The Natural Superiority of Women (25 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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before they are born and die of hemophilia
in utero,
or fall victim to the disorder at any time from birth to adult life, but exhibit the condition they will, and in the greater number of instances they will die of its effects.
There are actually two kinds of hemophilia genes; an A, or classical, occurring in one out of every ten thousand males; and B, or Christmas disease, occurring in one out of every fortyfive thousand males.
The mechanism of color blindness (red-green, mostly) and its explanation are precisely the same as for hemophilia. About 4 percent of American men are completely red-green color blind, while another 4 percent are color blind in varying degrees to red-green or other colors. Only 0.5 percent of American women are so affected.
More than seventy serious disorders occurring in males are known to be due to genes present on the X chromosomes. These conditions occur in a woman only if her father is affected and her mother carries the gene. In the table below are listed some of the conditions occurring more frequently in males because of sex-linked genes.
Conditions Due Largely to Sex-Linked Genes Found Mostly in Males
Absence of central incisor teeth
Albinism of eyes (depigmentation of eyes)
Aldrich syndrome (chronic eczema, middle-ear disease, etc.)
Agammaglobulinemia (gamma globulin deficiency in blood)
Amelogenesis imperfecta (absence of enamel of teeth)
Angiokeratoma diffusum (lesions affecting many systems of body)
Anhidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (maldevelopment of sweat glands)
Borjeson syndrome (mental deficiency, epilepsy, endocrine disorders)
Cataract, total congenital
Cataract, congenital with microcornea
Cerebellar ataxia
Cerebral sclerosis
Choroidermia
Coloboma iridis (congenital cleft of iris)
Color blindness of the red-green type
Day blindness
Deafness, congenital
Defective hair follicles
Distichiasis (double eyelashes)
Dyskeratosis congenita (malformation of nails, pigmentation, etc.)

 

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Conditions Due Largely to Sex-Linked Genes Found Mostly in Males (cont .)
Dystrophia bullosa (formation of swellings, absence of all hair, etc.)
Epidermal cysts (skin cysts)
Glaucoma of juvenile type (increase in fluids of eyeball)
Glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenate deficiency
Hemophilia
Hurler syndrome (dwarf stature, generalized disease of bone, etc.)
Hydrocephalus
Hypochromic anemia
Hypoparathyroidism
Hypophosphatemia
Hypoplasia of iris with glaucoma
Ichthyosis (scalelike skin)
Keratosis follicularis (thickening of skin, loss of hair, etc.)
Macular dystrophy
Megalocornea (enlargement of cornea of eyeball)
Menkes syndrome (retarded growth and brain degeneration)
Mental deficiency
Microcornea (diminution of cornea of eyeball)
Microphthalmia
Mitral stenosis (stricture of bicuspid valve of heart)
Myopia (near-sightedness)
Nephrogenic diabetes insipidus
Neurohypophyseal diabetes insipidus
Night blindness
Nomadism
Nystagmus (rhythmical oscillation of eyeballs)
Oculo-cerebral-renal syndrome of Lowe (cataract, mental retardation, etc.)
Ophthalmoplegia and myopia (drooping of eyelids, absent patellar reflexes, etc.)
Optic atrophy (wasting of eye)
Parkinsonism
Peroneal atrophy (wasting of muscles of legs)
Progressive bulbar paralysis
Progressive deafness
Pseudoglioma (membrane formation back of lens)
Pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy (weakening of muscles with growth of
connective tissue in them)
Retinal detachment
Retinitis pigmentosa
Spinal ataxia
Spondylo-epiphyseal dysplasia (short stature, severe hip disease, etc.)
Thromboasthenia (defect in the thrombin, fibrin, and blood platelet formation)
Van den Bosch syndrome (mental deficiency, skeletal deformity, lack of sweat glands, etc.)
White occipital lock of hair

 

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So much, then, for the conditions directly traceable to genetic factors. It should by this time be quite clear that to commence life as a male is to start off with somewhat of a handicap compared with the femalea handicap that operates at every stage of life, from conception on.
Even though male-determining sperm are produced in the same numbers as female-determining sperm, in the average ejaculation there are slightly fewer male-determining sperm, yet there are between 120 and 150 males conceived for every 100 females. Why this should be so we do not know, but it is a fact. The ratio at birth for American whites is 106 males to 100 females. In India the ratio is 98 boys to 100 girls. The ratios vary for different human groups, depending largely upon their socio-economic or nutritional status: the poorer the nutritional conditions, the greater the lethality of the males. Even fetal females are stronger than fetal males. The records uniformly show that from conception on, mortality rates before birth are higher for the male than for the female fetus and that males after birth continue to have a higher mortality rate than females for every year of age. Within every age range, more males die than females. For example, in 1987-88 three boy babies died in the first year of life for every two girl babies. At about the age of twenty-one, for every female who dies almost two males die; at age thirty-five, fourteen hundred men die for every thousand women; at fifty-five, eighteen hundred men die for every thousand women. After that the difference in death rate diminishes, though it remains in favor of the female.
In 1987, under the auspices of the National Institute of Aging, it became increasingly clear at the conference on biological and psychological differences between the sexes concludes that, as Professor James Neel of the University of Michigan put it, ''we really are the weaker sex, biologically less fit than females every step of the way." The advantage in both psychological and biological robustness that females enjoy, appears to be due to the fact that females possess quantitatively and efficiently more innate immune responses than males. This probably explains why females recover more frequently from illnesses, and live longer than males.
Life expectancy at birth is higher for women than for men all over the world (except in certain impoverished parts of India), and

 

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and this fact holds true for females as compared with males for the greater part of the animal kingdom. In the United States in 1996, the average life expectancy at birth females was 79.0 years and for males 73.0 years. At age 65, the average female could expect to live another 18.9 years, males at the same age could expect only 15.7 years. These facts constitute further evidence that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male. There have been some who have argued that women live longer than men because they don't usually work as hard. Most men, it is urged, work harder, work longer hours, and usually under greater strain and tension than most women. These statements are open to question. The exact opposite is, of course, the truth, as common experience and more than one study has shown. "Women's work is never done," as the old adage recognized. When forced to take over their wives' duties, at the end of a week or less most men are ready for a hospital bed. Furthermore, the stresses with which the average housewife with children has to deal are far greater than those which normally face her husband.
Male fetuses do not work harder than female fetuses in the womb, yet they die more frequently before birth than do female fetuses. Newborn males do not work harder than newborn females, yet they die more frequently than newborn girls. One-year-old boys die more frequently than the girls. And so one can go on for every age, with the difference in mortality in favor of the female.
In 1957 Francis C. Madigan, working at the University of North Carolina, published a study on the longevity of Catholic religious sisters and brothers who for many years maintained identical lifestyles. The same disparity in their mortality rates was found as among the rest of the general population. The data were obtained on nearly thirty thousand sisters and more than ten thousand brothers. The expectation of life at the age of fiftyfour was found to be an additional thirty-four years for the sisters, but only twenty-eight years more for the brothers, a difference in favor of the sisters of five and a half years.
When we compare the longevity rates of unmarried men having jobs with those of unmarried women having jobs, we find that the advantage is again with the females. Unmarried women with jobs live longer than their unmarried male counterparts. In 1987 the age-adjusted death rate for single men was one and a half times that for married men, whereas among single

 

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women the death rate was only 10 percent higher than that for the married. It is an interesting fact that among both men and women, the married have lower death rates than the single, widowed, or divorced.
A fourteen-nation study of working mothers conducted under the auspices of UNESCO and published in 1967 showed that women in general work longer hours and have less leisure time than men. As Professor Alexander Szalai, the project director, put it, "To summarize our finding, let's say that the last state of human bondage still persists, even if its burdens have been considerably lightened. More precisely, both categories of womenthe working and the nonworkingare at a disadvantage compared with men. The working women because they are overburdened with work; the nonworking women because their labors are underestimated and their existence is much more drab than that of the men."
Women are healthier than menif by health one means the capacity to deal with microorganisms and illness. Statistics from the public health services of various countries, and especially the United States, show that, while after the age of fifteen the sickness rate is higher among females than among males, females recover from illnesses much more frequently than males do. Death from almost all causes are more frequent in males at all ages. Under the awful conditions in which men, women, and children were sadistically incarcerated by the Nazis during World War II, the morbidity and mortality rates for females were much lower than for men. Almost the only disorders from which women die more frequently than men are those subserving the functional systems of reproduction, namely, the reproductive system and endocrine glandular system. The female owes her superior constitutional strength to, among other important factors, the fact that she is equipped with immunoregulatory genes on each X chromosome. The double dose of such genes results in a higher serum concentration of immunoglobulins which function as antibodies to give the female superior ability to combat infectious agents. Hence, the female's superior immunological system affords her a higher resistance to bacterial and viral infections.
The facts are set out succinctly by Drs. David D. Portilo and John Sullivan in their classic study of the "Immunological Bases for Superior Survival of Females," in which they conclude,

 

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