Throughout history Europeans have feed their daughters less food then their sons, a practice that continues with every-other Caucasian family to this date, and a practice that has spread to parts of the South Asia (i.e. Pakistan etc.) and Africa that it originally didn’t exist until recent centuries.
The practice of feeding girls less than boys are key reasons for stunting in children. Boys have generally been given more food than girls, because of which; girls are unable to compete with boys in many fields.
Evidence has shown that girls experience a high burden of stunting, thinness, and being overweight. Girls appear to experience a higher burden of stunting (11-23%) and being overweight/obesity (8%) than boys (5% for both).
Because we Males have bigger size bones and organs (but remember; in Mother Nature: quantity equals less quality), we are naturally 1 or 2 inches taller in height then Females. But during the Era of Shakespeare; there would be men much taller than women; then just a 2 inch height difference…….*look up "The Librarians" TV series Season 2 Episode 10 (episode 20)*
Sixty Years Ago, NASA Scientists Found That Women Would Be Better Astronauts. Their Work Was Never Published.
Over sixty years of crewed spaceflight, just 15% of space travelers have been women, and none of them have traveled beyond Earth’s orbit. But it didn't have to be this way.
How Women have been kept out of space
In the late 1950s, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II and Brigadier General Don D. Flickinger, the chair and vice chair of NASA's Special Committee on Life Sciences and both experts in aerospace medicine, seriously discussed the possibility of sending women rather than men into space. When the U.S. space program was ramping up, aerospace engineers began using detailed health data from armed services divisions to create physical fitness guidelines for pilots. According to Margaret Weitekamp, chair of the space history department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, women’s health data was ignored during the creation of the guidelines. The “absence of a physiological baseline [for women] shamed no one. Aerospace scientists simultaneously declared women to be too complicated and largely irrelevant,” writes Weitekamp in her book Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program.
"Their proposition was purely pragmatic," Kathy L. Ryan, Jack A. Loeppky, and Donald E. Kilgore Jr. wrote in a historical perspective published to the journal Advances in Physiological Education in 2009.
"First, there would be a reduction in the propulsion fuel required to send the rocket’s load into space, as women were lighter and would require less oxygen than men. Second, women were known to have fewer heart attacks than men... Third, the internal reproductive system of the female was thought to be less susceptible to radiation than that of the male. Finally, there were preliminary data available suggesting that women could outperform men in enduring cramped spaces and withstanding prolonged isolation."
But their idea was soon quashed when President D. Eisenhower deemed that astronaut candidates should be recruited only from the ranks of military fighter jet test pilots – at the time, women were barred from the role. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton – the Mercury 7 – were announced as America's first astronauts in Spring 1959.
Add to this the lack of basic equipment: Back in 1960, aerial acrobatics pilot Betty Skelton was featured in a Look magazine photo essay titled, “Should a Girl Be the First in Space?” She underwent the same physical-readiness and stress tests as the men, but she had to do it while wearing a belted and rolled-up-at-the-ankles flight jumpsuit, because there were none available to fit her small frame. Before the recent all-woman space walk on October 18, a previously scheduled space walk a couple months earlier was canceled when it was discovered that there weren’t enough space suits in the correct sizes for three women to go outside the ISS at the same time.
Beyond the ignorance of women’s bodies and lack of equipment, there’s long been a societal “concern” over women’s safety in space. The post–World War II era is when “the social and political importance of protecting white married women’s lives led to some of the most restricted cultural gender roles that we’ve seen,” Weitekamp tells Elemental. NASA worried that women involved in the space program would be seen as “frivolous,” and the agency was also concerned that “a woman being injured and killed would be enough to pull the plug on the whole program,” Weitekamp says.
“We are already in a position to say that certain qualities of the female space pilot are preferable to those of her male colleague.”
Dr. William Randolph Lovelace, a NASA contractor, was responsible for testing male astronauts for the Mercury mission. In 1959, he decided to test women, too, and created the privately funded Women in Space Program, which put women through fitness tests for space travel. Some scientific research suggested women might be more efficient astronauts. For example, studies showed women regularly outperformed men in situations that required withstanding prolonged isolation.
In 1960, Lovelace announced that female pilot Jerrie Cobb had passed the astronaut qualifying tests as part of his program. He told a gathering of reporters, “We are already in a position to say that certain qualities of the female space pilot are preferable to those of her male colleague.” In addition to Cobb, 12 other women (out of 19 initial woman candidates) passed the same 87 physical tests as the men did. But the women’s data was never published, because Lovelace’s Women in Space Program never took off and was discontinued.
While the first American astronauts – known as the Mercury 7– were training in the 1960s, aerospace doctor Randy Lovelace recruited 13 women pilots and put them through the same paces as the male astronauts. The “Mercury 13” outperformed the men on many tests, particularly in how they handled isolation.
But NASA wasn’t convinced. A congressional hearing was held to investigate whether women should qualify to be astronauts. In her testimony, Mercury 13 astronaut candidate Jerrie Cob said:
I find it a little ridiculous when I read in a newspaper that there is a place called Chimp College in New Mexico where they are training chimpanzees for space flight, one a female named Glenda. I think it would be at least as important to let the women undergo this training for space flight.
She was prepared to take the place of a chimp, if that was the only way to get into space.
Still, Lovelace and Flickinger thought women were more than up to the challenge of spaceflight, so, with private funding at a facility in Albequerque, New Mexico, the duo decided to challenge esteemed female aviators to complete NASA's onerous astronaut exams. Twenty-eight-year-old trend-setting pilot Jerrie Cobb was the first selected. Cobb was bombarded with the same tests the Mercury 7 astronauts took, and passed the program with flying colors.
"We are already in a position to say that certain qualities of the female space pilot are preferable to those of her male colleague," Lovelace said at a symposium after Cobb's performance.
Lovelace next secured more funding and began searching for additional female pilots to undergo astronaut testing at a new Women in Space Program. Again, this was conducted outside of NASA's purview.
Ryan, Loeppky, and Kilgore described what the program entailed:
"In the first phase, records and qualifications of potential candidates were screened for health and anthropometric data as well as for flight time experience. In the second phase, candidates would go through a rigorous set of physical examinations and physiological tests… to determine their physical fitness level and their ability to withstand the presumed physical rigors of space flight. In the third phase, testing would be performed that would simulate the physiological stress of space flight, including the ability to perform under extreme g-forces. Finally, psychological evaluations would be performed to determine the candidate’s ability to tolerate isolation and other psychological stressors."
The Women in Space Program eventually recruited 19 female candidates, each of whom faced the exact same rigorous testing schedule that male astronaut candidates endured, with the addition of a gynecological examination. Some of the women's tests were actually more difficult, like the sensory deprivation test, in which the women were immersed in a pitch black, soundproof isolation tank filled with skin temperature water for hours to challenge their psychological stamina. Two of the women, Rhea Hurrle and Wally Funk, endured the tank for ten hours before staff terminated testing. NASA merely placed the men in a soundproof dark room for two to three hours. John Glenn later confessed to writing poetry on a tablet during his test.
At the conclusion of the Women in Space Program, 13 of the 19 women (68%) passed. For comparison, 18 of the 32 men (56%) selected by NASA to undergo official testing succeeded. Details of the program were never published in a scientific journal.
In 1962, two of the female aviators from the Women in Space Program, Jerrie Cobb and Janey Hart, testified before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that women should have the opportunity to become astronauts. Representatives from NASA, including Mercury 7 astronauts John Glenn and John Carpenter, disagreed, pointing to "the lack of interest in women in pursuing astronaut training, the lack of women who were qualified, and that the prevailing social order did not accept women in this role," Ryan, Loeppky, and Kilgore summarized. 1962 was two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed that prohibited discrimination based on sex, Cobb and another female astronaut hopeful, Jane Hart, appeared before Congress to testify that women’s exclusion from NASA was discriminatory. At the hearing, astronaut John Glenn dashed the women’s hopes: “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,” he said. “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
Another two decades would pass before Sally Ride finally claimed the American woman's rightful place in outer space. Ultimately, President Kennedy wanted a “man on the moon,” and that’s where the priorities, money, and research went. NASA didn’t open the space program to women for almost 20 years after the hearing. In 1983, Sally Ride became the first U.S. woman to go to outer space.
In the United States, women were excluded from space by the restriction that astronauts had to be military test pilots – a profession barred to them.
Why Women’s Bodies Are Better Suited for Space Travel
Women’s bodies and minds are uniquely well-suited to the rigors of space flight.
The recent all-women’s space walk on Oct. 18 was hailed as a feminist milestone and precursor to NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, which aims to put the first woman on the moon’s surface by 2024. But at the end of the day, it was just two women doing their jobs — in this case, replacing a battery unit on the International Space Station (ISS).
Women’s bodies and minds are uniquely suited for space missions. They’re physically more efficient in many ways, and mentally hearty.
After the 2024 Artemis endeavor comes something even more ambitious: NASA aims to land humans on Mars by 2033. Considering the intense physical and psychological demands that will come with this perilous voyage, an all-women mission could be the ticket. “When I give presentations, we talk about the first man on the moon, and we flip that when we talk about Mars — maybe the first boot print on Mars will be a woman’s,” says Kristin Fabre, PhD, a senior innovation scientist at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, which works with NASA.
And yet, while astronaut training classes today are often 50% female, only 11% of the astronauts who have made it to outer space so far have been women. The reasons for that have nothing to do with women’s qualifications and capabilities.
Women’s bodies are made for space
A mission to Mars will be different than any other mission initiated by NASA, as it’s one of the farthest destinations attempted. It’s not just “an extremely difficult engineering challenge,”according to NASA, but one that will require individuals that are highly vetted for health. “You’re looking at probably a three-year mission. And that requires some special people,” Al Holland, a psychologist for NASA, told PBS.
In plenty of important ways, men and women don’t differ much in terms of how they’ve reacted to the physical challenges of spaceflight, including in health impacts like bone density loss, alertness over time, sleep quality, stress, and many others detailed in a 2014 NASA report on the subject. But there are some important ways that women may have the advantage, physically and psychologically.
In any space mission, weight is a concern: Every pound that needs to be lifted into space requires more rocket fuel, and that fuel adds to the ship’s weight. On average, women are smaller and weigh less than men, which translates to less rocket fuel. Women’s bodies are also more efficient. “Men of equal size to women require 15% to 25% more daily calories to maintain their weight,” says Yeral Patel, MD, a regenerative medicine specialist. “Research shows that women lose weight slower on a restrictive diet. Put that all together over a three-year mission, and women’s bodies need significantly less food and oxygen for a mission.”
Fewer calories and oxygen in also means less waste out: “Smaller bodies create and release less waste—both bodily waste and carbon dioxide,” Patel says. Less waste means less stress on shipboard systems and less weight to carry on a multiyear voyage.
Kristin Fabre says that while she doesn’t feel there has been a “true effort to look at sex differences in space,” a woman’s more sluggish metabolism might also be a boon when it comes to having more time to do DNA repair on cells damaged by radiation.
Women have some other advantages over male astronauts: Men’s eyes are affected more by zero gravity. Scott Kelly, who famously spent a year straight living on the ISS, has retinal thickening caused by fluid buildup behind the eye directly attributed that voyage. This issue occurs in women, but much less often. Kelly wrote in his biography, “If scientists can’t figure out what’s causing those eye issues, we just might have to send an all-women crew to Mars.”
Hearing sensitivity, when measured at several frequencies, also declines with age much more rapidly in male astronauts than it does in female astronauts, according to the 2014 NASA report. And in general, women’s immune systems are stronger than men’s, which could help them deal with bugs the crew may bring with them from Earth.
There are some cases where women may be at a disadvantage. For example, Women are possibly more susceptible to radiation as well, though some researchers think women’s additional fat deposits, especially around the organs, may reduce radiation exposure to vital tissues.
Psychologically, a Mars mission has unique challenges. The two most significant touchstones that help promote an astronaut’s mental health while in space are the abilities to call home and look out a window and see Earth, says Gary Strangman, PhD, an associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an innovation specialist at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health. “For a mission to Mars, both of these opportunities will disappear.”
Earth will be too far away to see from Mars, and “the round-trip communication time to Mars ranges from six to 44 minutes, which means real-time communication becomes impossible and one must resort to text messages, email, or prerecorded video,” Strangman says.
Other earthbound studies have found that men do best in short-term, goal-oriented missions, whereas women perform better over longer missions that may have unexpected challenges.
Some research suggests women may be better equipped to handle these mental health risks. In an examination of journal entries from astronauts who spent time on ISS, a NASA researcher found that men experienced a greater dip in mood during the missions than women. This is an important consideration for such a long trip.
On a trip to Mars, another major psychological stress will come from living in a small space with a small crew. Women may have the advantage here since research suggests they’re generally more comfortable in closer, more confined conditions—or, as early NASA research puts it, women have more “permeable personal space requirements.”
Some studies have looked at Earth-based scenarios that share similarities with a Mars mission to gain a better understanding of what the physical and mental health risks might be. In a study on 348 people in the British Antarctic Survey who stayed through the winter in isolated conditions—20% of whom were female—researchers found that gender was “a statistically significant predictor for good adaptation. Women were more likely to receive an ‘exceptionally well-adapted’ evaluation from their station commanders.” Other earthbound studies have found that men do best in short-term, goal-oriented missions, whereas women perform better over longer missions that may have unexpected challenges.
While women have plenty of psychological advantages, they are also more likely to experience stress and depression as measured by psychological tests (or women may be more comfortable disclosing this information than men). It’s worth remembering that anyone going to Mars will be highly trained and chosen with both physical and psychological strength in mind, and will likely be the result of “hundreds of considerations for assembling a crew,” Strangman says.
Weitekamp says social change will be the most important aspect in determining if we see an all-women’s mission: “I think we would need to be more used to the idea of not doing a women’s mission, but doing a mission that happened to be all women and seeing it as normal.”
In the 1970’s Transgender Women were falsely accused of having an unfair advantage against Cis Women. Needless to say, later that decade it was 100% proven to be a false claim that any Transgenders have an unfair advantage against Cis people and vice-versa.
Despite the whole bullcrap argument of unfair advantage via Trans athletes being put to rest 50 years ago, we got a whole new generation of people (Generation X conservatives) claiming this disproven claim all over again. Conservative propagandist kept bringing up the 1 school were a Trans female is always beating Cis females, but there are over 700 other schools in America were Trans females compete against Cis females; and the Cis females are always beating 100% of the Trans females in sports all the time.
Even in 2021 Multiple NCAA women's basketball players and staff have drawn public attention to disparities and substandard facilities at the NCAA tournament location in Texas.
In a post Thursday, Stanford University Sports Performance Coach Ali Kershner shared images of a small rack of dumbbells — the women's weight room — beside an image of a vast expanse with benches, racks and barbell weights — the men's weight room.
"These women want and deserve to be given the same opportunities. Not only that - 3 weeks in a bubble and no access to Dumbbells above 30’s until the sweet 16? In a year defined by a fight for equality this is a chance to have a conversation and get better."
In fact in the 20th Century women use to commonly use 25 lbs Dumbbells, at least in the 80's and 90's, but then the industry which is run by olde sexist men decided to take advantage of a new young generation of ladies entering the womanhood's; ignorance and do full on marketing of 5 lbs to them. Later the marketing campaign shifting from ladies should work out with 5 lbs dumbbells to ladies should work out with 3 lbs dumbbells, to 2 lbs dumbbells to now 1 lbs dumbbells.
Don't be surprise if the 1/2 lbs dumbbell is next as the new dumbbells women should be working out with instead. And eventually just telling women to grip theid hand and move it up & down. Because apparently women are still too physically strong and these over age 50 cis white men running the industry are afraid of women. Luckily women are catching on, as Kim Kardashian and Sofia Vergara and many other women are now working out with nothing lighter then 25 lbs dumbbells. Hell, even the late Marilyn Monroe was working out with somewhere from 10 to 25 lbs dumbbells all the time.
Anyways it’s not a coincidence that the NCAA women were given small weights that they have to share several minutes at a time per woman for each and every of them. This is to keep women weak & slow and un-athletic, so they’ll perform less better then the men. They might as well put up a sign saying they believe a women’s place is in the home. This goes to show how afraid they are of women matching; let alone surpassing men, and why is what I will get into more detail in the rest of this thread:
you see the easiest thing for women to put on is muscle and the hardest thing for a women to lose is muscle. With us men; the hardest thing for a man to put on is muscle and the easiest thing for a man to lose is muscle. That’s why you don’t see that many muscular men in the real world, and why you see an equal number of muscular women in the real world despite an originally western (and nowadays also eastern) influence culture for men to get more & more muscular and women to get more & more weak & frailer. 95% of all anorexics are females, that’s not a coincidence in a society that seeks to control women and subjugate them. Hijabs & Burqas didn’t originate among Arabs and Muslims, and weren’t even adopted until recent centuries to segregate women; as to reduce their rights. Countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia didn’t have Sharia Law until 40 years ago, and Iran is over 11,000 years old and has been Officially a country for over 8,000 years. Countries with Sharia Law like Saudi Arabia and Iran forbid women from bodybuilding because women get stronger faster then men, and that’s still not enough because females ages 16 to 43 years old always wake up one random morning with muscles (i.e. 6 pack abs and biceps) because some women and teenage girls produce so much estrogen that they automatically gain muscles despite having no lifestyle to put them on, because Estrogen is literally the only hormone that builds muscles and prevents muscle loss in real life, literally. We guys never wake up one random morning with muscles because that literally never happens to us, except in the comic books when bitten by a radioactive spider, but in real life that would just kill us with radiation poisoning.
Hell, women try out for the Men's Football Team all the time in College, and half the ones that tryout are better than all the men on the team, and the other half of women who tryout are still better than most the men on the Men's Football Team, but College's are only Liberal in name and never in action; so they are always turned down, and to this date there has never been a Woman in any College Men's Football Team; no matter how much better than the men she is.
History of Old Cis Males running the media to influence women to get more weaker and frailer, and inducing Anorexia with no shame
Not only do the media glorify a slender ideal, they also emphasize its importance, and the importance of appearances in general. Naomi Wolf argues that our culture disempowers women by holding them prisoner to an unattainable beauty ideal (Wolf, 1990).
Surveys suggest that 83% of adolescent girls read fashion magazines for an average of 4.3 hours per week (Levine & Smolak, 1996) and that “Seventeen” magazine has an estimated readership of 11,000,000 (Levine, Piran, & Stoddard, 1999). It appears that beauty and fashion magazines significantly impact the process of identity development in young women, especially with regards to gender-role learning, identity formation, and the development of values and beliefs (Arnett, 1995; Thomsen et al., 2001). In one survey, the number one wish of girls aged 11–17 who were given three magic wishes for anything they wanted was “to lose weight and keep it off”(Kilbourne, 1994). In another survey, middle-aged women were asked what they would most like to change about their lives, and more than half of them said “their weight” (Kilbourne, 1994). This pervasive body dissatisfaction and preoccupation with weight has become part of the female experience in North America; so much so that “psychologists have coined the term ‘normative discontent’ to explain the idea that it is normal if you are a female to be unhappy with your weight” (Oliver-Pyatt, 2003).
The epidemic proportions of drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and unsafe weight control methods among women have led theorists to posit the existence of mechanisms that are capable of reaching a large number of women (Levine & Smolak, 1996). The media is one such mechanism that has an ever-increasing influence and reach on women across North America and the world.
A recent naturalistic experiment conducted in Fiji provides strong evidence to support the hypothesis that the media has a significant role in the development of body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptomatology (Becker, Burwell, Herzog, Hamburg, & Gilman, 2002). Until recently, Fiji was a relatively media-naïve society with little Western mass-media influence. In this unique study, the eating attitudes and behaviors of Fijian adolescent girls were measured prior to the introduction of regional television and following prolonged exposure. The results indicate that following the television exposure, these adolescents exhibited a significant increase in disordered eating attitudes and behaviors.
A number of studies have examined the correlation between the use of mass media and body satisfaction, eating disorder symptomatology, and negative affect. The majority of the studies have demonstrated a direct relationship between media exposure and eating pathology, body dissatisfaction and negative affect (Stice, Schupak-Neuberg, Shaw, & Stein, 1994; Stice & Shaw, 1994; Utter, Neumark-Sztainer, Wall, & Story, 2003).
Women with anorexia nervosa engage in heavy media use and describe their consumption of fashion magazines as an “addiction. Beauty magazines become ‘how-to’ manuals to help women suffering from eating disorders in their attempts to obtain an elusive and impossible standard of physical thinness (Thomsen et al., 2001). Fashion magazines support the anorexic desire to restrict, and counterbalance dissonance-creating comments from friends and family (who tell them they are too thin) by promoting and endorsing messages that encourage thinness and dieting.
In conclusion, the mass media surrounds us with images of the “thin ideal” for females, an ideal that has become increasingly thin since the 1950’s and thus increasingly unrealistic for most girls and women. The messages and images that focus on the value of appearances and thinness for females have a significant negative impact on body satisfaction, weight preoccupation, eating patterns, and the emotional well-being of women. Research has demonstrated that the media contributes to the development and maintenance of eating disorders.
Given the prevalence of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in females in our society, and the associations which have been found between eating disorders and the media, it would be prudent for professionals and the public to advocate for more positive and self-esteem building messages to be conveyed to females by the media.
These sexist men intentionally influence Anorexia in women to keep women Weak & Frail to physically hold power over them. Its always about power & control with these scumbags, and they make me sick to call myself a man; knowing these mega misogynist are associated with my Gender.
Hell throughout the history of Ballerina dancing and Gymnastics, females have been made to eat little food; while their male counterparts had been looked after to make sure they ate plenty of food. This has lead women in these professions to break their bones all the time in their 20’s. After all; you can’t have Bone Density if you don’t eat food. It's not normal for a woman in her 20's to have an operation to give her a 100% artificial hip (Ballerina dancing). In fact Simone Biles (Gymnast) says she used to steal food from the cafeteria at her gymnastic training camps because she was not being fed enough.
The Olympian shared the admission about her experience at Karolyi Ranch in Texas, where she trained once a month from the time she was 12 under the supervision of Martha and Bela Karolyi, during an interview with CBS’60 Minutes.
According to Biles, eating at the camp was strictly monitored and rationed, so she and fellow gymnasts would often sneak into the cafeterias to find extra portions because they were hungry.
There would be nights where we’re, like, running with our hoodie up, and we would break into the cafeteria to eat,” she said.
At the camp, the gymnastics were “frequently verbally abused about their weight and size, underfed and lied to or misled about the severity of their own injuries,” according to InsideHook, with several gymnasts revealing that the Karolyis would “routinely search their bags for food”.
As for how she feels looking back on the experience, the 23-year-old (24 now) told CBS’ Sharyn Alfonsi that the strict conditions at the camp were “not the right training”.
Biles’ revelation comes after she called out beauty standards in gymnastics last week, when she shared a statement on Twitter condemning the “competition I didn’t sign up for and feel like has become almost a daily challenge for me”.
“In gymnastics, as in many other professions, there is a growing competition that has nothing to do with performance itself,” Biles continued. “I’m talking about beauty.”
In the statement, the gymnast reflected on the ways that this underlying competition has impacted her self-esteem before stating that she is done striving to fit unrealistic beauty ideals.
She previously discussed the importance of eating what she wants in a recent interview with Women’s Health, where she revealed: “I do not track anything. I eat what I feel good with and try not to overeat or stuff myself because I’m always at the gym.”
“For gymnasts, in particular, [tracking] can lead to health problems and eating issues, so I just eat what I know I can and should,” she added.
In response to Alfonsi’s question about whether Biles would want her future daughter to be “part of that system,” if USA Gymnastics remained the way it is right now, the Olympian said: “No. Because I don’t feel comfortable enough, because they haven’t taken accountability for their actions and what they’ve done.
“And they haven’t ensured us that it’s never going to happen again.”
You see, body fat is the substitute for muscle when one lacks muscle mass, and as we get older our bodies decline in muscle mass slightly; with each & every day older we get. And on top of that; Estrogen is the hormone that builds muscles, so its way more unrealistic for women to be skinny than for men to be skinny, because men are not the muscular gender, women are. In theory women probably store more body fat as substitute for every 1 ounce of muscle mass missing (lack of enough physical activity) than men do, because women are the muscular gender and their bodies want muscles, but their talked into having less muscle mass which makes their body store more body fat for substitute of lack of muscle mass. Its realistic for women to be muscular or at least fat as substitute for intentionally keeping their muscle mass low as possible, but skinny is unrealistic for the majority of women, which is why only 10% of women in America are skinny enough to fit into fashion design clothing and be cast by sexist Hollywood in Hollywood movies.
One of the easiest places for the media to have non-skinny images of women and simultaneously promote a positive healthy realistic body image of women at the same time, is Superheroine Movies and T.V. Shows and Comic Books and Manga and Video Games by showing "Physically Strong Powerful images of Women", which is easy because superheroes are physically strong and also have Super-Strength at that, so its an easy self explanation of such images of women. And for more physically weaker characters like Batgirl and Harley Quinn, well they have a background in Gymnastics; so they can just be animated with the body of female gymnast like our Olympic Gold/Silver/Bronze Medal winners. And for Live-Action, well you have the male actors get into 5,000 calories a day 2% body fat shape in 6 + months, so you can have the female actors do the same diet/exercise/calories a day. But its safe to say that both Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures are too sexist to ever allow "Physically Strong Images of Women" in their Movies despite Estrogen being the Only Hormone that Builds Muscles in Real Life.
Hollywood since 2001 has had Male Actors get into “5,000 calories a day; 2% body fat shape” for movies from Spider-Man (2002) to Batman v Superman (2K16), hell all the male actors in the film; 300 (2006) spent 6 months bodybuilding. But Female Actors have been made to eat 500 to 1,000 calories a day for movies from Avengers (2K12) to Wonder Woman (2K17). Scarlett Johansson was made to eat 500 calories a day to reprise her role as Black Widow in 2012’s Avengers 1. Later Female Actors were made to eat 800 calories to body-build doing all the exact same exercises as the guys but on 800 calories a day, and later by Wonder Woman 1 they were made to eat 1,000 calories a day for the role, and continue to to this date. With Tobey Maguire he worked out 6 hours a day; 6 days a week, later this was changed to 6 hours a day 7 days a week, but with Scarlett Johansson; as she said, she was made to work out like the guys but eat like a rabbit (they had her eat 500 calories a day doing bodybuilding exercises & regimes). By the time you got to Gal Gadot working out for Wonder Woman or Batman v Superman, the industry had women eat 1,000 calories doing the same exercises/routines, and as both Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot have said in their respective individual training’s: they were breaking (or burning) down each & every day doing these workouts the men were doing (keep in mind they were only eating 500 and 1,000 calories a day respectively). So to summarize the men are made to eat 5K calories a day, and the women 1K calories a day; under the exact same 6 hours a day 7 days a week bodybuilding exercises/routines.
From actors being made to work out 6 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week for 6 to 12 months, to the female actors only given 6 to 9 months under a maximum of 1K calories a day. They gave Christine Bale 12 months to get in shape for Batman Begins (2005), specifically 6 months follow by another 6 months because he still wasn't in shape after the first 6 months. Henry Cavill spent 6 months going from zero to hero for Man of Steel (2K13) and 9 months to put all the muscles back on again for Batman v Superman, because he lost all his muscles from the previous film and decided to start off on 5K calories a day instead of working his way up to eating 5K calories a day like he did on the prior film (Man of Steel). The point is; Hollywood can have any actor get into Superheroine shape (estrogen is the only hormone that builds muscles in real life), but the industry is too sexist & misogynistic to allow images of women with muscles (estrogen) in starring roles, even though they always go out of their way to have images of men with estrogen (muscles), but that’s what to expect from an industry run by almost entirely; middle-aged Cis White Males (which is all the more reason to diversify Hollywood at the Studio Board).
In Nature, Mother Nature; the most instinctual animals are insects and spiders. You'll notice among the most instinctive species on the planet; that the females are either the same size as the males or more big & bold than the males. The Queen Ant is bigger, stronger and can fly. The Queen Bee is also bigger and stronger, and same applies to the Queen Spiders like the Black Widow. There are no kings among the most instinctive species on the face of the planet. With Praying Mantis the males and females may be the same size, but once the male has help get the female pregnant; she decapitate's him and eats the male for nutrients because there is no more use for the males. And that's the natural order of things amongst the most instinctual species on the planet literally.
In the military, like the U.S. Army and Marines, the Women aren't given all the same regimens as the Men. The Marines recruitment centers will exclude women the 2 days a week their exercises include weight training. In the Army and Marines it is said that Women are feed 1,000 fewer calories a day than the Men. The problem with the military being run by nothing but olde white guys is they want the women to be skinny, so they don't feed them as much food as the men, which kills two birds with one stone for sexist men with such tactics i.e.:
1): you don't have to worry about the women outperforming the men in the military
2): you can keep the women skinny so they can marry a shallow man when their done serving in the military
And that's just some of the problems is such a sexist organization as the military. Hell a woman's spine is design to lift & carry heavy objects for long periods of time; which is why mothers are the only parents who lift cars & trucks off of loved ones, hell it's how ancient African women who migrated to Ireland more then 5,200 years build Stonehenge, using a combination of their natural better ability in Academics and their love for the stars in combination with how women fatigue a fraction as much as men do and need shorter breaks because they recover faster (as any Medical Doctor from the U.S. to Japan will tell you). But when trying to join the U.S. Army's special forces, they don't teach women how to lift things the female way, but instead they teach women the male way to lift heavy things, i.e. redistribute the weight to your hips (because the male spine isn't design to do any heavy lifting in us homosapiens). So from under-feeding women to not teaching women the female way to lift heavy objects (or even bothering to figure out the science for how women can always lift cars & trucks) like the heavy backpack for trials to try to join the Special Forces, the U.S. Military effectively; not only keeping women out of being able to pass and join Special Forces but most importantly of all; they sabotage 1/3 of our troops on the battlefield (1/3 of U.S. troops are women). Talk about treasonous, I mean if sabotaging 1/3 of our soldiers isn't treasonous; than what is.
Psychology, and how its been weaponized against Women in the media
The fact is; that imagery can hold a lot of power on a society, Russia knows it, China knows it, Iran knows it, North Korea knows it, and Hollywood knows it.
Look at Russia right now, Putin is making it look like he isn't going to War with Ukraine, and giving the impression that he's Liberating Ukraine from Neo Nazis, even though all of North Asia's (former U.S.S.R.) Skinheads (Nazis) are in Russia, but by creating an image in his country to look like his propaganda is true, the people in Russia (mostly Generation X and Baby Boomers, a.k.a. the suckers) believe this to be fact. With T.V., Movies, Comic Books and Video Games, they always show weak frail images of women and physically strong powerful images of men side-by-side to each other, and by always only showing Skinny images of Women and Muscular images of Men 24/7, they give the illusion that Males are the Superior Master Gender and that Women are the inferior peasant Gender, which this mentality shows its ugly head in kindergarten kids when they turn 5 Year's Old as scientific studies have shown in this past decade alone (and 5 years old is when boys developed toxic masculinity, i.e. claiming boys are the "Master Gender" and claiming that girls are the "Inferior Peasant Gender", despite science proving that concept to be 100% Bullcrap). By showing skinnier and skinnier images of women next to muscular and more muscular images of men, this has created a Rape Culture; especially in the top 2 consuming countries in the world of American Media, United States and India (there's no such thing as coincidences).
There's a simple solution to this, just allow Physical Strong Powerful images of Women in media, have the female Actors Bodybuild into 5,000 calories a day 2% body fat shape like you have the male Actors do, and animate 99% of Superheroines with Muscles in Comic Books and Video Games just like you already do with 99% of male Superheroes. And STOP sexualizing Skinny/Weak/Frail images of Women and only Sexualize Physically Strong Powerful images of women. After all, Estrogen is the Only Hormone that Builds Muscles and Gives Muscles their Physical Feats of Strength in Real Life Literally, and Estrogen is a Women's Hormone after all. So if you can have images of men with Estrogen in T.V., Movies, Comic Books and Video Games, then you certainly can, and have to have images of Women with Estrogen (Muscles) in Media. And have women star in a minimum of 33% of all movies, because 10% isn't enough. Hell since Females make up 52% of America's population, you can have Women star in 55% of all movies.
The natural muscular potential of women — Introduction
What can you achieve as a female lifter? There seem to be only 2 camps. The general public thinks a woman that touches a loaded barbell will wake up the next day as the SheHulk.
People with a bit more understanding of exercise physiology realize that this is obviously nonsense. One look around you in the average gym makes it clear that getting seriously big is difficult even for men.
The natural muscle potential of women is 100%. Women gain the same percentage of muscle mass as men during strength training. In fact, women gain as much size and sometimes more strength than men [2]. the relative increase in muscle size is the same between men and women.
Research on protein metabolism comes to the same conclusion. Women build just as much muscle protein after training and after meals as men. In fact, one study found that given the same level of muscle mass, women have a higher rate of muscle protein synthesis than men.
Women vs. men in elite sports
If you think this is all just silly theory from labcoats studying beginners, consider this. Elite, natural female athletes have 85% as much muscle as elite male athletes. The studied sports included Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting. The 15% difference can easily be explained by 3 factors.
- Women have a genetically higher body fat percentage. Women have ~12% essential body fat to regulate their hormones compared to just ~3% fat in men. And you know, boobs.
- People have lower expectations of women, even most women themselves underestimate what they can achieve physically compared to men. In a famous study, simply telling people they were on steroids increased their strength gains by 321%. These were advanced trainees already benching and squatting over 300 pounds (137 kg) before taking the fake steroids. Moreover, the androgenic-anabolic steroid protocol in question was just 70 mg of Dianabol per week. Giving that same dosage of actual Dianabol to advanced trainees improves strength by only a few percent. So what do you think it does to women when you tell them they have 15 times less testosterone?
- There are more men in sports, so at the elite level, the selection to get to the top level is stronger. Elite male athletes are likely the best the male race has to offer. For women there may be more potential world record holders that will never know it because they don’t try.
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The other sex hormone
Not only is testosterone not the great savior, estrogen is not the bad guy. Most people, even women, shun estrogen as the evil hormone that makes you bloated and does all sorts of negative things. Although it’s rarely described what exactly the negative effects of estrogen are, most people agree nonetheless that’s it’s bad for your body composition. This is complete nonsense. In my article on hormones and fat loss I explained the positive effects estrogen has on abdominal fat storage, but estrogen does many more awesome things.
- Estrogen aids in muscle repair.
- Estrogen is anti-catabolic and prevents muscle loss.
- Estrogen protects your joints, bones and tendons from injury.
- Estrogen does not make you fat. On the contrary, estrogen increases your metabolism.
These aren’t a few obscure and irrelevant findings I’m dragging up to support my point. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated the anabolic effects of estrogen. Estrogen is also crucial for your health, but that’s another topic. In short, estrogen’s bad reputation is based on nothing more than the poor intuition that if testosterone is anabolic, estrogen must be catabolic.
Why women aren’t living up to their potential
Women have the same relative natural muscular potential as men. They even have several advantages over men. So why don’t we see more muscular women?
- Women are underrepresented in sports and in the gym. Even at the Olympic level there are fewer female participants. It is even true in science. There are over 50% fewer female participants in scientific studies than men.
- Even if women go to the gym, most of them spend their time on the treadmill or playing with pink dumbbells.
- We don’t have the same expectations of women. If a man benches a lot, that’s taken as a sign of social dominance. If a woman benches a lot, she’s seen as a freak, people get worried and men feel their pride sting and shrivel. I’ve heard from many of the women I train they’re approached in the gym ‘not too lift that heavy’ when they bench more than a plate.
- Many women use contraceptives that harm their strength training progression. Many birth control pills impair muscle growth by decreasing androgen activity, lowering growth factor levels and increasing cortisol levels. It is primarily the progestin content of the contraceptive that’s harmful, because this competes with testosterone for the androgen receptor.
Lastly, the women that do actually train seriously in spite of the stigma often train like men, which doesn’t align with their physiological strengths. Since women produce much more estrogen than men, this gives them several advantages over men in the gym. Women don’t fatigue as much as men and women recover faster after training. There are many more important sex differences in metabolism, anatomy, neurology and physiology: see this article a full review of why and how women should not train like men. (If I just offended any feminists, get real.)
Effect of Estrogen on Musculoskeletal Performance:
- 1Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States
- 2Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States
- 3Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States
Estrogen has a dramatic effect on musculoskeletal function. Beyond the known relationship between estrogen and bone, it directly affects the structure and function of other musculoskeletal tissues such as muscle, tendon, and ligament. In these other musculoskeletal tissues, estrogen improves muscle mass and strength, and increases the collagen content of connective tissues.
Continued-Introduction
Beyond its role as a sex hormone, estrogen has important roles in the development, maturation, and aging of extragonadal tissues such as bone (Hansen et al., 2009a; Cui et al., 2013; Ling-Ling et al., 2016), muscle (Dieli-Conwright et al., 2009; Enns and Tiidus, 2010), and connective tissues (Hansen et al., 2009a,b; Hansen and Kjaer, 2014; Hansen, 2018).
Estrogen receptors are present in all musculoskeletal tissues including muscle (Barros and Gustafsson, 2011; Luo and Kim, 2016), bone (Cui et al., 2013), ligament (Liu et al., 1996), and tendon (Bridgeman et al., 2010). Within these tissues, estrogen is known to regulate metabolism (Nelson and Bulun, 2001). Menopause is characterized by increased risk of musculoskeletal injury (Enns and Tiidus, 2010), accelerated bone and muscle wasting (Rice et al., 1989; Frontera et al., 1991; Bassey et al., 1992; Häkkinen and Pakarinen, 1993), and decreased sensitivity to anabolic stimuli (Bamman et al., 2003; Teixeira et al., 2003). To counteract many of the negative aspects of menopause, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been used to reduce muscle and bone loss, and restore muscle protein balance (Hansen et al., 2012; Smith et al., 2014).
Estrogen and Muscle
Estrogen has a number of metabolic effects on skeletal muscle. When female animals lose estrogen through ovariectomy, mitochondrial function, membrane microviscosity, and complex I and I + III activities (Torres et al., 2018) all decrease. The loss of estrogen also results in increased mitochondrial H2O2 production (Valencia et al., 2016), decreased levels of antioxidant proteins such as glutathione peroxidase, catalase, and superoxide dismutase (Baltgalvis et al., 2010; Valencia et al., 2016), and impaired insulin sensitivity (Torres et al., 2018). These effects are due to the loss of estrogen since restoring normal estrogen levels restores cellular redox, and glucose homeostasis in skeletal muscle (Spangenburg et al., 2012; Camporez et al., 2013; Torres et al., 2018).
Beyond the metabolic roles, estrogen is clearly beneficial for muscle mass and strength, at least in animal models (McClung et al., 2006; Kitajima and Ono, 2016). For example, 24 weeks of estrogen deficiency resulted in a 10% decrease in strength that corresponded with an 18% decrease in CSA (Kitajima and Ono, 2016). Beyond the decrease in fiber CSA, ovariectomized (OVX) rats do not recover as well following unloading (McClung et al., 2006). In this example, following 14 days of unloading, OVX rats showed limited regrowth, and an increase in injured fibers during either 7 or 14 days of reloading. Supplementing the OVX rats with estradiol was enough to return fiber CSA and injured fiber numbers to control levels. These data suggest that in the absence of estrogen, muscle is more prone to injury, and this limits regrowth (McClung et al., 2006).
Estrogen and Tendon
If estrogen decreases lysyl oxidase activity in sinews, this would be expected to decrease tendon stiffness, and therefore decrease the incidence of injury to the associated muscles. In fact, women suffer fewer muscle injuries than men (Hägglund et al., 2009; Edouard et al., 2016). In professional soccer, women suffer 54% fewer muscle strains than their male counterparts (Hägglund et al., 2009). The majority of the benefit results from decreases in groin (83% fewer) and hamstring (36% fewer) pulls. A decrease in tendon stiffness could also leave the tendon less prone to injury. In fact, women are at lower risk of sustaining an Achilles' tendon rupture than men until menopause, after which the risk becomes similar in both sexes (Hansen and Kjaer, 2014, 2016).
Conclusions and Future Research
It is clear that estrogen has a dramatic effect on musculoskeletal function. In the past, much of the research focus has been on the strong connection between estrogen and bone. However, recently the effect of estrogen on other musculoskeletal tissues such as muscle, tendon, and ligament has become the focus of more research. These studies make it clear that estrogen improves muscle proteostasis and increases sinew collagen content. In order to promote female participation in an active lifestyle throughout their life span, more research is needed to determine how nutrition, training, and hormonal manipulation can be used to promote optimal performance at any age.
Final Conclusion
It’s time we stop treating women like second rate men. It’s up to them if they want to fulfill that potential. If they do, they should realize they’re not men and train to their strengths.
Author Contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.
Funding
This work was supported by funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health R01AG045375 to KB.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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