General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Are men the weaker sex? [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,814 posts)Why do you even need to ask?
For thousands of years men have used their greater physical strength to keep women oppressed. I'm also inclined to think that the fact that it's the women who have babies is incredibly frightening to men, and so they need to make the case that women are inferior to make up for their inability to reproduce. And so, over thousands of years, the pretense that men are stronger, better, smarter, and whatever, has gained a real foothold in our culture.
I do need to point out that life expectancy under 20 years implies an incredibly high infant and early childhood mortality.
Every so often I'll come across some otherwise sensible person who thinks that such a low life expectancy means that people were old and died of old age at that young point. No. Or, a physician I knew not that long ago who seemed to think that women tended to die more or less immediately after menopause. No.
If you live to age 4 in a world where life expectancy is under 20, you have a decent chance of making it to age 10. And if you make it to age 20 you have a very good chance of making it to age 40. And so on. What killed people off at younger ages were things like childhood diseases (the ones people of my generation survived and people of a younger generation had vaccines for). A bit later, it was accidents that killed people prematurely. And other infectious diseases.
Maybe the most important thing is that throughout our evolution, we've always had old people. Ones who could remember what it was like fifty or more years ago. Who remembered the rare catastrophe or flood or whatever. The old people really matter. There's also a hypothesis out there that menopause in humans came about because it allowed older women, no longer subject to childbearing themselves, to become grandmothers and help raise the younger generation.