Strong weaker floor. Myths and reality.

So let's face it. Are men the stronger sex? Well, physically, I guess so. We better pull the barbell and push the core further. What else is the power? It doesn't make sense. Let's turn to the facts.
Myth 1. Women like children.
Oddly enough, women are much weaker than men, the program “do not harm the baby”. People, in principle, have known this for a long time – it is enough to recall that in almost all peoples of the world there are wandering stories about an evil stepmother, but there are no fairy tales about evil stepfathers. And a couple of years ago, the Center for In-depth Behavior Research in Palo Alto (USA) took care to find out the number of complaints about the behavior of other people’s children from visitors to several fast-food chains. The results were surprising: for nine women who complained about crying, noise and running of children, there was only one man who expressed his dissatisfaction with the administration about this, despite the fact that the percentage of visitors to restaurants in general was not much higher. However, psychologists tend to explain this by the fact that women generally pay more attention to children, and therefore better navigate their bad and good behavior. And they actually suffer from the sight of young citizens putting on their heads plates of porridge. Another proof that men are much more tolerant of other people's children is the data of the German ethnologist Grammer, who examined the questionnaires of 2,863 clients of marriage agencies. 60% of men did not object to their chosen one having a child. At the same time, only 34% of women were willing to date a single father.
Myth 2. Women work worse than men

Even if we consider the highly civilized countries of the “golden billion”, women’s salaries in almost all spheres hardly reach 70% of the salaries of their male counterparts. There is a feeling that a man in society is viewed as a better worker, and therefore expensive. In fact, such statistics arise from the fact that they also take into account the income of women who work part-time, devoting part of their time to family and children. In general, women have long proved that in most professions, not associated with heavy physical exertion, they are at least equal to us. In Russia, the situation is even more interesting: women are traditionally the preferred workers. Here is the testimony of Alexander Engelhardt, agrochemist and Narodnik, who at the end of the XIX century tried to understand the causes of business inefficiency in the Russian hinterland, the origins of inertia and indifference of peasants to work. “Women have much more initiative than men. Women are more likely to take up any new business, if only this business is personally beneficial to them, women. Women are somehow more greedy for money, petty greedy, without any expectation for the future, just to get more money now. Money is much easier to do with women than with men.” Half a century before, the Marquis de Custin, who had traveled around Russia, also noted that it was better and more reliable to hire women for any business, since they were much more responsible for their duties. And in 2010, the former head of the Russian IKEA Lennart Daldren, evaluating his entrepreneurial experience in Russia, noted with surprise that female employees in our country are much more “inquisitive, diligent and reliable than men, while they learn much faster and delve deeper into the essence of the task.”

Myth 3. Women are more cowardly

According to the research of F. Riemann, a German scientist, author of works on the phenomenon of fear, in general, women are less able to recognize risky situations and, accordingly, it is easier to commit courageous actions without thinking. Roughly speaking, if you aim at a woman with a gun, there is a high risk that she will try to attack you, because less men believe that she will be shot, that guns shoot at all and that this thing is a real gun. But women are less willing to overcome fear if they are able to understand it.

Myth 4. Women are more afraid of pain
Immediately before childbirth, analgesic substances begin to enter the body of women, which reduce pain sensitivity - that is why women are able to survive birth pain, which, according to some reports, could lead to pain shock with a fatal outcome of every second man. On the other hand, many women experience premature birth and preterm birth with stimulation without this natural anesthesia, remaining after the experience in sound mind and sober mind. Women are genetically programmed to have a higher pain threshold. That is, they feel pain no worse than we do, but in them it less often leads to fatal changes in the nervous and cardiovascular system. And women are 10 times less likely to lose consciousness at the sight of blood than we, which is also explained by physiological reasons: due to some well-known nuances of their anatomy, they observe it regularly and do not perceive it as something out of the ordinary.

Myth 5. Women are less intelligent

No, women are representatives of the norm, they have quite rare both higher and lower indicators of intelligence. So in general, women are smarter than us due to the category of very stupid men. Ten years ago, the University of Chicago, for example, published a study by E. Hedges and E. Knowwell, based on six large-scale tests of boys and girls – students of American colleges. Girls in general showed a smaller variance in estimates, while boys prevailed in both the upper and lower scales of the graph. Almost all the “geniuses” – hurrah! – were men, but all the “idiots”, unfortunately, too. As a result, the average IQ scores were higher in the female sex – because of those idiots who could not correctly count the number of legs of a cat and not shame us all.

Myth 6. Women fall for all sorts of fintiflushki - bows, ribbons, laces and other nonsense

A classic example of mirror logic is: “If someone wears a pink bow on a date, do they like pink bows?” It would seem that the answer should be yes. But with the same success it could be argued that the fisherman, throwing a fishing rod, puts a worm on the hook, because he likes to eat worms. Check whether women like pink bows is very simple: tie yourself a couple and walk the streets, counting the admiring female views. We have to admit: all these studs, mesh stockings and whipped curls like us first of all. And the vast majority of women at home go in cozy sweatshirts and comfortable grandmother's robes.

Myth 7. More women in the world than men
For every 107 boys in the world, only 100 girls are born. And this is not taking into account all India and China, where this imbalance is artificially amplified. In some Chinese provinces, parents who dream of having a son abort female fetuses so hard that there are as many as 120 potential grooms for every 100 newborn girls. And how the Chinese plan to solve this problem in the future, we personally do not even undertake to predict. World peace and the geopolitical grace of the past 50 years have led men to survive instead of dying heroically on the battlefield, so that the female shortage is now felt almost universally. And even in countries where the proportion of women in the population is higher, this demographic is due only to the large number of older women whose husbands have given their debt to cardiovascular problems, starting to mow men after 40 years. True, Russia stands alone here: the indecently early male mortality allows us to continue to be a country with a predominantly female population. At least one good news from the whole article.

Myth 8. Women are the weaker sex

Yes, unloading a car with cement woman will be slower and more dramatic. Her muscle mass is on average 24% less than the muscle mass of the average man. But in general, women do not have to claim the title of the weaker sex. They are much easier than us to endure most of the adversity. For example, prolonged starvation or thirst, increased radiation, as well as sudden temperature changes are more likely to kill a man. In addition, women are much better at resisting infections.

Myth 9. Women generally live longer

In fact, things are a little different. It is not women who live longer, but men who die earlier. There are four periods of increased risk in a man’s life. The first is 2-3 weeks after conception, when there is a kind of testing of the resulting gene combination and all knowingly unsuccessful goes to screening. At this time, about one in ten eggs fertilized with a sperm with a Y chromosome are discarded, since it is future male embryos that more often carry non-viable mutations. The second peak is the age from birth to 5 years, when the mortality rate of boys significantly outstrips that of girls. The third peak is from 17 to 25 years old, when boys are several times more likely than girls to become victims of accidents, murders, fights and military clashes. The last, most dangerous peak is the age from 36 to 50 years, when men in their prime die due to cardiovascular disorders. While their peers protect the female hormone estrogen, which protects blood vessels and prevents the formation of plaques on their walls, men without such additional armor are forced, alas, to meet with heart attacks and strokes. But after 50 years, the chances of men and women for a long life become almost the same.

Myth 10. Women are vegetarian at heart, and we, the bloody predators, need meat.

Yes, of course, you are a gross carnivorous animal, and she is a gentle elf with a lettuce leaf in her mouth. In fact, adult men do not really need animal protein, we can replace it with vegetable proteins. But a woman needs animal proteins and some nutrients, available only in meat, almost constantly to maintain the normal functioning of her reproductive system and to reduce the risk of having sick children. Even in the most vegetarian cultures, such as Japan and India, fish and poultry were often introduced into the diet of young girls and pregnant women, which were absolutely forbidden for men of their caste. As for Abrahamic religions, pregnant women were not recommended to fast. Today, strict vegetarian nutritionists develop complex diets and prescribe mineral-vitamin complexes to at least partially compensate for the damage that women with such principles can harm future offspring.

Myth 11. Women invented monogamous marriage

No, monogamous marriage is a patriarchal norm that protects the right of most men to reproduce. In such a structure of society, women cannot sit in flocks on the napes of the most successful, strong and influential males, and are forced to choose even very dubious characters from the point of view of evolution as partners.

Myth 12. Polygamy is a pleasure for men

Polygamy primarily takes into account the interests of women: almost any of them can fall under the wing of a strong man who guarantees her and her children protection and food. Weak males with polygamy are excluded from the evolutionary race. And while all sorts of sultans frolic in the harems, a huge number of men do not get any women at all.

Myth 13. Women are more afraid of snakes and spiders
Arachnophobia, an unstoppable fear of spiders, affects three times as many men as women. As for snakes, it is generally a traditional female animal, like a cat. Before the spread of meowing mice (in some areas - ferrets), snakes, often even poisonous, were quite faithful assistants of the housewives. A snake in the hair or around the neck became the trademark of matriarchs, witches and priestesses of all kinds of cults. Snakes, sensitive not only to tactile cues but also to smells, are more likely to come into contact with women than with men. Our smell often makes them aggressive. And if we take the statistics of snake attacks on people, we can find out with interest that for one bitten woman there are ten men. Until now, most workers in snake nurseries of all kinds of Malaysia, Indonesia and other natural snakes are women.

“And not just snakes! Approximately the same statistics of attacks on people of large cats (given, for example, in the essay V. P. Sheinov “Woman and man: 1000 differences). Apparently, this is due to the fact that women do not actively exude pheromones of fear and aggression when faced with danger.”