![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2CNOHpz
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning…”
that makes me think of my boss when I worked for the chemistry dept in college. she was maybe five feet tall, around 50 years old, and I remember one day her saying to me, over a five-gallon drum of acetone, ’[lace], don’t try to lift this, it’s probably too heavy. let [your male coworker] do it’ … and then easily picking it up herself.
Yes. Yes! Yes this.
I just get tired of Everyone Knows You Need To Be Big To Be Strong, and I know it’s because we have such a visual culture at this point, but in real life, when you do manual labor, you start to realize that size is not at all an indicator of how strong someone is, and a lot of times, it’s knowing how to use your body, it’s practice and practicality. Someone smaller will have to lift with their legs or strategically get their shoulder under it or something; someone larger will know that lifting it straight up will hurt their back so they’ll get a knee under it instead, that kind of thing.
One thing I will say for my BIL– he’s the kind of guy who opens car doors for women, but they tend to hire a pretty balanced crew, gender-wise, and there’s generally a pretty frank assessment of people’s strength based not on gender or physical size, but rather on real criteria, like “come over here and pick this up, can you do it? ok no? all right we’ll give you this other job” and there are very few jobs that someone physically can’t do, it’s just that a taller person would be faster, and a shorter person would do better at that other job, and such.
I’m old enough now, though, that when the various men at the office job are like “oh let me carry that” I’m like “fine go ahead” because I really don’t care to prove myself.
BIL and Dad have been putting rafters on the new barn, and it’s a lot of heavy lifting, and Dad is 74 and has a bad shoulder, but man, he can still lift really heavy things despite being only 140 pounds. BIL is 6′2″ and about 200 lbs, and he’s very, very strong, but he has a family history of severe back problems, and has been fighting against developing his own back problems for his whole working life, so he’s extremely careful about how he lifts things. He does, and he can, and he’s very strong, but he’s also learned to be smart about it.
On Friday, I had to climb up into the back of the dump truck to lift things up into the barn loft, and i had a terrible moment of being, like, a humorous Internet video about an elderly corgi, because I stared at that truck bed, which was a solid four and a half feet off the ground, and absolutely did this little what-do-i-do dance, it was hilarious and terrible. I had no idea how i was going to get my fat ass up into that truck, and my dad took pity on me and was like “ok I’ll come down and climb up there” and I was like no sister did it so i should be able to! and eventually I figured out that I could climb the wheel and then cantilever myself out over the flange of the truck bed by hanging onto the side, but it was so pathetic, and so sad. And then I basically didn’t do any of the lifting either because my angle was bad. It was pathetic. And then I had to get down. Argh!
Listen, if you want 40 pounds moved over and over again across a room, I’m your woman. But I don’t really climb or jump, that’s just how it is.
(Your picture was not posted)
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning…”
that makes me think of my boss when I worked for the chemistry dept in college. she was maybe five feet tall, around 50 years old, and I remember one day her saying to me, over a five-gallon drum of acetone, ’[lace], don’t try to lift this, it’s probably too heavy. let [your male coworker] do it’ … and then easily picking it up herself.
Yes. Yes! Yes this.
I just get tired of Everyone Knows You Need To Be Big To Be Strong, and I know it’s because we have such a visual culture at this point, but in real life, when you do manual labor, you start to realize that size is not at all an indicator of how strong someone is, and a lot of times, it’s knowing how to use your body, it’s practice and practicality. Someone smaller will have to lift with their legs or strategically get their shoulder under it or something; someone larger will know that lifting it straight up will hurt their back so they’ll get a knee under it instead, that kind of thing.
One thing I will say for my BIL– he’s the kind of guy who opens car doors for women, but they tend to hire a pretty balanced crew, gender-wise, and there’s generally a pretty frank assessment of people’s strength based not on gender or physical size, but rather on real criteria, like “come over here and pick this up, can you do it? ok no? all right we’ll give you this other job” and there are very few jobs that someone physically can’t do, it’s just that a taller person would be faster, and a shorter person would do better at that other job, and such.
I’m old enough now, though, that when the various men at the office job are like “oh let me carry that” I’m like “fine go ahead” because I really don’t care to prove myself.
BIL and Dad have been putting rafters on the new barn, and it’s a lot of heavy lifting, and Dad is 74 and has a bad shoulder, but man, he can still lift really heavy things despite being only 140 pounds. BIL is 6′2″ and about 200 lbs, and he’s very, very strong, but he has a family history of severe back problems, and has been fighting against developing his own back problems for his whole working life, so he’s extremely careful about how he lifts things. He does, and he can, and he’s very strong, but he’s also learned to be smart about it.
On Friday, I had to climb up into the back of the dump truck to lift things up into the barn loft, and i had a terrible moment of being, like, a humorous Internet video about an elderly corgi, because I stared at that truck bed, which was a solid four and a half feet off the ground, and absolutely did this little what-do-i-do dance, it was hilarious and terrible. I had no idea how i was going to get my fat ass up into that truck, and my dad took pity on me and was like “ok I’ll come down and climb up there” and I was like no sister did it so i should be able to! and eventually I figured out that I could climb the wheel and then cantilever myself out over the flange of the truck bed by hanging onto the side, but it was so pathetic, and so sad. And then I basically didn’t do any of the lifting either because my angle was bad. It was pathetic. And then I had to get down. Argh!
Listen, if you want 40 pounds moved over and over again across a room, I’m your woman. But I don’t really climb or jump, that’s just how it is.
(Your picture was not posted)
