"A few? Try most of the women who do take up martial arts for a lengthy period of time. Women are generally faster than men, and can get past a typical man's defenses more often than another man"

All this tells me is that you've been getting your ass handed to you by the women you have sparred with. ;-)

Yes, because many of the women I have sparred with were well trained, including how to use their differing physical attributes from men to their advantage. Less trained women obviously didn't fare as well. This certainly doesn't guarantee even the trained ones a victory if they go up against men of a comparable degree of training, of course, and skill levels will vary from individual to individual regardless of gender, as will circumstances during both a ring-based tournament and actual street fight. What it does mean, though, is that girls and women are fully capable of learning to handle themselves, and their smaller size and weight compared to typical men need not be a disadvantage in all cases. The main weakness of women is that they are conditioned not to receive such training, that it's not "proper" for them to learn to defend themselves, and that they should rely on men for this. Hence, it's no wonder that untrained women are knocked silly by men in the general population during the type of situation you mentioned in your personal experience, when it's simply upper body strength against upper body strength alone. Or involving sports scenarios that place a high emphasis on upper body strength.

"Because you likely came across women with no special training, or participating in sports where their specific attributes have no great advantage over men."

Actually it was a sport where the most useful physical characteristics are more often attributed to women than to men, and the top female competitors were far more committed to the sport than myself or the other mediocre men.

I would like to have seen this personally, as I, myself, have personally seen women excel against men in sports that did not place emphasis on greater upper body strength--which will obviously give men the advantage--as opposed to sports that depend on other attributes. I am not calling you a liar, mind you, but what I do believe is that there is a lot more to the incidents you're describing than you're telling me. From a lot of personal experience, if you happen to lack fight training, I would be willing to pay to see you step into a ring with a well trained woman and see if you could easily beat her with greater upper body strength and weight your only advantages, and with a cocky attitude on top of that. It takes a lot more than simply being a male specimen to be an effective warrior; even soldiers need a lot of training. I've seen enough of that to be confident in what I'm talking about.

Further, when it comes to sports like volleyball or softball, I would be willing to bet that the men, if they won, did not do so easily, as they wouldn't have the luxury of getting to simply knock women over with their superior upper body strength and weight. Soccer is "iffy," because even though slamming into each other isn't supposed to happen, and a heavy reliance is on the lower body with men having to contend with women's typically greater stamina, slamming incidents do still occur.

Obviously, the great majority of women could not function on a football team of an assorted gender (save, perhaps, as a kicker), because the majority of them would not be able to take a hit from a 300-pound man slamming into them at full speed. The same with a woman boxer paired against a male boxer of comparable skill if both were in a boxing ring and had to abide by standard boxing rules, since that is one particular fighting sport that places a huge emphasis on the weapons and strength of the upper body, with the lower body used only for footwork. However, it may be different if a male boxer was placed up against a woman skilled in Tae Kwon Do or Isshyn-ryu karate, and allowed to use her full array of bodily weaponry, then the outcome may well be different, and I would honestly vote depending upon who the individual fighters were, their known stats, their earned reputation, etc.