We live in a curious age in which the self-evident isn’t. So if you have a friend muddled about whether men and women are different, here’s some help. It’s the #chairchallenge already making its way around the Internet, and while women can do it, men can’t.
What’s involved? One easy-to-lift chair, one wall, plus at least one male and one female participant, both ideally wearing shoes.
- Stand facing the wall, toes touching it, and then move back two footsteps (not paces – just the length of your own feet). You should now be standing two full foot lengths away from the wall.
- Place a chair under you touching the wall (or have someone else do it).
- Bend forward over the chair at a roughly 90-degree angle and lean the top of your head against the wall.
- Grab the chair by its seat and raise it to your chest.
- Then, stand up!
That’s all there is to it! We tested this out at our house, and I found while I could almost, sort of, kind of do it in my socks, there was no way once I had shoes on, as that brought me just a smidgeon further away from the wall. Meanwhile, my wife did it with ease.
So why the consistent results? A number of possible explanations have been offered:
- Men generally have larger feet, putting them further from the wall.
- Women generally have a lower relative center meaning more of their weight is over their feet making it easier to move off the wall.
- Women are generally more flexible than men, making it easier for them to shift the center of mass.
Whatever the reason, a sharp male/female divide is evident and that makes this not only a funny experiment to try, but also an important one. God says we are created male and female (Genesis 2:17) and for different roles (Ephesians 5:22-33). Our rebellious world dares insist the opposite: infinite genders, no notable differences between them. Now we’ve got an experiment that makes the self-evident obvious again.
