What is the gender ratio on Literotica?

[SimonDoom]

you are full of shit

Your profile describes you as a high school teacher. I hope you teach your students better communication skills than you practice. You give opinions without offering any reasoning behind them, you offer no evidence or proof to support them, you have no published stories listed under your name here so would appear to have no experience to back you up, and you use obscenity toward me rather than engaging in ideas.

I would give a student who communicates the way you do an "F."

 

[KeithD]

I hope ginger isn't really a high school teacher, because, if so, that's a pretty dumb thing to admit to on a porn discussion board. Students have a way of ferreting out their supposedly "anonymous" teachers on the Internet (I've had a nephew revealed, although it wasn't related to porn, and we've had at least one regular poster here outed and she had a hell of a time getting erased here). Just sayin'.

 

[SimonDoom]

I hope ginger isn't really a high school teacher, because, if so, that's a pretty dumb thing to admit to on a porn discussion board. Students have a way of ferreting out their supposedly "anonymous" teachers on the Internet (I've had a nephew revealed, although it wasn't related to porn, and we've had at least one regular poster here outed and she had a hell of a time getting erased here). Just sayin'.

Now I feel guilty for pointing it out. My goal wasn't to out anybody or to increase the risk of outing. I'm adamantly against that sort of thing. You're right that it makes no sense to provide a lot of information about oneself. In my job I've done some online investigation and have read a lot about it and it's remarkably easy to figure out who somebody is using relatively little information.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Now I feel guilty for pointing it out. My goal wasn't to out anybody or to increase the risk of outing. I'm adamantly against that sort of thing. You're right that it makes no sense to provide a lot of information about oneself. In my job I've done some online investigation and have read a lot about it and it's remarkably easy to figure out who somebody is using relatively little information.

And there's quite a lot for identification on their profile too. Date of birth, state, and a very detailed physical description. I'd be wary of posting that much personal information on a site like this already, regardless of occupation.

 

[Voboy]

True and all, boys, but it's not like she can change her profile now even if she wanted to.

 

[Hypoxia]

Have faith. Believe what you wish. But ask yourself, "Does this matter?"

 

[gingerotica]

[Personal attacks and/or accusations/insults against other Literotica authors and trolling prohibited per our AH Forum Rules]

 

[MelissaBaby]

you have no published stories listed under your name here "

That's too bad. Their clever, original word play really made me want to read their work.

 

[Maeven_quinn]

I know that generally speaking, written erotic content is more popular among women while graphic content is more popular among men. Had something to do with the way their minds work, I think. Was a long time since I read that though. Can't say that holds true for Literotica though, and it'll probably depend on the category too.

It's true that women are more verbal. I do not believe that it's true that men are more visual.

Men watch more porn than women because most porn has been made with men in mind. That's been changing a lot over at least the last decade, thankfully.

I read my porn. I like to watch it too though.

 

[lustatopia]

It's true that women are more verbal. I do not believe that it's true that men are more visual.

Men watch more porn than women because most porn has been made with men in mind. That's been changing a lot over at least the last decade, thankfully.

I read my porn. I like to watch it too though.

I read this whole thread and it was actually quite entertaining, sans the bit of nastiness at the end.

Maeven_quinn, statistically, yes men are more visually tuned into their environments. (Of course, statistics mean zip when talking about individuals who are all unique in their aptitudes.)

Men are more visual due to a couple of million years or so of evolutionary forcing towards hunting and tracking prey down, then tossing shit at beasts from a distance.

The guys who were good at this simply got laid more than those who weren't. Natural selection did the rest. Women burdened with child rearing were more prone to sedentary tasks which did not requiring togographic navigation and shit-tossing skills, thus women developed a different set of strengths (statistically speaking) for instance, women are statistically better at communication, ie language, as well as cooperation, eye-hand dexterity tasks and probably empathy as well.

As for the ratio of men to women on Lit, I'll bet it varies a lot depending on where you are on the site, although it would be fair to imagine it's male dominated in most places.

It would be more interesting to see a breakdown of the sexual identity preference of the Lit community. After all in 2019, what difference does one's physical gender really amount to in a digital medium?

 

[SimonDoom]

I read this whole thread and it was actually quite entertaining, sans the bit of nastiness at the end.

Maeven_quinn, statistically, yes men are more visually tuned into their environments. (Of course, statistics mean zip when talking about individuals who are all unique in their aptitudes.)

Men are more visual due to a couple of million years or so of evolutionary forcing towards hunting and tracking prey down, then tossing shit at beasts from a distance.

The guys who were good at this simply got laid more than those who weren't. Natural selection did the rest. Women burdened with child rearing were more prone to sedentary tasks which did not requiring togographic navigation and shit-tossing skills, thus women developed a different set of strengths (statistically speaking) for instance, women are statistically better at communication, ie language, as well as cooperation, eye-hand dexterity tasks and probably empathy as well.

As for the ratio of men to women on Lit, I'll bet it varies a lot depending on where you are on the site, although it would be fair to imagine it's male dominated in most places.

It would be more interesting to see a breakdown of the sexual identity preference of the Lit community. After all in 2019, what difference does one's physical gender really amount to in a digital medium?

It's interesting to speculate about what the origins of sex differences are, assuming there are differences. I tend to think men, on average, are more visual than women in the sense that they are more apt to be attracted to and to evaluate women on visual grounds than vice versa. To the extent it's evolutionary, I suspect it's more a matter of sex selection: men historically were attracted to women for physical/visual traits associated with high fertility. Women were attracted to men for nonvisual (and visual) traits associated with survival and successful competition for scarce resources against other men. But I suspect culture has just as much to do with it. Also, averages are just averages, and at a site like this people tend to be much more appreciative of deviations from the mean.

 

[lustatopia]

It's interesting to speculate about what the origins of sex differences are, assuming there are differences. I tend to think men, on average, are more visual than women in the sense that they are more apt to be attracted to and to evaluate women on visual grounds than vice versa. To the extent it's evolutionary, I suspect it's more a matter of sex selection: men historically were attracted to women for physical/visual traits associated with high fertility. Women were attracted to men for nonvisual (and visual) traits associated with survival and successful competition for scarce resources against other men. But I suspect culture has just as much to do with it. Also, averages are just averages, and at a site like this people tend to be much more appreciative of deviations from the mean.

Very true. Averages are made to be broken! Especially here at Lit.

But is the fact that men tend to evaluate women more for visual traits associated with sexual voluptuousness a cause or an effect?

I'd suggest the later since evolutionary forcing is a multi-million year long process and yet the physical sexual dimorphism in Homo sapiens appears to be greater than in earlier hominids due to the enlargement of the skull to hold a larger brain. (Modern human female hips became much broader to better suit birthing requirement of a larger head.) While the fossil records indicates the hunting/gathering cultural style appeared in much earlier species, such as Homo erectus.



Heeh, heh, I got to say Homo erectus. ;-)

 

[Hypoxia]

The guys who were good at this simply got laid more than those who weren't. Natural selection did the rest.

Of course, people just liked fucking for fun, too. Not to mention conquest and rapine, swapping women between tribes, and the usual forced incest. It's not all choice.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Maeven_quinn, statistically, yes men are more visually tuned into their environments. (Of course, statistics mean zip when talking about individuals who are all unique in their aptitudes.)

Men are more visual due to a couple of million years or so of evolutionary forcing towards hunting and tracking prey down, then tossing shit at beasts from a distance.

How do we know this to be true? It's a nice story, but what is the evidence that this is the true cause for differences in male vs. female visual response patterns, as opposed to any other possible explanation?

The guys who were good at this simply got laid more than those who weren't. Natural selection did the rest.

...but then those guys would have passed on their superior visual genes to their daughters, too, so this doesn't explain male-female differences at all. Unless you're suggesting something fancy like a Y-linked gene or something that's only activated by other sex-linked stuff, which is certainly possible but starting to get a bit elaborate.

Women burdened with child rearing were more prone to sedentary tasks which did not requiring togographic navigation and shit-tossing skills, thus women developed a different set of strengths (statistically speaking) for instance, women are statistically better at communication, ie language, as well as cooperation, eye-hand dexterity tasks and probably empathy as well.

"Eye-hand dexterity" is also inherently visual, as are some of the other stereotypically female tasks like "find the tiny shoot that signals a nutritious root vegetable" and "tell the difference between poisonous and edible mushrooms".

So why do visually-oriented male tasks lead to visual patterns of sexual arousal, but not female visual stuff?

This is the problem with the Just So Story variety of evo-psych - it's so easy to come up with a story for anything. If we had data showing that women were more visually oriented than men, I'd be able to point to hand-eye and foraging work as evolutionary explanations... and still there'd be no evidence that this was the real reason for it.

 

[lustatopia]

This is the problem with the Just So Story variety of evo-psych - it's so easy to come up with a story for anything. If we had data showing that women were more visually oriented than men, I'd be able to point to hand-eye and foraging work as evolutionary explanations... and still there'd be no evidence that this was the real reason for it.

Hey, I'm just repeating research points I've read. I'm open to other interpretations of the origins of the observed sexual dimorphism in humans. But it ain't gonna be any different then discussing the difference in any other species, me thinks. Because we are critters too, although we do have cultural and linguistic forcing issues which complicates matters.

Of course, there are people who don't think the evolutionary process via natural selection explains the fossil record and some of them make some pretty good arguments. I'm not talking about the Christians either, but real biologists. So there's that.

But the anti-evolutionists, at least the scientific ones, all share your same problem. They diss situational evolutionary scenarios as just-so stories but fail to offer an alternative explanation.

 

[lustatopia]

Of course, people just liked fucking for fun, too. Not to mention conquest and rapine, swapping women between tribes, and the usual forced incest. It's not all choice.

I'm betting the guys who were good at killing wooly mammoths with projectile weapons after tracking them for weeks were the same guys who most liked fucking for fun and were the best at conquest, rapine, swapping women and the usual forced incest stuff too. But yeah, you're right. It's complicated.

This could be why the whole Enlightenment thing didn't get off the ground until the last 200 years of 3 millions years of us fucking around on this planet.

 

[Hypoxia]

I'm betting the guys who were good at killing wooly mammoths with projectile weapons after tracking them for weeks were the same guys who most liked fucking for fun and were the best at conquest, rapine, swapping women and the usual forced incest stuff too. But yeah, you're right. It's complicated.

Yes, quite complicated. We have many (strange) ways of being human, and little commonality. But I won't whip out any sociology studies. Just trust me.

This could be why the whole Enlightenment thing didn't get off the ground until the last 200 years of 3 millions years of us fucking around on this planet.

I was just kicked off a liberal discussion board for suggesting that Enlightenment didn't mean Evil Europeans Pillage The World. A bunch of factors came together just right giving Euro assholes dominance over most other assholes. Enlightenment seems to be collapsing now. What's next? (A post-reality world, ay yi yi.)

ObTopic: We can imagine whatever ratios we want because we don't know.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Hey, I'm just repeating research points I've read. I'm open to other interpretations of the origins of the observed sexual dimorphism in humans.

But it ain't gonna be any different then discussing the difference in any other species, me thinks. Because we are critters too, although we do have cultural and linguistic forcing issues which complicates matters.

...and that there is an alternative explanation for the type of dimorphism we were discussing. Culture obviously influences many aspects of how people develop, and many phenomena in culture are gendered to at least some degree. So we shouldn't be asserting the truth of an evolutionary explanation before we've eliminated the possibility of a cultural explanation (and vice versa; IRL the answer often comes down to some complicated mix of "both, and more").

Even where a trait can be confirmed to be genetic, it's risky to assume that it must be advantageous. Evolution favours those who are better able to pass on their genes, but it doesn't follow that every trait created by evolution is beneficial for reproductive success. Genetics is full of complicated package deals and side-effects: men have nipples because women have nipples, folk like me have increased skin cancer risk as a trade-off for better Vitamin D synthesis, etc. etc.

Of course, there are people who don't think the evolutionary process via natural selection explains the fossil record and some of them make some pretty good arguments.

Which people? (I know Behe is still shilling his "irreducible complexity" argument, but you said good arguments...)

But the anti-evolutionists, at least the scientific ones, all share your same problem. They diss situational evolutionary scenarios as just-so stories but fail to offer an alternative explanation.

There are many, many problems with "scientific" anti-evolutionists, but that isn't one of them.

If somebody asserts that Jack the Ripper was actually Teddy Roosevelt, it is quite reasonable for me to say "Are you sure? How do you know that?" I am not obliged to put up my own theory about who the Ripper was, in order to challenge that assertion; I just need to point out that they haven't made much of an effort to eliminate possible alternatives. And if their claim is well founded, they should be able to give me an answer that's a bit more persuasive than just "well it could have happened that way".

For instance: sickle cell disease is a hereditary illness that kills about a hundred thousand people a year, causing something like a 30-year reduction in life expectancy. So why is it still with us?

If I ask a geneticist, they will tell me that it's linked to malaria resistance via a dominant/recessive mechanism: people who get one copy of the allele get malaria resistance (beneficial), people with two get sickle cell disease (harmful). That theory has a whole bunch of very specific implications (e.g.: we should expect higher rates of SCD among people with recent ancestry in malaria-prone regions, there should be specific alleles that are associated with both SCD and malaria resistance, they should probably have something to do with blood cells given that both SCD and malaria are blood-related.) And all of those implications check out!

So if I ask a geneticist "why do you believe this explanation to be true, rather than some other?" they can give me a lot of very specific reasons. It's not just "well, I couldn't imagine anything else"; their theory makes a bunch of testable predictions.

By and large, evo-psych doesn't do that, and that's part of why it has a poor reputation. It's not that evolution can't influence psychology, just that evo-psych advocates seem to be very quick to latch on to these explanations without making much effort to test them. (Has anybody even looked for a sex-specific genetic mechanism that might make men more visually oriented than women? If so, did they find it? Are there observable differences in the frequency of relevant alleles in societies which did more/less hunting?)

 

[Hypoxia]

So if I ask a geneticist "why do you believe this explanation to be true, rather than some other?" they can give me a lot of very specific reasons. It's not just "well, I couldn't imagine anything else"; their theory makes a bunch of testable predictions.

That's the trick. Does your model of reality make testable predictions? If so, go for it! If not, it's worthless. A theory (outside legal circles) is a usable, testable model that spawns more questions. Failed tests lead to more models (theories). We eventually home in on usable reality, unless sidelined by political-religious assholes. Beware those who know The Truth.

 

[lustatopia]

I was just kicked off a liberal discussion board for suggesting that Enlightenment didn't mean Evil Europeans Pillage The World. A bunch of factors came together just right giving Euro assholes dominance over most other assholes. Enlightenment seems to be collapsing now. What's next? (A post-reality world, ay yi yi.)

Fashionably foppish posturings change with the wind. It's true that the current crop of postmodernists, themselves the end product of the Enlightenment, like to play the intersectional victimhood card against the authors of the Enlightenment, who are most dead white privileged males.

Nevertheless, systems of cognition as powerful as the methodology of science, ie, rational observation, hypothesis formation and testing... as well as the universal rights of humanity as outline in the US Bill of Rights, essentially an Enlightenment manifesto, are not so easily dismissed, even if they can be distorted and misused.

I suspect the rational ideas of the Enlightenment will out live today's swelling tide of collectivist Endarkenment, simply because the epistemology pioneered in the Enlightenment works and that of the new Endarkenment does not.

 

[lustatopia]

...and that there is an alternative explanation for the type of dimorphism we were discussing. Culture obviously influences many aspects of how people develop, and many phenomena in culture are gendered to at least some degree. So we shouldn't be asserting the truth of an evolutionary explanation before we've eliminated the possibility of a cultural explanation (and vice versa; IRL the answer often comes down to some complicated mix of "both, and more").

Even where a trait can be confirmed to be genetic, it's risky to assume that it must be advantageous. Evolution favours those who are better able to pass on their genes, but it doesn't follow that every trait created by evolution is beneficial for reproductive success. Genetics is full of complicated package deals and side-effects: men have nipples because women have nipples, folk like me have increased skin cancer risk as a trade-off for better Vitamin D synthesis, etc. etc.)

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Bramblethorn. A lot to think about in there...

Is the fact that culture evolved as an adaption to existential contingencies - the most important being the physical necessity of women to bear the brunt of pregnancy and child-rearing - a just-so story. Sure, but only because it is just so.

Ancient cultural contingencies are based upon physical existential challenges. Why are men statistically bigger and more robust then women?

Is it a just so story to speculate that young males were usually the most expendable members of the culture who could be sent out away from the safety of the fire to hunt for game, while the females stayed closer to the home to ensure the survival of the children?

The males who failed (for whatever reason) when confronted in the hunt or in battle tended to be less successful at passing along their genes. Cave paintings, like at Lascaux, have a shitload of information in them that supports just so stories like these. So do hundreds of archaeological excavations around the world.

True, our contemporary view of reality is conditioned by the parameters of our culture today and culture determines how children are socialised toward socially normative gender roles, but that doesn't explain physical dimorphism.

What you called "psychological" differences between the sexes are often not entirely cultural. Although, it's true that it is difficult to weed out nature from nurture.

For instance, it isn't credible to propose that men are more aggressive than women simply because culture, even while the rates of violence varies between cultures. Culture moderates violence, but is not the cause of the obviously hard wired aggressive tendency of the male cohort.

I don't wish to overstate my faith in the predictive usefulness the of natural selection model. Nevertheless, anthropologists are imagining possible scenarios based on the fossil record of our ancestors and by applying to that record the modern tools of genetic analysis to generate very interesting results, some of which is challenging the conventional anthropological views of only a few decades ago.

For instance, the idea that the Earth was populated by many different intelligent, language-using hominid species right up into the Holocene is a remarkable discovery. It seems hominid genomic evolution is a much more plastic and diverse then we had imagined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan

I am curious, though, to read what your scenario would be for the creation of Man and Woman. It's one of the great mythopoetic topics of all time. Every culture from the most aboriginal to Carl Sagan's empiricism knows their culture's Adam and Eve story by rote.

What's yours?

 

[Hypoxia]

Every culture from the most aboriginal to Carl Sagan's empiricism knows their culture's Adam and Eve story by rote.

What's yours?

The great god Scrotium vomited Alan and Betsy up from a hole in the earth near northeast Arizona. Varied birds and animals accompanied them. Some critters became friends before being eaten. Alan (fucking) and Betsy (fucked) generated slews of hominid children, some wiith wings in their heads. These became philosophers and emigrated to Europe. Then Tycho Brahe invented science and the world changed. The end.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I’ve been watching this with interest.

There’s a fascinating article on the entire topic: Equality for the sexes in human evolution? Early hominid sexual dimorphism and implications for mating systems and social behavior by Clark Spencer Larsen. Larsen notes that virtually all hominid species have or had body mass dimorphism, with males being bigger than females. The bigger the difference, the more likely that physical conflict for mating is/was present. He notes, “Insight into dimorphism... has important implications for social behavior and organization in later and present-day humans.”

Larsen acknowledges the problems with attempting to measure sexual dimorphism with long-extinct species and discusses some of the workarounds for that. He tentatively concludes that even pre-Homo species such as Australopithecus afarensis may well have made a monogamous social structure, much like that in H. sapiens.

That said, donning Nomex, fumbling for Kevlar...

First off, while every factor in this planetary Darwinian experiment to some degree involves random chance, virtually none of the results do. It’s more or less a given that, in terms of evolution, nothing exists without reason or cause. Everything costs something in terms of energy and nothing we see is there ‘just because’. Predators are fast, all other things being equal, because fast ones survive to breed and slow ones don’t.

The problem when we go further than that is that we as a species instinctively try to find reasons for things. That inevitably leads to conspiracy theories, but it also led to fire, stone tools and penicillin.

Explanations for almost anything and everything started out as religious (“In the beginning, God created...”). These were eventually challenged or supplemented by the not-too-different philosophical efforts to explain things. (‘Spontaneous generation’, for instance, was a popular theory which had flies being created from garbage, rats and mice being created from grain, etc.) Those are the serious equivalents to Kipling’s Just-So stories.

Yet, acknowledging the problems with trying to explain things without 100% of the facts, what else is there? Considering human sexual dimorphism, we lack the ability to travel in time to take samples, to observe the changes and conditions and patterns over millennia. It is inevitable therefore that we will take such hard facts as we can find and try to fit them into a coherent pattern, using logic as the glue. (That process of course differs from earlier, pre-scientific explanations in that we use more than just impressions, hopes or fancy.)

It’s only a theory, granted. Theories are overtaken, modified, discarded as new facts become available. Just a theory, but so is atomic theory. Nobody has ever seen an electron or shaken hands with a Higgs Boson, yet it works well enough that we can generate electricity with and and, God help us, a quarter-million Japanese died because of it.

So, on average, men are bigger and more muscular, can run faster than women. Women are better at some intellectual tasks and seem to be better at fine detail. Such things are pretty well established. Not better or worse in either case, just shades of different.

In virtually every primitive society we know of, the men tend(ed) to hunt and women tend(ed) to do more gathering, staying close to the tribal hearth as it were. It’s universal enough that the exceptions can be legitimately tagged as outliers.

How to explain such things?

Until comparatively recently, ours was what we would now call a primitive society, a hunter-gatherer society. (OK, many different societies, but they differed only in details.) Let’s consider hunting, for protein was desperately valuable.

Disregarding muscle differences which make women incapable of drawing as heavy a bow or throwing a spear as far, there’s no reason for women to not be effective hunters. Yet men seem(ed) to do most of it. Why? Well, consider that nubile women in primitive societies were/are essentially in a state of perpetual pregnancy. Consider also that group survival depended on that steady flow of babies; infant mortality was high, lifespans short and social safety networks non-existent. Those babies were the retirement plan and anything which threatened the ‘tribal fertility’ was probably not a good idea.

Women certainly could hunt and no doubt did, but a primitive mother is inextricably linked to her infants. True, nursing children might be left with another nursing woman, but there are problems with that, too. Inevitably, trying to go on major hunts with a crying baby or three probably wasn’t a good plan. There is, of course, no such problem with men having been sent out to find food, no matter how long they were away.

And, to put it bluntly, in terms of group survival, wombs were valuable and dicks were cheap. A woman hunting rabbits would be one thing, but however Edenesque Jean Auld’s ‘Earth’s Children’ society might be, hunting predators or large animals like mammoths, rhinos or hippos would have been very dangerous to the participants. Any society which encouraged its few and valuable wombs to be consistently put at risk hunting such would be less likely to survive than one which protected them.

‘Just-So’? To an extent, yes, but it offers a rational explanation or linkage for the observable facts at hand. Men were, to some extent, expendable in terms of ‘home life’; women were more likely to be kept near the hearth by biology. Again, not better or worse, but different.

Take it further. Would there be any advantage, evolutionarily-speaking, for women to be as tall and strong as men? It’s hard to see one, frankly. (A pelvis wide enough to permit childbirth is a given, of course.)

Still further – this sort of pressure has been there for thousands upon thousands of generations, which is certainly long enough for genetic change to have taken place. Without going into details of what such changes are or might be, is it in any way unlikely that men and women carry genetic traits making them both physically and psychologically different?

(That certainly doesn’t imply that we are genetically programmed to the same degree as Auld’s Neanderthals, with men being utterly incapable of cooking and women being utterly hopeless at hunting. We’re talking shades and trends.)

Caveats to all of that: 1. Yes, it’s only a theory. 2. Theories can, will and should be altered as new facts show up. 3. We’re talking averages and individuals most certainly will vary. 4. In a sample size as large as H. sapiens, exceptions can be found to anything. That doesn’t necessarily disprove the basic premise.

 

[searing87]

Readership and Writers

I'd assume women tend to read romance novels more than men. I'm not sure what men like, but being male, I prefer stuff that is credible. Men with huge "manhood" (I hate that word) who can shoot gallons of cum are ridiculous. I don't like women to be horny victims.

As a photographer I've worked with thousands of fashion models. BTW, please learn to spell and employ proper usage.

 

[Hypoxia]

Peoples aren't hunter-gatherers forever, and some environments (esp. the Americas) lacked big game animals to feed a tribe for weeks. Agriculture and domestication changed human physical evolution, as do any societies that care for their elders and infirm (who might have a few bright ideas up their sleeves). Wikipedia sez,

The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Pigs, sheep and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world... about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture into the twenty-first [century].​

Some societies had no need for agriculture, esp. in the Pacific Northwest with its vast salmon runs and food oversupply, leading to 'potlatch' cultures. I don't know if/how fishing was sorted by gender. But a bunch of small women can haul in the nets as well as a few big guys.