As Men Battle and Women Observe (2022) Рисунок - Edwin Loftus

I am a large male with naturally high testosterone that made me stronger and faster than most and I added to that with exercise and working out in weight rooms when possible. I was good at sports and favored American Football, Basketball and Track and Field. I enjoyed the competition but more enjoyed the physical activity and testing my capabilities against those of others. Winning interested me, but not as much as scoring an honest victory over a capable opponent. I grew up under the philosophy, "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game that matters."
Other large and strong males would pick fights with me because I protected my friends or because I was the target to prove themselves against. I only lost a fight once, and that was against five men. I sought training after that and got very good at it but was not someone who looked for fights or would not back down to someone to avoid one.
Fighting only shows you are stronger or better at fighting, it doesn't show you are right in whatever you are fighting about. Still, it was nice to be able to stand up to mean people that do enjoy those kinds of things.
In my thirties I worked in Involuntary Psychiatry and as a big male I usually led the restraint procedures on patients that had lost control. For thirteen years I faced danger almost every day, having to subdue and overpower often physically powerful men without hurting them. So, I've given the subject of violence a lot of thought.
In that process, I have also studied women, who, while they can be as violent as any man, tend not to, not as commonly. There are good and bad things about that. Women, though averagely smaller and weaker than men, are still big animals with big animal fighting potential. If a hundred-pound dog comes at you, you're likely to be more frightened than if a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman does though she is stronger, larger and with more potential natural ways to hurt you than a dog has. The dog has trained since puppyhood to be able to defend itself. Most women haven't. This disinclination to fight for themselves is a weakness, an inferiority of women in general. But it is also a strength and superiority of women in general. It makes them prone to be victims of men and more aggressive women and makes them often ill-prepared to fight effectively to defend children or the weak. So much so, that in many civilizations, women are classified among "the weak" that men are expected to defend and those that don't are often considered to be less-than-men.
This difference has been observed for as long as humans have recorded their observations. It has produced generalizations about the genders that are true for most, but never for all. And this is the failure of systems that try to judge us by general categories, by gender, by race, by heritage, by the land we come from, by the training we received ... and on and on. We are not categories. We are individuals. I am more similar to others of different categories than I am to others of my own set of categories, and so, probably are you. These "demographics" some use to classify us are all fictions, true as generalities, but untrue when it comes to applying them because only individuals experience the injustice of being judged, served, penalized or rewarded as a member of the categories they happen to fall under.
In this drawing I present what isn't true, expecting that many will be moved to identify it as untrue in their experience. How many of those men do not want to fight? And how many of those women do or wish they could? To the left is there a group of men sitting by disinterestedly as the fight goes on? To the right is there a group of women rushing forward to join the fray?
If this image did not invoke some similar feeling in you ... I failed. It is a type of art I frequently engage in, one that exists less in the image than the reaction to it. I usually don't explain that, but sometimes it helps, not the image, but the person viewing and reacting to it.

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MenWomenStereotypesCategoriesTruths