Men

By | August 29, 2007
3 Comments

What are they good for? Here’s an interesting tidbit:

Any man who reads the newspapers will encounter the phrase “even women and children” a couple times a month, usually about being killed. The literal meaning of this phrase is that men’s lives have less value than other people’s lives. The idea is usually “It’s bad if people are killed, but it’s especially bad if women and children are killed.” And I think most men know that in an emergency, if there are women and children present, he will be expected to lay down his life without argument or complaint so that the others can survive. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) (though that’s not how it looked in the movie). That in itself is remarkable. The rich, powerful, and successful men, the movers and shakers, supposedly the ones that the culture is all set up to favor — in a pinch, their lives were valued less than those of women with hardly any money or power or status. The too-few seats in the lifeboats went to the women who weren’t even ladies, instead of to those patriarchs.

Read the whole thing…it’s a fascinating take on the differences between the sexes. Whether you buy into the arguments or not, it certainly does make you think.

Also, 2/3s of the ancestors of the current human population are women. I know.

I know.

Just read it.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Brilliant!

    This article explains so much so well that it should be required reading for any “gender studies” program.

    Thanks for linking to this Phil.

  • http://beyondwordsworth.com Kathy

    That’s the most coherent explanation of gender differences I’ve ever read. Thanks!

  • http://triticale.mu.nu triticale

    And, for your amusement, is the geekiest article I’ve ever seen.

    Note that Simon, who runs Becky on his GirlOS partition, is in fact sufficiently male that he is about to marry the girlfriend he is living with.