Women Are Always Living Longer, Am I Right?

Once again we confront the question of why women live longer than men do. While the conventional wisdom holds that after so many years of dealing with female craziness men are happy to die, Science has an alternative theory: Women are less disposable than men, i.e. we need them to stick around longer if we’re going to survive as a species.

In humans, as in most animal species, the state of the female body is very important for the success of reproduction. The fetus needs to grow inside the mother’s womb, and the infant needs to suckle at her breast. So if the female animal’s body is too much weakened by damage, there is a real threat to her chances of making healthy offspring. The man’s reproductive role, on the other hand, is less directly dependent on his continued good health.

It is too extreme to say that for all biology cares, males need only to attract a mate and then can pretty much die. A study of children in Tanzania, for example, showed that children who lost a father before the age of 15 tended to be a little shorter than their peers, and height is a reasonably good proxy for health. But children who lost a mother fared even worse — they were shorter, poorer and did not live as long as fatherless orphans. From an evolutionary point of view, however, the drivers of mating success for males are generally not the drivers of longevity. In fact, high levels of testosterone, which boost male fertility, are quite bad for long-term survival.

There is a solution that would allow men to match women in the longevity stakes, but it involves cutting their nuts out, so no. Anyway, as future generations of men develop increasingly smaller genitals due to environmental exposures and women finally establish control over business and statecraft, men will probably only be needed for sperm donation. Sit ’em down in front of a television, hook them up to some kind of seed extractor, and then get rid of ’em once they’ve outlasted their usefulness. Lucky bastards. I was definitely born too soon.