Our thanks to Martin for a piece in the International Business Times four days ago, Women-only climbing clubs take participation to new heights. Written by a female journalist – what are the chances? – it’s firmly set within the ‘women are as strong as men!’ genre. Extracts:
She [J4MB: Wing-Sum Wong, didn’t Benny Hill do a sketch about someone with a similar name?] is hoping for a better understanding of equality [J4MB emphasis] between male and female climbers: the 34-year-old frequently finds herself as the only woman in the training area.
“Quite often I will come into the training area and train and I get told ‘Oh, you’re really strong’ and that’s great, it’s a compliment, but at the same time it’s almost like it’s not expected of me to be strong,” Wong says.
“It’s an unconscious bias that people have adopted through being part of a society [where there’s] the expectation that women aren’t strong and they’re very surprised when a woman is strong,” she adds. [J4MB: Hmm, might that ‘unconscious bias’ be linked to her comment that she frequently finds herself as the only woman in the training area… so CONSCIOUS bias would be perfectly reasonable?]…
“Some of the best female climbers can outclimb male climbers [J4MB: the worst ones?] on the competition circuit,” says Wong. “We just have to take a different approach to climbing something because we’re different sizes, different heights, but we get there. We all get there.”
A string of female achievements in climbing has followed the sport being included in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games for the first time. World bouldering champion Shauna Coxsey, [J4MB: you wouldn’t know from the article, but there are men’s and women’s events, including bouldering – here] who recently confirmed her bid to compete at the Tokyo games, received an MBE in the Queen’s 90th birthday honours in 2016. [J4MB: Jenni Murray and three-times winner of our Lying Feminist of the Month award, Caroline Criado-Perez, received OBEs, your point would be…?]
And in October, Austrian climber Angela Eiter became the first woman to complete one of the world’s hardest climbs, the La Planta de Shiva near Malaga, Spain. [J4MB: She’s a strong climber for a woman, we get it. But why the relentless pretence that women’s sporting prowess comes anywhere near men’s? The emotional neediness is off the scale.]
Justice for Men & Boys 
As an ’empathic’ male I can see that it must be hard for women to assert that they’re as good as any man, and then have to accept that the best they can ever achieve is the first woman to do … what hundreds, or thousands, or millions of men have done before them.
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Yes, and I say that too, as a man who has never achieved any kind of historical “first” and doesn’t claim the achievements of my gender makes me as an individual superior in any way; but then I’ve never felt the need to prove to myself that “men are better/as good as women” (to flip things on their head here).
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…and that’s women’s inferiority complex in a nutshell.
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Quote:
….But why the relentless pretence that women’s sporting prowess comes anywhere near men’s? The emotional neediness is off the scale.]….”
I know Mike’s question is retorical because I know, HE knows the answer!
But not everyone will so I beg your indulgence in allowing me repeat it again.
It’s because women (in particular, although not only) suffer from the
‘The Three i’s’ –
Inadequacy
Insecurity
Inferiority
These in turn lead to ‘The Three r’s’
Rancour
Resentment
and
Revenge
They know it’s men who have built the modern world, and it’s men who maintain it.
This is because it is the Male that is the ‘Engine of Evolution’ – without whom, etc. etc.etc.
(The price of being male BTW, is often death, which takes the shine off the job description somewhat)
In reality, this is nothing to be miffed about – women have their own essential place in the scheme of things – and without whom, etc.etc.etc.
Hence the generalised truism “woman is, man does”.
Sounds like a good recipe for happiness and sucess to me.
Or was, until feminism and it’s ‘Provo’ and deeply political wing, feMarxism, recognised the failure of the original Economic Marxism and became the main driver of the pursuit of absolute power, which is it’s aim.
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Keep repeating it Slowcoach, the three i’s and the three r’s is a brilliant distillation of the source of misandry.
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There is a long history of “plucky” women taking part in all sorts of sports and activities. Particularly when in reality few men or women had the leisure for such things. This long history includes the fact that few women choose to do these things. In a sense the ideas on which sex may be better at something is irrelevant if the small numbers involved simply reflects who is interested in doing it.
As you say its seems to be an emotional issue that women in any activity or indeed job find it really difficult if there aren’t lots of women around. Constantly, as in this case, we are told that the adventurous individual women finds it hard to be in a male group. The really odd bit is that they then blame the men, rather than those women that choose not to turn up! Really if they wanted to feel more “at home” then they should either be in all women cubs or learn how to be happier in male company. Because in so many fields, from the female “jockies” of the eighteenth century, women have been involved in a small way but this has always been a small group. The challenge is how these women persuade substantial numbers of women to join them. Being “as good as men” isn’t going to do it for more than a few.
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The relentless whinging about small annoyances like compliments she doesn’t like is a sure sign that even if more women were persuaded to join (hopefully not, as enough social spaces for men have been colonised by women and taken over to suit their worldviews and needs in modern society – one thinks of Tinder for example, the app that was supposed to be about “zipless fuck” hook ups and is now lecturing its male users about courting women properly ffs), she still wouldn’t fit in. But we men frequently have to pay the price of female insecurity these days.
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Big yawn.. Most women I’ve come across in life have been climbers – of the social variety.
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“It’s an unconscious bias that people have adopted through being part of a society [where there’s] the expectation that women aren’t strong and they’re very surprised when a woman is strong,” she adds.”
There’s nothing unconscious about it, biologically women just aren’t as strong as men. I could cite evidence from the military or whatever, but really, why bother. Google it and you’ll find millions of examples. Can’t an individual woman be in better form and therefore stronger than a man? Sure, I wouldn’t want to wrestle an Olympic female climber myself; but if women are so strong, how come they are always being raped by the evil patriarchy that feminism constantly warns us off?
One of the earliest things that used to drive me crazy about feminism was its ability to spout off contradictory ideas about shite (“women are stronger than men, teach men not to rape!”) without blinking. These days though, I know that’s only scratching the surface of the crazy.
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