Sexist Grading System

Aging has caused me to lose between 1 and 2 inches. I demand an immediate regrading of all routes to take this personal tragedy into account.

But this is just a momentary problem. Once guidebooks are fully computerized, you'll enter your age, height, weight, gender, sexual orientation, various 1-rep max's, pb ultramarathon time, fill out a psychological profile, give a complete list of childhood diseases and STD's, and get customized grades for every route in the database.

Problem solved.

So their color grades are still a grading system . . . its just less precise . . . Also different people have different strengths. And it was poorly written.

trash article, insert into dumpster.

Can't believe I spent 5 minutes on that. They're already arbitrary grades on arbitrary routes up a random rock. If they want, then they can create their own guidebooks, customized by height, weight, gender, ape index, body type, BMI, climbing style, etc. so they don't feel bad about their numbers

Everyone's being way too hard on this guy. In this work I see the makings of the next David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, or William Gaddis. This is some truly inspirational writing. Bravo sir, bravo. I now have excuse #461 to add to my arsenal of reasons why I failed to redpoint a route.

DrRockso wrote:Tldr: His assumption that 50% of the rock climbing population are females couldn't be farther from the truth. We can only wish.

+1!

Here's my interpretation of the blog post:

• First ascentionists are generally men, this means generally men get to have the first say in the grades of things
• They grade it according to their personal perspective
• Some women the author knows get bummed out because they think they can climb at some grade, but every now and again they get their ass handed to them at that grade because it's a different style to what they're good at
• This makes the climbing grades we use sexist and the solution is to do away with grades, by making a new grading system where V0-V14 is split into 5 colors

That last point doesn't make sense to me, but then a lot of the current wave of feminism doesn't really make sense to me.

I think the solution to this dilemma of a small group of mostly hard men with tendons of steel ascending stuff and giving it a grade that makes me think I can do it but actually leads to my ass being handed to me, is to drop my ego. I don't want the world to adopt some fuzzy grading system to account for my particular set of disadvantages so I can feel better about myself.

To effectively para-quote hazel Finlay. "Women will never be as strong physiologically as men, you just got to look at marathon runners and Olympic sprites, but there's no reason why women can be as mentally strong as men" there stoat physical difference in build, stature and natural muscle tone of the majority of each sex. And in climbing being a physical pursuit it attracts mainly men. If sewing or some other "feminine" activity (I can't think of a female dominated sport or activity at the moment) was ranked on difficulty then men would be at the disadvantage. Men and women are different because we have evolved differently and thinking we can physically compare over night because suddenly everything is about political correctness rather than common decency and respect is just a pipe dream

Being 5'6" on a good day, I occasionally find reachy problems our routes outside. Oh well. I just understand that those climbs are not that grade for me. Doesn't bother me a bit. But I will say it is annoying to experience that repeatedly in a gym.

What a pile of tripe.

It no secret that being taller and stronger often gives advantages. Buts thats life we are all different. There are some climbs which being smaller give advantages.

The story of the FFA of this climb back in the 80s funny. The strongmen of the day had all failed to climb it without aid. And then along comes a woman of tiny stature and manages to be the first to free climb it. Some people cried foul that having small hands was now unfair!

(It is still hell fun to aid though!)

That was, by far, the most ridiculous climbing article I've read. Nicely done.

To those if you who mentioned gymnasts being short, a small correction. Short doesn't matter, weight and power does. And, in fact, if two ladies can do exactly the same moves, the one with longer arms and legs will score higher, because of the gorgeous lines she can get. They are pure pleasure to watch on the bars, especially. Once you get to world class though, those bodies generally have moved over to figure skating, where the big aerial moves are not allowed and the physics are still workable.

Eric Carlos, talk to your gym. They can keep the existing route and still add some holds here and there for the (hopefully) large variety of folks who come there.

And Patto, that photo is spectacular! It should be in the "exposure" thread. I have to say, my first thought wasn't how hard it would be to climb, but how much I'd be sweating it out for my climber if I had to belay them on that! : )

Sexist grading system:

Yes = I'd do her/him/it.
No = I wouldn't do him/her/it.
Yes, but = I'd do her/him/it but only after copious amounts of liquor.

Old lady H wrote:And Patto, that photo is spectacular! It should be in the "exposure" thread. I have to say, my first thought wasn't how hard it would be to climb, but how much I'd be sweating it out for my climber if I had to belay them on that! : )

Yes. Yes it should, I must have missed that thread because I am a big fan of exposed climbs! Here is more info on that route:
mountainproject.com/v/passp…

The exposure is amazing. Though I just aided the roof pitch, and the aid is damn easy. It still is the only aid climb I've done!

The amount of shit talking on this thread is almost funny in and of itself.
It's amazing how badly this community reacts to being called out on their male dominance. Climbing is male dominated, historically and presently, and as far as I can tell, no one is really disputing that. It is really such a stretch to think that grades would, on average, make more sense to men than to women?
If you are allergic to feminist-style discourse let me break it down for you, grades are not an inherent aspect of the rock, they come from the subjective experience of the first ascensionist. The more similar the climber is to that person the more the grade will make sense, this explains why dynos often feel unduly hard for shorter people, it also explains why Tommy Caldwell couldn't do a climb Beth Rodden eventually graded "only" 14c. And why slab, off width, and chimney routes are so notoriously sandbagged, the first ascensionists of those routes are often specialists who spend an inordinate amount of time on those styles. Since men are, on average, more similar to other men than to women, it is perfectly logical that one of the ways this would break down would be by gender.
The author's solution, to fuzz out the grading scale and use colors instead of numbers, is not absurd, or even original. The gym I frequent does the same thing (and I still struggle up climbs across three colors). The point of this is to acknowledge that assigning specific numbers to routes and the way that encourages us to think of those numbers as inherent to the route, is damaging to the experience, especially if you are a very different sort of person from the first ascensionist (or route-setter).

My one quibble with the article would be where he says that men and women entering a gym start off as equally bad and then the men get better. I'm not sure that's true, and if it is I can think of a number of other, largely cultural, reasons why it would be.

Jacob Smith wrote:Since men are, on average, more similar to other men than to women, it is perfectly logical that one of the ways this would break down would be by gender. The author's solution, to fuzz out the grading scale and use colors instead of numbers, is not absurd, or even original.

Sure, but I think there's a large disagreement with the fact that the author took a somewhat gender-related issue and blew it into a necessary social change in order for the sport to be appealing to both genders. This both isn't the case, and the way he proposed to fix it is essentially meaningless. His scale would require attaining a "dude grade" of V8, then translating it into a color, which is meaningless without it's relation to the V-scale. This solves nothing, and adds an extra step to an already wildly arbitrary process.

Wouldn't it make more sense to stress to new climbers that grades are very subjective, and they'll likely succeed largely in one aspect of climbing, and struggle with many others? Shouldn't we just make some general disclaimer on life because that's basically how it works? God life is unfair. Let's just do away with it.

Brendan Blanchard wrote: Wouldn't it make more sense to stress to new climbers that grades are very subjective, and they'll likely succeed largely in one aspect of climbing, and struggle with many others?

Of course it would. But then the OP couldn't whine about being oppressed and wouldn't have an outlet for their eighth-wave feminism ranting. I mean come on man, after paying a shitload of tuition for those "gender studies" classes you don't expect them to not view every single thing as oppression by the patriarchy do you? You want to put Wellesley and Bryn Mawr out of business?

patto wrote: Yes. Yes it should, I must have missed that thread because I am a big fan of exposed climbs! Here is more info on that route: mountainproject.com/v/passp… The exposure is amazing. Though I just aided the roof pitch, and the aid is damn easy. It still is the only aid climb I've done!

The thread was/is "what does exposure mean to you" and it's mostly photos! Yours would make a great bump. I don't have the strength to do much of anything with an overhang....YET. : )

Will S wrote:Sexist grading system: Yes = I'd do her/him/it. No = I wouldn't do him/her/it. Yes, but = I'd do her/him/it but only after copious amounts of liquor.

I like this one, Will! No sexism, here, methinks you've got a universal rating system, for every situation possible, probable, or improbable. : )

Jacob Smith wrote:It's amazing how badly this community reacts to being called out on their male dominance.

That isn't the reaction I'm seeing.

Jacob Smith wrote:let me break it down for you, grades are not an inherent aspect of the rock, they come from the subjective experience of the first ascensionist.

EXACTLY. And that isn't sexism.

Jacob Smith wrote:The author's solution, to fuzz out the grading scale and use colors instead of numbers, is not absurd, or even original.

No the idea is still absurd. Making a subjected measurement less precise doesn't help anybody.

Jacob Smith wrote:The point of this is to acknowledge that assigning specific numbers to routes and the way that encourages us to think of those numbers as inherent to the route, is damaging to the experience, especially if you are a very different sort of person from the first ascensionist (or route-setter).

BS. If you aren't adult enough to realise that in climbing grades are subjective then that is your own issue.

Maybe people should just get over their grade obsession and climb for the sake of climbing. Grades are a important guide and it stops people getting in over their heads. But any informed climber knows that there is a big difference between a long classic 5.9 in Tuolumne Meadows and 5.9 in a East Coast gym.

In fact the difference is far more stark than any male/female subjective differences. So maybe the system is discriminatory against anybody not in Yosemite? (jk)