Equality Is Not Sameness, Yet Popular Culture Is Forgetting the Difference

As Olympic sport begins to admit the reality of biological difference, Hollywood continues to promote a fantasy that men and women are physically interchangeable.

The argument: The West must recover a truthful understanding of equality; one that affirms equal dignity while acknowledging real biological differences between men and women.

WHY IT MATTERS

Recently, the International Olympic Committee announced a new policy to protect the female category in Olympic sport beginning with the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The decision reflects a growing recognition that biological sex differences matter in competition. After years of heated debate, the world’s most influential sporting body is acknowledging a simple reality: fairness in women’s sport requires recognizing that men and women are not physically identical.

Yet while sport is beginning to reassert this very real biological distinction, popular culture continues to blur it. Hollywood action films increasingly portray men and women as physically interchangeable in fight scenes, routinely depicting female characters overpowering much larger male opponents (see Red Notice, Pitch Perfect 3, both Jumanjis, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga for examples). The goal is often to signal empowerment, but the result is a subtle cultural message that equality requires denying biological differences.

Photo by: Quino Al (Unsplash)

To be clear, films do more than entertain; they also shape how millions understand human nature, gender, and social expectations. So when Hollywood repeatedly depicts men and women as evenly matched in physical confrontation, it subtly rewrites basic truths about the human body. When Angelina Jolie easily keeps pace with Brad Pitt in Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s fight scenes, for instance, even emerging victorious in hand-to-hand combat in a typical suburban setting, she isn’t merely amusing filmgoers on a Saturday night—she is instead signaling that if she can do it, other women can, too. But that simply isn’t reality, as science overwhelmingly demonstrates the significant advantages the average man holds over even a highly-trained, fit woman.

That fact is why we must ensure that biological reality is respected on screen, as well as in the boxing ring. In England and Wales, 72.1% of victims in domestic abuse-related crimes were female in the year ending March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics. When films routinely depict men and women trading blows as equals, they normalize a vision of violence that conflicts with real-world vulnerability. Storytelling that ignores this truth risks shaping perceptions of strength, protection, and what moral behaviour is considered acceptable beyond the screen.

The choreography of these films is entertaining, sure, but it strains credibility. Fans may argue that action films are merely escapist fiction, yet these repeated portrayals weaken a long-standing moral intuition at the heart of Western civilization: that strength carries responsibility. For centuries, societies understood that men’s greater physical strength carried a duty of restraint and protection. The norm that men should not strike women was not an expression of female inferiority, but a recognition of asymmetry, and the civilizing expectation that strength should be used to protect, not dominate. When cultural narratives erase those differences, they also risk erasing the moral framework that once governed them.

“Equality does not require pretending that men and women are physically identical.”

The International Olympic Committee’s recent policy highlights the tension. In elite sport, biological difference is now being openly acknowledged again because fairness requires it. Yet outside sport, many cultural institutions still resist recognizing the same reality. Studies of mixed‑gender military training show that female recruits tend to experience higher rates of certain musculoskeletal injuries than their male counterparts during basic training, partly because they are often performing the same physically demanding tasks in integrated units without adjustments for average sex‑based differences in strength and physiology.

Restoring clarity here does not diminish women. On the contrary, it allows female achievement to be recognized within the truth of embodied difference rather than within artificial standards of sameness.Western civilization has historically understood equality in richer terms: equal dignity, equal moral worth, and equal protection under the law paired with an honest recognition that men and women are not identical. Recovering that balance needs to be part of restoring cultural sanity.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The debate over women’s sport is ultimately a debate about truth. Equality does not mean pretending differences do not exist. If the West hopes to restore a culture grounded in reality, our stories (on the screen and beyond) must rediscover the wisdom that dignity and difference can coexist.

Delphine Chui is Senior Editor of Education at Restoring the West. Follow her on X @DelphineChui.