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Warning: I get pissy below. I EVEN DROP THE F-BOMB.

The sexist smog surrounding Danica Patrick’s career as a racecar driver, culminating in her recent win in Japan, has finally tipped over into the blatantly ridiculous. She’s a winner, it seems, primarily because she is smaller than all the other drivers. This is an unfair advantage! at least one sore loser has shrieked to the press, as well as countless others, both drivers and non. Glue a 100 lb barbell to the hood of her car, dammit!! SPORTSMANSHIP! FAIR PLAY! As others have pointed out, this is quite a 180 degree backflip for the We-Don’t-Wanna-Play-With-GURLZ crowd, who usually base their arguments on the ineradicable and overwhelming physical disadvantages that are inherent to womankind. The saddest part about all this is that the sexism is so ingrained that even this irrefutable evidence of the bullshit of it all has not made a real dent in the concept.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Women, in general, are physically inferior to men in general when it comes to most things athletic. I know this both in the abstract, in being familiar with the physiological design differences, and on a personal level, having spent some time in the military. In the abstract, sexual dimorphism is a fascinating biological topic; you can read about argonauts, a species of octopus, where the female is five times the size of the male, or elephant seals, where the males are two to three times the size of the female. There are species of more primitive animals where one sex exists only as a larvae parasite or even only as specialized tissue inside the other sex. To cap it off, you have many more species, like the goldfish upstairs in my fishtank, where there are no size differences between the sexes at all. At the most basic level, it’s all about what’s worked over the millenia to keep your species alive. In terms of good ol’ Homo sapiens, in the US for instance, where we are much less likely than other places to give superior nutrition to one sex over the other and thus the numbers are more legitimate than they might be elsewhere, there is only an 8% difference in height between the sexes and a 14% difference in weight. (Contrast this with the 180% difference in length and the 330% difference in weight between the sexes in elephant seals. They probably wonder how we can tell each other apart.) So what’s the big, HAIRY DEAL?

My theory: It isn’t really about the facts. (When is it ever?) Leaving the abstract and turning to the personal–on an absolute scale, I was a little on the small side for a soldier. Probably nobody’s gonna say, “My ideal soldier is 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 145 pounds, yeah!!” I expect that most people envision some 6 foot 2 inch, 200 pound monster of ripply muscles guarding their shores. (Like anybody’s ever invaded our shores. But bear with me here; I am talking about mindsets, not reality.) However, I was far from being the littlest soldier in my unit, even if you excluded the other female soldiers. I was taller than a good third of the guys and weighed in at or near that third’s weight. In full camo paint, fatigues and field gear, I was pretty indistinguishable from the rest. And that 145 pounds? It was muscle. When I left home for Basic training, I weighed 125 pounds. They fitted us for our dress uniforms the first week of training. We didn’t put them on again til our graduation ceremonies; the pants fit just fine, but the blouse would barely fit over my arms and shoulders and as we were marching to graduation, I took too deep a breath and popped the top two buttons off my dress jacket. And I hated it more than anything that they had two physical test standards, one for each gender.

I mean I HATED it. By the time I graduated from Basic training I could pass the male physical test standards, and I maintained that til I was out. I could do it. I DID it. But it didn’t matter because I was already sabotaged, because they could always say that I wasn’t as good a soldier as a man because my physical training standards were lower. MINE weren’t, but my gender’s were. And they didn’t have to be because any woman is capable of passing the Army PT test to the male standard. Rinse, repeat–EVERY WOMAN who is physically able enough to complete Basic training is physically able enough to pass the test to the male standard. Is it harder for women than men to do so? Yes, in general. I was in better shape than a lot of guys and I had to be if I wanted to meet my self-imposed standard. Is it anywhere near impossible? No, the standards even for men aren’t THAT high. For instance, the passing time for the two-mile run for my age group for men was about fifteen and a half minutes–we’re not talking anything remotely like the four-minute mile here, people. So it’s quite doable for women.

My theory: It has nothing to do with the actual, rather small sexual dimorphism between men and women. That’s merely the excuse. Because most men sitting out there on their fat lazy butts were in nowhere near the shape I was in when I was in the military, and if it’s really about physical superiority , then I should’ve been getting to treat them all like wussy subhumans. I wasn’t; I was treated, by default, like I was the wussy subhuman, and endangering said fat lazy butts by my mere existence in the armed forces besides. And now that the sexual dimorphism favors a woman…it really is all about the fact that she just isn’t a man. Being a man is what makes you superior at all things categorized “male.” Not that men are generally physically advantaged over women. It’s just the essence of their man-ness, which a woman is just never, ever, ever gonna have.

Well, screw that. What restraint I used to show about the whole situation is now gone. Vanished, vamoosed, finito, GONE. Next person who starts tweeting about male physical superiority for one, better actually HAVE some, and two, better have personally participated in a situation where it made one fucking bit of difference that three, I couldn’t have done the same or better at in my military days.

Lisa KS out.