Competing for a Mate Can Shorten Lifespan via Science Daily
Thought it was of interest they even studied a high school in Wisconsin, that for one year had a higher-ratio of young men and compared their health.
Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a long-term project involving individuals who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The researchers calculated the gender ratios of each high-school graduating class, then ascertained how long the graduates went on to live. After adjusting for a multitude of factors, they discovered that, 50 years later, men from classes with an excess of boys did not live as long as men whose classes were gender-balanced. By one measurement, mortality for a 65-year-old who had experienced a steeper sex ratio decades earlier as a teenager was 1.6 percent higher than one who hadn't faced such stiff competition for female attention.Of course this is a bigger issue in China and India where males are preferred for children, so through elective abortion there are fewer girls to marry.
Much attention has been paid to the deleterious social effects of gender imbalances in countries such as China and India, where selective abortion, internal migration and other factors have in some areas resulted in men outnumbering women by up to twenty percent. Such an environment, already associated with a marked increase in violence and human trafficking, appears to shorten life as well.The researchers have not investigated mechanisms that might account for this phenomenon, but Christakis suspects that it arises from a combination of social and biological factors. After all, finding a mate can be stressful, and stress as a contributor to health disorders has been well documented. Says Christakis, "We literally come to embody the social world around us, and what could be more social than the dynamics of sexual competition?"
Thanks, Renee, I saw this too, but you beat me to it, so I'll write my thoughts here.
ReplyDeleteThis immediately brings two things to mind.
The first is that since government is obligated to address inequality based on sex, and men are a suspect class given that they die younger than women, doesn’t this obligate the government to make sure each man is paired with a woman?
The second is that warning labels should appear on any marriage licensing paperwork for brideless pairings.
Seriously this yet more evidence that there is a difference between men and women, despite what Walker says.
I'm interested if women live longer one way or the other.
I would guess single women with nieces and nephews would live the longest. They didn't unfairly name them 'old spinsters' for nothing. But also you can look into communities of nuns as a group to study as a contol group. As someone who has been pregnancy multiple times I won't deny pregnancy/child raising has it's own sets of stresses yet ideally with these with traditional support system also comes benefits to offset. Women are losing these benefits, so child bearing doesn't look as attractive.
ReplyDelete"doesn’t this obligate the government to make sure each man is paired with a woman?"
I disagree with the wording here, I think at most since we are dealing with 'freedom to marry' that government only has the obligation to promote it. A good way to promote this, is to make sure you aren't shrinking the marriage pool by significantly aborting a good number of female fetuses.
Also something that may seem unpopular since we don't like young marriage is that this effect of large ratio of young men even had an effect in high school, their teenager years not their twenties. With liberals I agree teenagers do have hormonal urges, but I don't think infatalizing sex is the best route. Again unpopular but I do believe bringing back the option of young marriage. As a parent I'm going to help my kids anyways with college, does it matter if they're married or not? Would like to see college a lot more like my law school was set up, most people in their 30's if not older with children. So there was no 'camp like experience', like with my undergraduate studies. We were there to learn about law and to train as a lawyer, not to have an holistic experience. So many college professors weren't interested in their studies, but rather to change young people. Seriously as someone who goes to Mass every Sunday, some of my undergraduate professors were definitely secular 'fire & brimstone' don't follow along one's grade could suffer.