Fear of Equality

    While checking my varied news-feeds again, I came upon a supposedly-neutral discussion board where people were arguing over the question of trans-gender athletes.  I soon noticed that the contributors divided up pretty neatly into two categories: those who claimed that ingesting enough female hormones would make a male athlete just as weak as a female, and those who claimed that male mammals -- including humans -- are always naturally bigger and stronger and faster than females.  This piqued my interest, because I remembered that the fastest racehorse in history was a Thoroughbred mare -- female -- named Winning Brew, who ran the mile at 44 MPH.  She's generally considered the fastest, even though Quarter Horses have been clocked at 55 MPH, because Quarter Horses -- as the name implies -- race at top speed for only a quarter of a mile.  Winning Brew could maintain that speed for a full mile. 

    I've never seen any evolutionary advantage for females to be smaller, weaker, or slower than their male counterparts.  This is particularly true of mammals, among whom the females have to protect not only themselves but their young.  In fact, there's very little sexual dimorphism among mammals -- and what little there is mostly concerns hair growth;  lions have thick manes and tail-tufts, while lionesses don't.  Among bears and tigers, which are solitary carnivores, there's even less difference;  one usually tells a male tiger or bear from a female by shooting it first and then examining the safely-dead body.  Among hyenas the females are usually bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than the males.  Among reindeer, it's the females who keep their antlers well after the mating-season;  Santa's sled-team are all does.  As for the primates, among Troglodyte chimpanzees the males are bigger, stronger, and fiercer than the females;  among Bonobo chimps it's just the opposite.

    That got me to thinking about the studies in a remarkable book called "The Dominant Ses", by Mathilde and Matthias Vaerting.  It was published almost a century ago, when a lot of the indigenous societies it mentioned still existed, and it should have been an anthropological blockbuster;  unfortunately, it was published in Germany at just the wrong time politically -- and was suppressed for almost 100 years afterward.  Even today, it's devilishly hard to get your hands on a complete copy.  What the book proposed was that whether a society is male-dominant or female-dominant, the characteristics of the dominant sex were always pretty much the same -- even unto physical characteristics.  While nobody, including the archeologists, has ever found a society in which the females were larger and stronger than the males, there have been several in which the sexes were of the same size and strength.  This shows that, humans being social animals, culture -- the way a society thinks -- can have a remarkable effect on the expression of the genes and the physical development.

    So, considering all that, I proposed an experiment.  Let's gather a breeding-population of at least 1000 healthy and fertile adults, and pledge them to raise their male and female children exactly alike -- same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress and expectations -- for at least two generations, and better it be six.  Then we can compare the size, strength, and speed of both sexes and see just what is truly natural to the sexes and just what is the result of cultural attitudes.  I proposed this to that discussion forum and waited to see what responses I got.

    Well, the results were surprising to say the least.  I was accused of being a fascist/communist for "forcing" people to raise children according to an "ideology" -- even though I'd simply asked for volunteers.  I found it interesting that those who insisted that raising children according to an ideology was eeeeeevil had no objections to raising their children within the rules of particular religions, and what's a religion if not an ideology?  I also noticed that those who wanted children raised "naturally" were also quite willing to help children identify as the sex they weren't "assigned at birth", by applying puberty-blockers and gender-reassignment surgery.  One thing they all agreed on is that it's either impossible or eeeeevil to raise children in complete gender equality, because that would mean "forcing" them all to be exactly identical, which would make them soulless clones.  

    Phew!  Where do people get the idea that "equal" means "identical"?  That's a flat lie, and I can prove it with simple mathematics:  2 + 2 = 3 + 1.  The two sides of that equation are equal, but they're not identical.

    All I can make out of this squabble is that an awful lot of people are actually afraid of equality.  They can't seem to see equality as like the starting-gate at the racetrack, where all the horses start from the same spot at the same instant, and it's only during the race itself that they sort themselves out according to speed.  

    Or perhaps it's exactly that real-life sorting out that they fear.  Only the first three horses in a race place "in the money";  the rest are also-rans.  Could it be that a lot of our intellectuals today fear that, in a pure meritocracy, they would be also-rans?  Is that why they're so afraid of meritocracy, and of equality -- of the fair starting-gate?  Is it because they secretly fear that they're born losers?  That's a pretty poor excuse for hating equality!

    Meanwhile, I still offer my experiment for consideration.  Is anyone interested?

--Leslie <;)))><