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Males Are Fragile?
Submitted by Roy on Mon, 2008-03-24 15:27
This article is about much more than male "fragility" and argues for close consideration of all the new research on sex differences and gender preferences in life choices. Excerpt:
"Males are more vulnerable to maternal stresses and pollution in utero — female preemies are almost twice as likely to survive as male preemies. Boys are twice as likely to have attention problems, four times as likely to have language or reading disabilities, and ten times as likely to have Asperger syndrome. Males are more susceptible to almost all chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer, liver disease and AIDS. They have much shorter life spans.
They are more aggressive and take more risks, which is one reason why there are more male prisoners (the ratio of male to female prisoners is 10 to 1) and male suicides. Victims of work and school violence are 93 percent male. Men catch postsurgical infections more than women do, and 70 percent of them die from this peculiar vulnerability (compared to 30 percent of women). If this is not a picture of fragility, I don’t know what is."
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Comments
Aids?
Incorrect. Heterosexual women have a greater risk of contracting HIV than a heterosexual man.
I find all these health disparities fascinating. She failed to mention the government spends more money on women's health. Even if you take in account pregnancy and prenatal care funding.
How is dying at work a measure of fragility? I wonder if the high death rate of Alaskan fishermen is due to weakness?
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"Women are also less likely to be Scrabble and poker champions. I think this has to do with testosterone and the competitive drive during early adulthood, which makes the average male trajectory look different from the average female trajectory. Also, males are statistically more variable than females, which means that there are more extreme men than extreme women. This affects both ends of the distribution, not only the number of male geniuses (there are precious few of either sex), but also the fact that most people with severe intellectual handicaps (IQs less than 70) are male."
Now that's interesting and in many ways true.
Scrabble Sex
If by "fragility" you mean higher mortality at younger ages, then her particular term makes sense.
I wonder what is the ratio of death on the job for male:female Alaskan fishermen? Maybe 100%-to ZERO?
BTW - I had a girlfriend who I could never ever beat at Scrabble. She pissed me off. But we always had great "pity sex" after our bouts of Scrabble. Maybe that's why I unconsciously intended to lose?
I kicked her out.
Interesting
The article was pretty good, but I disagree with the idea that women making less for working at jobs that pay less than the average man is unfair. Especially considering that women have more opportunities for education. How about all those sexist scholarships which are for women only?
Evan AKA X-TRNL
Real Men Don't Take Abuse!
It's still all about women
The article describes itself as "a probing Q&A that looks deep into the minds of men and women."
It does nothing of the sort. After the initial promising assertion that there are differences between males and females, it quickly lapses back into the all-too-familiar obsession with females and their lifestyle choices. After telling us how fragile males are, men are promptly dropped from the discussion and it is all about women from then on. As if men's fragility is all there is to say on the subject, and there is nothing that anyone can or should do to change it.
So despite acknowledging that men have the rough end of the stick in terms of poorer health and life expectancy, Pinker has no interest in doing anything to improve men's situation vis-a-vis females. Apparently getting women to earn as much as men is far, far more important than helping men to live as long as women or to live less dangerous lives.
In other words, we have yet another woman-firster.
Which also gives the lie to the claim that women are more interested in the caring professions, or are simply more caring people than men are. We see that in practice their "care" extends only as far as children and other women; then it suddenly dries up.
Civilisation: man's greatest, and most unappreciated, gift to women
Fragile my ass
What a load of mammo-centric nonsense! If we are so fragile then why are men more likely to survive aviation accidents than women? Why are women more likely to develop diseases such as Osteoperosis and Alzeimers? And why are women more prone to eating disorders, such as Anorexia?
Of course, in the latter example it's all down to men for imposing unrealistic expectations on women, and no doubt men hog all the safest seats on airplanes...
Yeah, we are sooo fragile!