Hi! What comes to my mind frequently when American men dominating in women's sports are mentioned by media is many young people's ignorance of the drastic unfair advantage. They are likely people who have never had siblings of the opposite sex to fight against as kids.

I have seen unsettling posts published on Ovarit, like someone asking the question 'at what age did you learn about the fact that you are physically weaker than most men?' and many answers mentioning adulthood or late teens.

That doesn't reflect well on the education system. Is this an American thing to believe that equality between men and women is only possible when the two sexes are indistinguishable from each other with the exception of the content of one's pants?

I have been told by a Polish American that Americans and Poles understand gender equality differently. We are more likely to say 'women and men are different, but equal in worth either way', when American-style progressivism is partially based on denying the material differences between the sexes, including the physical strength disparity, since American women (as opposed to their counterparts from the former Eastern Block) had to fight for their right to work some decades ago, which involved claiming to be identical to men to get their way.

I know that movie creators are entitled to some fantasies and this is why we can watch 70-year-olds dominating their 30-year-old counterparts within the male sex since older men, movie fans, also have power fantasies. This is why the existence of overpowered female characters destroying their male opponents in fights doesn't bother me itself. The problem is ADULTS' inability to distinguish the reality from fiction.

As a little girl, I watched one episode titled 'The Kyoshi Warriors' from the cartoon 'Avatar: The Last Airbender', which represented the American-style attitude to feminism basically. In short:

• a male character is sexist and disrespects his sister because of her femaleness
• he meets a bunch of girls somehow easily physically overpowering average/trained males their age despite having no superpower
• he learns that girls are physically as strong as normal boys
• and, as a result of this acknowledgement, he stops being disrespectful towards women, like his sister

I found this episode weird as a 10-year-old girl and now I have the language to articulate why. The message of the story is that men's respect for women should be conditional on us proving ourselves to be physically the same as the male sex. The boy's sexism is presented as wrong because he isn't entitled to misogyny in a world without the sex physical strength disparity. It's like trying to tell English-speaking children that they shouldn't be disrespectful towards non-native English speakers by creating a cartoon episode in which an American boy stops mistreating immigrants from Mexico only because of discovering that they speak English much better than he does. Fine, but how is this message appliable to our world? We, non-native English speakers, are different from you, the native ones. Our pronunciation and range of vocabulary will almost always be different. If mistreating us is wrong (in this hypothetical fictional universe), but ONLY BECAUSE we are not actually different as regards our ability to express ourselves in this language (here comes the condition!), then it follows that when the criteria cannot be met in our world (and, mostly, they cannot, because an average adult non-native English speaker who has spent years working in the US has the vocabulary range of a typical American kid who is 14 at best, according to studies), the message isn't appliable and bullying is great. It works like this when it comes to the cartoon: Misogyny is evil! Why? Because you cannot express misogyny against someone who is actually physically as strong as you! And women are, so misogyny against them is evil!

I don't understand adult Americans praising this episode for its 'feminist' message (despite it presenting men's respect for women as something that should be conditional on us meeting the criteria impossible to be met in the real world, so we are not entitled to respect, by this logic, since we don't have the physical strength of these fictional girls). They don't get the hidden misogyny (women are only worthy of respect when they are the same as men; they need to prove it before they get equal respect). Some of them even claim that the fictional girls' set of skills reflects the real world.

Is this true that Americans are so out of touch with reality when it comes to human sexual dymorhism? If they are, it will be hard to fight for our female-only sports, unfortunately.

I cannot think of the day when I learnt about the sex physical strength gap any more than I can remember the moment when I discovered that humans don't fly. It simply seems so natural to know. Is this some taboo knowledge in your country you have to discover yourselves f.e by doing your own researching or getting hit by a male partner in adulthood?