The women: I think they were right about "Women seem to be better at putting up with things, at accepting the fact that a situation isn’t fixable and trying to make the best of it."
Most women who aren't rich (esp in those days) were used to extreme hardship and making do.

The men: "Having a family was also a factor in men’s survival; all the adult males who survived the entrapment were fathers, and all the bachelors (single men 21 and over) died." It may have been a combination of the focus of surviving for the family, and that focus 'encouraging' them not to go out and do something pointless or dangerous.

Many young men seem to have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to many things, possibly testosterone-related, or maybe just an inability to think things through clearly, or a combination of the two.

Art "... why is it that pretty much every behavior that is futile, self-destructive, stupid, self-defeating, and foolish characterized and immediately identified as typically male?"

Are you familiar with stream-of-consciousness written interior dialogues? I would love to see some accurate ones from some different young men.

Just from what I've seen and heard, so many of them seem to be basically irrational. Not all, however... I'm not trying to be insulting here.

There seems to be two basic types of men/boys: those who can control their thinking and planning, and those who can't seem to think in a straight line.

The first group is what I think of as 'men', and they seem to be the ones who are good businessmen, who can create a military strategy, and draw reasonable conclusions from a set of facts. I've known very young men who fit in this group, so I suspect that age isn't the issue.

The second group is the 'boys', no matter what their age. They seem to be totally unable to follow a rational line of thinking to a reasonable conclusion. It's like their brains are seriously affected with a bad case of electrical static that interferes with adding 2 + 2 to get 4.

The boy gets mad at someone and starts punching holes in the wall and kicking furniture around; the man focuses on a plot for revenge (even though he doesn't necessarily follow through with it -- it's more of a form of keeping control).

I have three good friends of many years who are married to really excellent men. I have known many other men (and my older brother falls into this category) who simply react, with no plan, no focus, no conclusions on how/why something happened.

Put both of these two basic types of males in a survival situation, and everything else being equal, I would bet on which ones would survive: the ones with focus and rational thinking.

Okay, guys, how far off am I?

Sue

p.s. on the Darwin Awards. I believe it was in the second book where the author said that she received many queries as to why almost all the nominees and winners were male. IIRC, the Darwin Awards began as a sociological experiment at a CA university (Stanford?), and Wendy Northcutt took it over with a few other people when it had outlived it's original usefulness. She said that by the time of the second book came out, while there had been thousands of males nominated, only (I think) 14 females had been suggested. I forget what she offered as a possible reason, but that may have been where I first came across the term 'testosterone poisoning'. Or not.