those are some interesting as well as distrubing stats - - and no I don't think males are the expendable sex

Males are expendable. That's why the race expends them at such a rate. After the War of The Triple Alliance, one of the participants was down by about 90% in males from age fourteen to sixty. Got fixed up in a generation or so.
Besides, males like to do some of the stuff that gets them killed. It's a free country. And if they didn't do it, some of the dangerous stuff we need done, who would?

Holy carp! I'm moving to San Francisco pronto and having the local government pay for a sex change operation! I'm too young to die!!!

Their risk of mortality is not only greater now due to increased violence in general, but also due to the absence of residential fathers, being raised in female-headed households and remaining single and unattached (with or without offspring).

For instance, studies show that boys without residential fathers get into more trouble. Boys raised in female-headed households have more problems in school academically and behaviorally. Typically, they are not socialized to "be a man." That is, they aren't taught by a strong, authoritative male that women are to be treated with respect and that part of being a man means marrying the mother of your children and taking care of your family.

There's a strong correlation between female-headed households, illegitimacy and crime in a given area.

As far as marriage goes, anyone with eyes can see that marriage is generally a stabilizing influence on men. Married men take less risks physically and generally settle into monogamy. They usually make more money because they take more career risks that will bring rewards to the family. They're more focused on others and what the consequences of risky behavior would mean: death or divorce, for instance.

Again, I'm speaking in general terms. Exceptions abound.

Shawn, by female-headed do you mean single parent female-headed families? If so, you should probably note the difference between causative and correlative.

Dean, man, you were doing so well there till the end - I was almost sure you'd written a snark-free gender related post!

My name is La Shawn, and yes, I do know the difference between correlation and causation. Why you assume I don't know is interesting.

Did you infer that I think female-headed (I don't understand the distinction you're making between female-headed and "single parent female-headed") households cause crime? The answer is obviously "No I don't." Criminals cause crime by committing criminal acts.

I think your risk factors decrease if you're married or in a long term partnership AND if you have pets. (One does not imply the other...)

Men, expendable? Nah, just sometimes we say that. We wouldn't trade you for the world...really. Chaos is a good thing. :)

American boys are expendable. They constitute 40% of college graduates, tomorrow's leaders.
American girls are valued. They constitute 60% of college graduates, tomorrow's leaders. 70% of graduating doctoral psychologists are women, women are approaching parity in law and medicine, making big advances in business and government, and breaking almost all the barriers once thought unbreakable.

But the female brain is different than the male brain--not better or worse, just different.

So the idiots who try to force as many women as men to succeed in advanced mathematics, physics, advanced computer science, and advanced engineering, are fighting against the subtle effects of testosterone on the developing adolescent brain--not against societal bias.

I don't see this as a disparity in attention paid to men's vs. womens issues. What's really going on is that both sexes lives have been made safer over the last hundred years, it's just that women's have been made more safe at a disproportionate rate by eliminating the overwhelming risk of dying in childbirth. In the undeveloped world today, just as in our world a hundred years ago, women had a 25% chance of dying in childbirth before completing their childbearing years. In modern America, it's essentially zilch. So, it's not that the developed world is so bad for men; it's that the undeveloped world is so bad for women.

Improvements in public health, immunizations, antibiotics etc. etc have further improved the lives of all, but have not favored men over women, so the disparity remains.

Changing one female-specific variable caused an immense improvement in life expectancy for women. But, for men, the improvements will have to be in several areas, and most of those are lifestyle-related and notoriously difficult to control in a free society.

By the way, although men have more genetic diseases, and therefore higher infant mortality (the number one cause of infant mortality being genetic disease) the deck is not totally stacked against them. More boy babies are born than girls- 51% to 49%.

Hell, men cause all their own and everybody else's problems, doncha know?

I just found a "study" by The New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project which also attemps to blame all men, and men only, for domestic violence. Here:
http://www.avp.org/publications/reports/reports.htm#Rep_dv

This of course, raises more questions than it answers. I e-mailed and asked; we'll see how it comes out!

If men are responsible for all domestic violence, how come there is violence in some lesbian relationships? Just askin'.

I'm not sure, Conrad, how one would go about "forcing" women to succeed in CS, physics, or higher mathematics. Particularly "forcing" certain percentages of women to do such things. It would be like trying to make a sculpture with spaghetti sauce. But I do know that there should be support for girls and women who want to study these things, and I know--despite our focus issues when compared with males--there are women out there who have the talent to excel in these endeavors.

Dani: You have a very good point on childbirth (except I thought it was 20% not 25%? Well not much to quibble about there.) Although to be fair we'd have to compare what the equivalent death and encripplment rate was for men; in a world where the average lifespan is/was only 40, one must assume men die at large rates due to injuries and infections as well, especially as in those societies (as now) men do most of the high-hazard jobs.

And it does remain that in the U.S. virtually all high-hazard jobs are nearly exclusively the province of men, although that's changed marginally in the last few decades.

I'd like to post some thoughts on this - as soon as I get back from my motorcycle ride ;-)

"Is there anyting to be done about it?"

Well, if you consider the main threats to men are
accidents and violence, then I'd say we actually spend billions of dollars each year trying to remedy the problem. The majority of violent crime is man on man, so most of the money in spent on the criminal justice system should count as action on this front. Many more men are killed in traffic accidents than women, so much of the funding for traffic enforcement and highway safety proportionately benefits men. And as pointed out, men work in the most dangerous jobs, so much of the budgets of OSHA, NIOSH, and the MSHA should be considered as benefitting men more than women. So I'd say we are in fact doing quite a lot.

Patrick,

To what purpose do you point out that the majority of violent crime is "man on man"? It would be more neutral, don't you think, to say that men are disproportionally victimized by violent crime. "Man-on-man" is like "Black-on-Black"; it takes the problem off into a little corner where the victims and the victimizers are the same, and obscures what ought to be the important fact, which is that men are getting murdered at a rate several times that of women.

I haven't seen the study, so I don't know what their eleven leading causes of death are, but they can't possibly all involve "lifestyle choices." Men, as a group, probably drive more recklessly than women do. They engage in more dangerous sports. They undertake more hazardous work. They are more likely to get themselves into the sort of company that can lead to murder. They are more likely (in developed nations, anyway) to be at risk for AIDS. They are, IIRC, more likely to smoke, at least in the US (I think in continental Europe it's the reverse).

Fine. Five or six leading causes of death there. And the rest of them? Cancer? Heart disease? Suicide? (No, suicide is not a "lifestyle choice." Please.)

The fact is that we have two demographically identical cohorts here, of equal size, and over the course of their lives we discover that one cohort is several times more likely to commit suicide, several times more likely to be murdered, several times more likely to be killed or maimed at work . . . and lives on average several years less than the other cohort. That would be perceived as a crisis, I think, if the genders were reversed. Such activism about gender bias in medical research as there is concerns bias against women. No one has ever even tried to explain to me why the discriminated-against seem to live so much longer than the discriminated-in-favor-of, or why the male/female longevity gap doesn't argue by its very existence for disproportionate research funding going to mens' health.

Urk. How can I both agree with and disagree with Patrick AND Michelle?

Well, I'll try: I agree with everything Michelle says, EXCEPT for her comment about black-on-black crime. Identifying black-on-black crime does not put that issue in a neat little box where we can ignore it. It allows us to identify an acute problem more precisely--and knowing more about a problem is always good. In the particular case of black-on-black crime, it's IMPORTANT that we know that young black men kill each other at an extraordinarily disturbing rate, because this allows us to tailor how we address the problem.

THAT SAID, I actually agree with everything else you say Michelle, because you can't just say, "well, we have all these programs to address violence and workplace safety and so therefore they automatically help everybody involved in those issues." No, that doesn't really wash.

Philosophically, it may be that we as a species just accept and expect men to do more dangerous things and accept more dangerous assignments, and so on. It may be that that's hard-wired into us and that there's not much to be done about it.

That said, I'm not sure I buy it. But even if I did believe that, I'd argue that more study to figure out why it is and all its permutations is very useful. (But then, almost all research is worthwhile, right?)

We know from study, for example, that women are more likely to be acquitted of any accusation of a violent crime. We also know that they are less likly to be charged with violent crimes when accused of them. Police are less likely to arrest, prosecutors less likely to press charges, juries less likely to convict, if the accused is female. Research has shown all of this, repeatedly. Thus, we have to ask ourselves how much this impacts on the proportions we see in these crimes: the initial statistics say that men are more likely to kill than women, but how much is that ACTUALLY true and how much of it just looks that way due to our social biases?

Recent research has shown, for example, that in the area of domestic violence, women are very, very nearly as often the instigators of violence as they are the victims of it. Indeed, up to ten years ago we were re-evaluating and saying, "gee, women may be committing nearly a quarter of these crimes," and that seemed surprising, but recent research has brought that to where we now think it's been so badly underreported in the past that it may be damn near 50/50--and all of a sudden all those "hilarious" cartoons and comics of the housewife with the rollerpin or frying pan waiting to hit her wayward husband take on a whole different meaning. As do our assumptions about helpless and weak females.

I'm also reading a fascinating book at the moment called "When She Was Bad" by a feminist scholar and social researcher. This gets into some extraordinarily politically hot territory, for she discusses--this in 1999 mind you, so it has NOTHING to do with current politics--an extensive study of Arab culture in Palestine. She specifically discusses the issue of "honor killings," and another feminist researcher who specifically examined a bit over 40 cases of these honor killings.

(As a reminder, "honor killings" of women are where a man feels his family and personal honor has been wounded by his wife, sister, or daughter, and kills her. Mind you, there are also honor-type killings aimed at men, but that's another subject.)

Anyway, astoundingly, she found that in the majority of cases, when a man killed a woman in an honor killing, in almost every case, the man's mother, or sister, or wife, urged him to do it. Which of course does not make the man not-guilty of murder, but in fact raises the social complexity of the issue to a whole 'nother level, and makes "honor killings" of women not just a matter of "violence of men toward women" but also an issue of woman-on-woman violence.

It also gives us an insight into Muslim culture we see too little of; women have huge power and influence in Muslim societies, it's just behind-the-scenes and non-obvious. That doesn't make it any less real; women have enormous social power within Muslim families, and in those socities, family is everything.

What does all this mean? It means that if we're going to be constructing policies to address complex social issues, we need to know as much as possible.

Damnit, Dean, there you go being right again. Cut that out. It's irritating ;-)

Yes, of course, it's important to know that violence against blacks is mainly committed by other blacks, and violence against men mainly by other men. What I was complaining of in the phrase "black-on-black crime" was summed up in a line spoken by a racist judge in one of John Mortimer's "Rumpole" stories about a gang fight round Paddington Tube station: "Only real worry was, some passing white might've gotten hurt."

There is a tendency to compartmentalize these things. It's necessary, but also dangerous. It's unfair, for example, to compare US infant mortality stats unfavorably to those of European countries or of Canada, Japan, whatever without observing that we have an urban black population with very particular difficulties (crime, drugs, and poor nutrition heading the list), and that if you disaggregate them from the stats we come out looking pretty good. But the temptation is to "disaggregate" them in policy as well, and that we must not do.

You again make good points Michelle, but I again make an observation about one of your point:

Infant mortality in the U.S. is higher than most other western industrialized nature, but there's a catch: we make much greater use of fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization than any European nation, and were are also as a society much more ikely to use extraordinary efforts to keep a child with birth defects alive. So SOME of our "high" infant morality rate is due to the fact that we often try to save infants that, in other societies, would simply be listed as stillbirths.

Just another random data point Not really debating you per se.