Then you would think - if it does more harm than good - that men who do healthily express their emotions would have kicked the evolutionary shit out of men who don’t; and since they evidently haven’t, you would have to hypothesise that the “unhealthy” behaviour actually has a payoff. Perhaps men who stand shoulder to shoulder in a phalanx and compartmentalise their grief over the best buddy they’ve known for fifteen years and has just expired messily on their right prevail in battle over the ones who stop everything to healthily weep and wail?
Simple: women take better care of themselves – physically and mentally. Most women do not hesitate to go to the doctor when something concerns them, regardless of how embarrassing the exam might be. (I’m fortunate in that my hubby has no problem seeing a doctor…and our doctor is a woman.) Most women have someone on whom to unload their worries, depression, anger, etc., and who will be honest and tell her she what she needs to hear. Over the years, women get used to seeing a doctor for gyn exams, birth control, pregnancy. I have no stats or cites, but I suspect that married men (or men living with an s.o.) live longer than single men because we women look out for our men, and try to get them to take care of themselves. It’s ironic, but I think this is a result of women being considered chattel for thousands of years (in most societies). We learned that we had to take care of ourselves so that we could care for our husbands and children. Men were waging war while we were concerned with the basics.
Based on…?
Read the link in my post, and the science article. It explains what is behind
in detail. That is, visceral (intra-abdominal) fat. Pre-menopausal women have less of it, and it can cause young men to die.
Well thank God we have women, since we’re just too stupid to take care of ourselves. We need a holiday to celebrate women who give up everything to take care of their man-child. I’m going to get back to wiping my ass with a rake, bye bye.
Interesting, because I’d have at least considered the possibility that correlation does not equal causation, and that the following scenario deserves a little thought:
Men who are poor providers are not good at attracting mates. Men who are poor providers are also not good at taking care of themselves. Hence, there is a significant statistical overlap between men who shorten their life expectancies by self-neglect and men who scupper their chances of getting married. Hence, singleness and shorter lives are correlated without marriage being the cause of longer lives.
Somebody should study the role of physical size. My non-scientific impression is that large people of either sex tend to die sooner and that slight people tend to live longer. Perhaps this accounts for part of the difference between men and women.
May as well add my wild speculation to everyone else’s.
It might be to do with the Y versus X chromosome thing.
Pathogenic alleles are typically recessive (because bad, dominant genes get selected out of the genepool quickly).
Women have two X chromosomes, and so typically need two recessives to have a pathogenic genotype within that chromosome’s genes. Men only have one, and so just need one recessive, which is much more likely to happen.
(The Y chromosome doesn’t code for a lot, so is not significant here.)
Stretch the definition of ‘pathogenic’ to ‘not ideal’ and you have a hypothesis for why we might expect men to live less long.
A good test for this hypothesis might be to see if females of other mammalian species live longer than males, in controlled conditions (i.e. in captivity).
On the other hand, the life expectancy difference between the sexes isn’t huge.
Perhaps, once you factor out risk-taking, war, murders etc, the difference is zero.