Frank T. Pool

My wife and I bought a new television a few months ago. We watched very little before that, but nowadays we “improve our minds with TV” a few times a week. It’s something that we can do together.

We have been watching “Breaking Bad” and “Just Call Saul” concurrently, often alternating episodes from each season. I can only take so much badness at a time, so we’ll probably be at this for a while.

One of the characters in both series is Michael Ehrmantraut, formerly a cop from Philadelphia who was on the take. Mike killed the crooked cops who murdered his straight-arrow policeman son. He is tough and smart and knows how to commit crimes when he has to. He moves to Albuquerque to support his son’s widow and to be a doting grandfather; meanwhile, he gets sucked deeper into the world of organized crime.

In a fairly early episode, he shows up along with two toughs to be backup for a milquetoast pharmaceutical company employee who diverts drugs to a dealer. Mike ends up beating up and disarming the guys in a short explosion of choreographed violence.

The actor who plays Mike, Jonathan Banks, was born in 1947 and was at least 62 when that episode was filmed. Now, guys that age can indeed be tough—I notice nobody challenged me to a fistfight when I was 62—but the ease with which he defeats younger, bigger men is a convention of drama violence that does not reflect the real world.

To quote the Godzilla trailer—size matters. A welterweight may be quicker of hand and foot than a heavyweight, and may land some clean shots, but eventually the heavyweight will put him away. Likewise with wrestlers, who compete according to weight class. A former roommate talked about how in high school he used diuretics and diet to be as light as possible at weigh-in.

Obviously, size does not matter equally in all sports, but height and weight, along with muscular strength does matter when we move from sports to physical altercations.

When my daughter was a little girl, one of her favorite shows was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” We were happy that she found a heroine who could triumph against evil. We were glad our daughter developed self-confidence, and she even had a favorite stake she played with much in the way that I had once played with sticks as swords.

The show had frequent scenes where a five-foot-four-inch actress regularly defeated male vampires and demons who probably outweighed her by fifty to seventy pounds. Well, there’s no such thing as vampires and demons, and small women don’t very often beat up larger men unless they have magical weapons that turn their opponents into dust.

In a recent article in the British publication The Critic, Niall Gooch alludes to Buffy, and says that her combat prowess was “less a reflection of reality and more a well-crafted piece of TV wish-fulfilment.”

He points to a video of two fairly small female police officers and a very slight male colleague having great difficulty making an arrest at a bus stop. This leads him to write about the necessity of having physical requirements for police officers who are required to make arrests.

Gooch says that among the worst reasons not to re-institute rigorous physical qualifications is “denial or obfuscation of the strength differences between men and women,” which he claims is backed by science and observation.

Men run faster, tend to be larger, and have greater upper-body strength. He cites the time in 1998 when both Venus and Serena Williams were defeated by Karsten Braasch, ranked 203 in the men’s division. Serena said, “I hit shots that would have been winners on the women’s tour, and he got to them easily.” Gooch also cites the defeat in 2016 of the Australian women’s national soccer team by a group of boys under age 15.

A major reason we have women’s sports is to allow them to excel competing against each other, not against men. The men’s record in the 100-meter race is 9.58 seconds and the women’s record is 10.49 seconds. That half-second difference doesn’t sound like much, but it is significant in that sport. The 25th best women’s spot is a tie at 10.81, and for the men it’s tied at 9.86. The best recorded time for a 70-year-old man is 12.77; for a woman, 14.73 seconds.

A sizable majority of Americans in a recent Gallup poll now believe that athletes should compete based upon their sex at birth, up from 62% in 2021 to 69% in 2023.

Well, that’s an issue for another day. The point I’m making is that, whether it’s a guy eligible for early Social Security quickly taking down a burly thug, or a young woman regularly knocking out larger and stronger men, television and the movies are depicting acts of violence that deviate significantly from what really happens.

Men achieve maximum strength in their 20s, and can maintain it until around age 50. After that it declines. Exercise can help but not reverse it. A tough 65-year-old is not going to be as strong as a 25-year-old.

Television and movies are not reality—I get that. We’re drawn by triumph, not brutality. Superheroes are fantasy inventions, not actual humans who might, in punching out evildoers, break bones in their own hands. But what we see on the screen should not determine what we expect in the world.

Especially when it comes to beating people up.