16
nigh
t. The only creatures growing fat were the hyenas, who feasted on
the discarded corpses.19
Male expendability starts in the womb. The egg of the female
inches in solitary splendor down the fallopian tube, inviting
impregnation. It has no competition. On the other hand, the
sperm--the male's contribution to procreation--vigorously swim the
lengthy course up the vagina and uterus, beating their long, thin tails
in an effort to outrace the millions of their brothers headed for that
solitary egg. Only a single spermatozoa--one literally "chosen" by the
ova--manages to finally penetrate the egg's outer membrane and
achieve the grand prize of impregnation. The losers die.
But that is merely a preview of the casual manner in which
nature tosses male lives away. Male foetuses are the primary victims
of natural abortions, miscarriages and stillbirths. When times are
tough, nature shows her preference by hiking the rates of spontaneous
abortion for males to higher than normal, but continuing her tendency
to preserve her embryonic daughters.20 As James V. Neel of the
University of Washington says, for males "in utero it's a jungle."
Things don't get any better after birth. In their first few years of
life, male babies have a higher death rate than their sisters. Then the
nasty habits built into the male genes begin to take their toll. Even in a
nice, civilized spot like Alameda, California, where researchers
performed a longitudinal study of 5,000 adults, males were nearly four
times more likely to lose their lives to homicide than females. And
they were twice as likely to be accident victims. Their own aggression
and bravado did them in.
But cockiness is not the only thing that mows men down. They
are twice as likely to be victims of lung cancer, suicide, pulmonary
disease, cirrhoses and heart disease. The immune systems of females
work far more efficiently than those of males. How can you encourage
the male immune apparatus to function at a higher level? There is a
way, but I wouldn't recommend it: castration. The single trick that
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