Girlboss action heroes like that chick from Atomic Blonde or Galadriel from Rings of Power are obviously metaphors for women's capability in white collar email work. The point is that women are getting top billing in male-dominated genres of fiction, not that women should compete with men at the Olympics. However, as much as people pretend otherwise when convenient, the action genre retains a certain utility to real life, and when it begins to stray too far from that anchor, audiences don't turn up. This is partly why current Marvel offerings attract a minuscule fraction of the attention given to a now-40+ year old show, Dragon Ball Z, despite both properties involving superhuman feats. Simply put, it's more credible on a subconscious level for an incredibly shredded dude to throw someone through a building than a 110 lb woman doing the same.

I just watched this review of Damsel, the latest fantasy action trash (Reaper's youtube channel is great though), in which Millie Bobby Brown slays dragons that 10 knights can't beat, and it made me think: if reality can be distorted to the point that a non-zero percentage of the population thinks that men can turn into women, what else can be programmed? Is it possible that women now believe to some extent that they can physically compete with men?

I would actually love if this were the case, but the likely answer is that the overwhelming majority of them do not. Physical strength, even in our tech-addled culture, is still so fundamental to human existence that it's inescapable. It's one thing to lie that your surgical wound is a vagina, because nobody wants to see it, but day 1 of high school gym class makes the male-female disparity extremely clear, and the more athletic the woman is, that disparity becomes even clearer to her.

To the extent the delusion exists, it goes something like this: unathletic women cite some extreme on the internet to "prove" they have just as much potential as men, even though they personally have no intention to lift a finger. For example, elite female powerlifters are stronger than a lot of men who lift. Elite BJJ girls can handle a lot of dudes off the street if they don't know how to wrestle. When you compare them against the prototypical soyboy, this is obviously the case.

The closest that women have come to believing they are equal with men, that I know of, is the debate over women being allowed in the infantry, and I think this is because the outlier argument is in full force. The thinking is that the most athletic, cream of the crop women could ruck march with the boys, and this is - actually somewhat true for about one in a million women. Of course it ignores practical concerns like the rate of injury, sexual interaction, the political lowering of standards, and many other things we have been over ad nauseum, but in that narrow band of details, it is true that a few women are capable of meeting a baseline male standard. Still, the pivot to white males in Army recruitment ads, or the fact that Selective Service has not been extended to women, show that most women do understand they cannot physically compete.

But maybe under the immense weight of our current propaganda, there are now some girls out there who think they can take their partner in a fight or wrestle a hog or something. That would make for some great entertainment in our dystopia.