Quoted from the beginning of his article:

"Reader KFG dropped this insight in last week’s post and I thought it was very relevant to something I’ve been contemplating for a while now:

"As a general principle genetic fitness is always relative to the environment. A spread of genetic traits makes a species more robust, because it will have individuals better suited for survival in a greater range of environments.

"There’s more than one breed of working dog because no one is “better.” Each has its specific strengths, paid for with corresponding weaknesses. A terrier is to small to hunt wolves, but you’re not going to stuff a wolfhound down a badger hole.

"This was a great analogy. It’s also one of the primary reasons I believe the egalitarian equalist narrative is a deliberate lie with the hoped-for purpose of empowering people who cannot compete, or believe they have some plenary exclusion from competing in various aspects of life. One of the primary selling points of egalitarian equalism for men is the idea that they can be excluded from the Burden of Performance.

"There is no such thing as ‘equality’ because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

"The tests that a chaotic world throws at human beings is never equal or balanced in measure to our strengths to pass them. Equality, in the terms that egalitarian equalists are comfortable in defining it, implies that that every individual is equally matched in both value and utility within a totality of random challenges. Aside from this being patently false, it also demerits both strengths and weaknesses when that individual succeeds or fails at a particular challenge as a result of their individual character."

This article, from is one that reminded me of a nagging feeling of annoyance, later turned resentment, which I got from a boyfriend long past, when he said that I should be able to change my own oil. Why the hell should I be under a car, when I don't know the first thing about cars, would hate to be on the hard ground looking up at a bunch of unknown, filthy parts, and for lack of proper strength, would be just as likely to have the car come crashing down on me for not jacking it up properly? Rhetorical question, related to the lie of equality, to the feeling we have all experienced when facing the expectation that we be a breed of dog which we are not...

Math, for example: it's a left-brained activity, like language learning is a left-brained activity. I speak four languages. What the hell was wrong with me, that I couldn't make my highly functional left language brain also learn math? WTF? What is wrong with using the efficiency of my brain and its proclivities to do what I do easily and well and leave the rest to someone else who loves what I hate? So men are not all knitting and women are not all repairing their vacuum cleaners?! Really?! "Doing it all" is not all it has been cracked up to be, and there are degrees of function and survival which are perfectly acceptable on our own continuum of abilities and preferences.

And of course, if you can do it all, you don't have to be interdependent with another human being...like that British lady who was traveling down the Amazon alone, with her newly learned self-defense skills, repeating her mantra that fear would not devour her... Oops.

I found this article to be a good booster shot against the social narrative I grew up with. And I learned a new word: equalists—I don't plan on ever going back to them.

Clown or Hyena, It Doesn't Matter to Me