The Most Unappreciated Fact About Men: Understanding Why Men Are the Way They Are 

There’s nothing more basic than sex. None of us would be here if that one lucky sperm didn’t survive against all odds to be allowed merge with an egg. The resulting union created you and me. Let’s think for a moment about that union. A healthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm cells in a single ejaculation. Since only one lucky sperm will be successful in making his way to that magical egg, there’s a good deal of competition.

There’s a joke about one sperm getting ready to compete. At the moment of ejaculation, he launches himself and the race is on, just him against millions of other competitors. Suddenly, he stops swimming and tries to turn around. He screams to the other sperm, “Go back, go back, it’s only a blow job.” From an evolutionary point of view, success is measured by sexual union that produces offspring that live long enough to produce offspring of their own.

Although the human egg is microscopic, it is large enough to house 250,000 sperm. Think of the few successful sperm who make it to the egg and face this massive, round, entity. Each one tries to get through the cell wall to make it into the interior, but only one sperm is chosen. This tells us something important about what it means to be male and why men are the way they are. There’s a lot of competition with other males and we must ultimately be chosen by a female who is willing to let us in.

Here’s another example from the animal kingdom. Imagine you’re a young stallion. Like all young males you have sex on your mind. But in the world of horses, it is the alpha male who rounds up the females and when they are in estrus has sex with all of them. Most males don’t reproduce at all, so there is a fierce competition to become the alpha male. They fight each other and take risks to be #1, because the consequences of not being #1 determine whether you are a reproductive success or failure. The females, on the other hand, can count on having babies. They don’t have to work to find a male willing to have sex with them.

There’s another thought experiment I heard from Roy Baumeister, one of the nation’s leading social scientists and author of Is There Anything Good About Men? “Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women? It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.”

“Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago.,” says Baumeister. “Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.”

So, being a human male, we don’t face the same odds as stallions, where you’re either number one and reproduce with every female in the band or you’re not number one and your odds of having even one descendent are small. But compared to human females, we have to try harder.

Here’s a final thought experiment. Imagine you’re a female and you were asked to find a male who would be willing to have sex with you. You have three hours. What do you think your chances would be of being successful? Now imagine that you’re a male and your task is to find a female who would be willing to have sex with you. You have three hours. Not all women would be successful and not all men would be. But as a group, the women will be more successful than the men.

“Of all humans ever born, most women became mothers, but most men did not become fathers,” Baumeister concludes. “You wouldn’t realize this by walking through an American suburb today with its tidy couples. But it is an important fact. I consider it the single most under-appreciated fact about the differences between men and women.”

 And this difference has important implications in understanding why men and women are the way they are. Here are a few of them:

1. More men than women are at the top of the success ladder.

It doesn’t take a social scientist to tell you that a man is more likely to be a President, Senator, Congressman, corporate CEO, than is a woman. But it isn’t primarily because of sexism and women being oppressed by more dominant males, although that is certainly a reality. Men are more often on the top because all men living today are descended from those who were successful, if not at being Alphas, at least in being willing to compete and win a female. Men are more likely to fight to be #1 because we’re descended from those who were afraid to be #2.

2. More men than women are at the bottom of the success ladder.

It’s understandable that when women look to the top and see mostly men, many conclude that since they know they are as smart and capable as men, that if they aren’t making it to the top, there must be men that are keeping them down. But if they looked at the bottom they would see a different reality.

There are more mentally retarded boys than girls, more men than women in prisons, more men who kill themselves than women who commit suicide, more males murdered by other males than females murdered by males. There are more men at the top, but also more men at the bottom. Both nature and culture produces more men at the extremes than women.

3. More men than women die sooner and live sicker.

We know that women, as a group, live longer than men. Less well known is that men die from and suffer with every one of the major diseases—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc.—at rates higher than those of women. It’s not surprising that men have less healthy diets, exercise less, drink more booze and consume more drugs, than women. In the world of evolutionary success, we strive to be #1, even if we kill ourselves doing it. We can do better.

4. More men than women take risks with their health and well-being.

We’re in the middle of another football season and I see men every weekend who go out and injure themselves, sometimes causing brain damage that will only become apparent later in life. I have two grandsons whose life-long dream was to be football stars and now both have recently been signed by the New England Patriots. I worry about their safety, but also know that being a football hero has its rewards.

The minimum starting salary in the National Football League is $465,000/year and I can attest to the fact that since they were first football stars in high school they attracted many beautiful young women.

To understand why men are the way they are, we have to understand our evolutionary heritage and the reason so many of us men still fear not being good enough or successful enough to be accepted and loved by the partner of our dreams. I look forward to your comments.