At Republic 454a-457c Plato has Socrates make the case that given equal training the very best women will outperform almost all men, so they should be afforded guardian status. The key point is the distinction between means and distributions. The "average man" may very well be stronger than the "average woman," but averages are abstractions; we only meet concrete men and women, and the best women will be better than all but a few of the men.
We see this principle instantiated in Olympic weightlifting, one of the sports that has most caught my eye this year. While the men's competitors lift more than the women (when adjusted for body weight, of course), the women's competitors can lift more than all but a tiny slice of the male population. This discrepancy in performance provokes lots of gender anxiety among men; witness the cries of "she looks like a bloke" that were sent the UK lifter Zoe Smith's way (Feminist Philosophers post here; other relevant links here and here).
Many things are of interest here. One is that women weightlifters don't "look like blokes"; they look like weightlifters, as do men weightlifters. As I argue here, the demands of the sport produce the characteristic body of top athletes in that sport. It's only because men have dominated elite sport for so long that we think of an athletic body as masculine. But it's not; it's just athletic.
Here's where Spinoza comes in.
Another point of interest is that the discrepancy between "ordinary" men and women at comparable levels of training is much less that between an ordinary man and an Olympic male weightlifter. Why should I have any identification with this guy?
He might as well be from Mars in comparison to my athletic endeavors. What he can lift -- and in particular the fact that he lifts more than the best Olympic women -- doesn't predict what I can lift relative to any particular woman, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm not totally outclassed by the lifts of women Olympic lifters.
Finally, a note about gender performance / self-presentation. Here are the women's gold and silver medalists at 75 kg. Note the feminized presentation of the winner and the butch presentation of the runner-up. (I'm using "butch" because that's what she's presenting rather than a straightforward "masculine" appearance.) For more on gender performance / self-presentation in sports, see here for an introductory piece (please send links to other discussions!), and the links here to Jordan-Young et al's discussion of the Caster Semenya case, where we could say she was punished for her non-feminine muscle poses rather than for her musculature itself, which is comparable to other Olympic female 800 runners such as Maria Mutola and Kelly Holmes.
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