Sixteen Volts

A few years back the Canadian female hockey player Hayley Wickenheiser got great publicity for playing in the Finnish ice hockey league as a woman, since this was a great victory for feminism and proved that women can be just as strong and fast as men. In reality, as a general rule, in pretty much every physical sport the best female athletes in the world can compete in the level of the best 16-year-old boys, and have no business whatsoever actually going against best male athletes. Of course, this doesn't seem to affect feminists, who still claim that everything is just social construction and if boys and girls were raised exactly alike, they would grow up to be equally strong and men and women would compete together in all sports.

For some reason, none of these news articles ever seemed to show Hayley in action. Now, I am not a hockey or any sports fan by any means (I can barely tell when the Olympics are on), but I immediately smelled a rat there. The news articles and other writings used the words "professional hockey league", which turned out to be the third division of Finnish hockey. I once saw maybe ten seconds of a game on this level on TV, and even I could see that it looked just pretty sad, like the typical women's hockey on TV. It is no wonder why the news articles praising Hayley "forgot" to show her in action.

Many things turn out to be quite funny when you actually get to see them. For example, consider the concept of "fat and fit", much touted by fat acceptors out there as some kind of proof that morbid obesity is actually harmless. Now, if you are really willing to work for it for years with extreme discipline, it is theoretically possible to be "fat and fit" in a very real sense, as the professional sumo wrestlers in Japan prove every day. But what do the American donut-swillers really mean when they use this term? For the answer, see this hilarious CNN report about a woman who is supposedly "fat and fit" and "runs circles around the fat bashers".

I literally fell down laughing when I saw that report. The report begins by telling us that the woman depicted in it kept gaining weight and then decided not to diet. Then this SUH starts lecturing us that fitness is not really what we think it is, like triathlon and such, but being "active, active at any size". (For some reason, I was reminded about that episode of Coupling where Jane goes on to explain that for her, "vegetarianism" is about accepting things, including meat.) The report then goes on to show this woman in action. Her "fitness" consists of the ability to lift teeny tiny weights up and down with her arms, and then, oh my goodness, she is also able to lift her leg up and down. Imagine that! To my best estimate, she is perhaps at the fitness level of a typical six-year-old girl. And even that is a very generous estimate.

This is an even funnier example about how mentally ill the fat acceptance community is than that world's fattest guy who got angry at the suggestion that he has ever eaten more than the average person. Truly a keeper. The Danimal aptly commented on this video:

Fat Acceptance propaganda could never have originated with men. While men have certainly concocted their share of nonsense---see every religion---men generally restrict their nonsense to varieties that aren't immediately and obviously falsifiable.

It also helps that most men either participated in sports as boys or had many male peers who did. In competitive sports there are objective criteria of fitness, and in most of the popular sports, excess bodyfat is a handicap. Anyone who has trained for any sport which involves lifting the body against gravity (jumping, running, gymnastics, cycling up hills, etc.) has repeatedly seen the obvious correlation between leanness and competitive performance.

Many women, on the other hand, avoided much involvement in competitive sports when they were girls, and had more opportunity to associate with peers who were similarly uninterested in sports. Thus many women reached adulthood without forming the same empirical understanding of what "fitness" is, leaving them free to invent nonsense definitions.

There aren't many sports in which competitors get better by becoming fatter, let alone morbidly obese. This is also true of life in general.

I am gradually starting to understand why Vox Day thinks of feminist women the way he does. If the fat acceptors ever get their Fatopia, I wonder what will happen when a fire breaks out and the "fat and fit" firemen actually have to come to the rescue.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 12:45 PM