women doing all the work: more machines, more suited machines, more doubling up. When you no longer have a resource, you replace it. That’s the entire history of civilization.

The Four-Option Matrix

Aliens across the galaxy will vary wildly in size. They’ll all be within an order of magnitude or two. That’s where the sweet spot is for maintaining structure and circulation: a larger size becomes costlier since every double in height quadruples the cross-sectional area needed for bones and octuples the mass they have to carry, and these scale-ups quickly outrun each other; while sizes too small reduce the ability to have and maintain large enough brains to be intelligent enough to build a civilization (the only actual requirement for that). But that’s still a lot of allowed variation: from rats, to hobbits, to humans, to dinosaurs, to whales. So there can’t be any impossibility of building civilizations due to the correspondingly trivial difference between the strength of human men and women. That’s just ridiculous. There will be whole civilizations out there built by bugs the size of your cat or reptilian giants the size of your house. “Humans could never lift as much as a Reptoid, so clearly they could never build and maintain a civilization” sounds silly for a reason.

Of course then the sexists will wax on about SEAL teams and stuff. But of course, in the hypothetical we were given here, men don’t exist to fight, so women wouldn’t need special forces at that extreme edge of capability. But even now we only have that because we can. We destroy the bodies of men in our special forces by placing outrageous demands on them that aren’t actually necessary for their real-world performance. Plenty of women perform well in special forces roles around the world, while ancient Roman special forces would be comparable to even women line soldiers today—and we have real-world examples, who perform well in modern theaters. And they’d totally crush a whole hobbit or rat army with ease. So the “we can max out men’s strength in combat” is true but evades the question whether we need to or should. Are our standards even necessary to complete missions? The experience of other world militaries tells us the answer is no. As with athletics, even at worst, the best female operator will be as good as the worst male one, who nevertheless obviously met the bar—that’s why he’s there. So why shouldn’t we be using the personnel we have? Leaving resources unused over sexist fantasies is irrational.

But I’m setting that aside and sticking with the thing I’ve been focused on: not the ability to fight, but just build and maintain a civilization, owing to “strength” being somehow a requirement. Women and men are nearly identical in every other way. Battle-wise women can invent mechasuits if they have to fight giant Reptoids or whatever. So that question is moot: Vietnam kicked our ass, and their soldiers were tiny; they simply adapted warfare to their capabilities. So did the Kurdish Women’s Brigades against ISIS.

So let’s stick to just “building civilization.” And let’s assume that even if all men and women optimized their strength and fitness (so their bell curve average would be across the board higher than it is now), the average man for a job can lift (or push or pull or whatever) 200 pounds on his own, while the average women for the job can do 100. This is not realistic. I’m just using numbers easy for the arithmetic. For the Bug People of Alpha Centauri it might be 20Ibs; and the Reptoids of Planet X, 1000 Ibs. So even my imagined disparity is meaningless to the point. The Bugs can build civilizations. And the Reptoids would be delusional if they thought humans couldn’t. So modern sexists might be dumber than Reptoids. But it doesn’t matter. The same proportional schematic follows regardless.

This is what I sketched that weekend in my notes for this blog:

Here I have diagrammed every possible alternative route to generating the same capacity. You could put different numbers here for aliens and hobbits and rats and whatever, and it all comes out the same. So the difference in strength between men and women can never possibly matter. Because it never matters even for rats or hobbits. What you have here are two existing options (the resources we have available now): men, at 200 pounds capacity; and women, at 100 pounds capacity. Yes, plenty of women can outperform that; while most men can’t perform it. So I am exaggerating the existing population disparity in favor of the antifeminists by oversimplifying reality. This is a fantastical representation of population resources. In actual reality we have tons of alternative resources to deal with (stronger women; weaker men), and to cultivate (existing men and women do not on average train to their potential but well under it; if necessary, that would change). But never mind that. Because even in the fantasy the antifeminist eats their words.

• Option I: Eliminate the need. Basically, don’t make anything requiring a 200 Ib. lift. Make it all 100 Ib. lifts or less. In reality we already do this. Most labor is already well under “men’s advantage” and thus women can easily sub-in, and even endure longer (e.g. driving nails, hauling wood and drywall, carrying ladders, laying bricks or shingles; basically everything involved in building a modern tract house). Accordingly, in Asia, a third of the construction workforce is already women. Everywhere else it’s between 5 and 20%. But consider the Rats of NIMH: they don’t need 200 Ib. lifts to build a civilization; they just make everything to their capacity and size, nothing requiring anything they can’t lift.
• Option II: Use machines. A woman can lift more than 200 Ibs. with a mere joystick’s strength. You just need the tech. Which we’ve had since prehistoric (levers, wheels) to classical times (pulleys, cranes). And now in spades. Because powered machinery does pretty much everything now, even for men. Forklifts and cranes are as easily run by women as men. And contrary to fantasy, men don’t walk around with steel girders on their shoulders. Most girders, they can’t (they typically weigh 600–1200 Ibs.); and the rest, they wouldn’t. Lifting small beams weighing 125 Ibs. or more every day wrecks their body and is generally considered a stupid thing to do. They crane that shit. So would a woman. The Rats exploited machines extensively, of a kind they could build using every technique I numbered.
• Option III: Split the work. Any 200 Ib. lift can be broken up into two 100 Ib. lifts and ported that way. Just double the time to effect the same work. This can be done at the design level (just don’t make 200 Ib. panels or bags of sand) and at implementation (carry one 100 Ib. bag of sand and then the other). Obviously, in reality, no one uses 100 Ib. bags of sand: standard bags are 50 Ibs. and thus already Option I. But the point here is that facing a lift twice your capability can often be solved by simply splitting it into two lifts. It’s what the Rats did (splitting lifts into even smaller units than that). And it’s what we almost always do (hence 50 Ib. bags of sand, not 200).
• Option IV: Double up. Any 200 Ibs. can be lifted by two woman supplying 100 Ibs. of lift. This is the most obvious point. Men don’t carry couches on their own. They get a bro to share the load. And, as we all know, quite often (if indeed not most often) that extra “bro” is a woman (their friend, girlfriend, wife, coworker, or relative). There is nothing one man can do that two women couldn’t. Yes, this means you may have to double resources on one task, but we already do that. Couches. And the Rats likewise: they would just make smaller couches, yet double up to carry them just as men do. There is no need of things to require one-party 200 Ib. lifts. If we ever create that need, it’s only because we can, and have the solve: machines or people.

This diagram is complete and iterates. So, for instance, if you want to armchair-resist the point and say, “But you need 200 Ib. lifts to build and fix the machines in Option II,” even when true (it usually isn’t), it’s resolved by the same spread of options: don’t make machines requiring that (smarter use of design); use smaller machines to build and fix bigger machines (smarter use of tech); move smaller parts one at a time (smarter use of time); get two people to move the part (smarter use of cooperation). And if any option becomes unavailable, you always have at least one other. There just is no way to prevent the Hobbits or the Rats of NIMH building and maintaining advanced civilizations; nor, likewise, women.

Conclusion

There are two ways to respond to these facts and observations. You can realize, “Wow, yeah. I was wrong. Women can totally do everything men can, even if they rely more on tech, time, cooperation, or intelligent design than men do.” Or you can be emotionally triggered with fear or rage and scoff and guffaw and try to find some flaw in my reasoning or error in my facts or nitpick irrelevancies. “It’s not 33% women in construction in Asia, it’s 31.9%, so you’re wrong. Ha!” or “It’s only 15% actual line work, the rest admin and engineering. So you’re wrong. Ha!” (or whatever; I just made those numbers up). Neither of which refutes any point I made: still lots of women, still could be more, and by all the intelligent routes I diagrammed—including revamping our sexist culture to encourage rather than discourage doing it and training for it. The same sexist culture you were triggered into defending with these irrational postures.

The difference between a rational person and an irrational one is the moment when you realize you are doing this, are horrified by the fact that you are doing it, and commit in your very soul to not doing it again. You have to want to be a rational person. For real. Not pretend. You have to actually believe it’s vital to always think rationally and avoid and check yourself when you fall back into irrational modes of argument (like straw manning, denying, nitpicking, cherry-picking, mocking, evading). Otherwise all you really want is to believe (and seem) that you are rational, not to actually be rational. And that will then be the difference between us. I cannot help you with that. You have to come to that moment on your own. Until you do, you will never be able to construct a belief system grounded in reality. You will instead forever be trapped in an emotionally reassuring fantasy.

I’ve written a lot about how to escape that fate. See my entire feminism and men’s issues categories for examples, and my entire critical thinking category for lessons in what rational thought actually consists of. But a good place to start is Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases, and then everything said and linked in my Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research. Here, the bottom line is that feminism is the position that has escaped sexist fantasies about what women can or can’t do or are or aren’t good at or are or aren’t best at or destined for, and thus realizes women are people just like men, and can choose their own paths in life just as men can and on the same principles, and are owed the same rights and privileges for all the same reasons. They should not be mistreated or pipelined or cheated because of their sex or gender. Nor also should men, as feminists have been saying for half a century now—contrary to the sexist delusion that they never thought to care about that. Indeed most antifeminist beliefs about feminism are delusionally false, being maintained against contrary facts only on emotion, not reason. And only a commitment to genuinely being reasonable can get you out of that hall of mirrors. Just as many have escaped before.