It’s commonly known that women outlive men, a statistical fact that no one ever seems to cite as evidence of systemic injustice. You never hear that the reason women live longer than men is because we live in a toxically misandrist matriarchy that unfairly favors chicks and disadvantages dudes.

A study released on Monday reveals that the American “death gap” — the chasm in longevity between men and women that has persisted for more than a century — is wider than at any point since 1996. Whereas women lived 4.8 years longer on average than men in 2010, the gap in 2021 stretched out to 5.8 years.

This disparity is not exclusive to the United States. In fact, it’s worse elsewhere. Worldwide, women outlive men by an average of seven years. According to a 2001 report, the only five countries on Earth where men outlived women were the flea-bitten open-air latrines we call Afghanistan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. But a report from 2017 says there’s no longer any country on the planet where men outlive women.

It wasn’t always this way.

According to data from developed countries, men lived longer than women throughout most of the 1800s, only for the longevity stats to tip in favor of females during the 189os — an advantage that women have held ever since. Women are supposedly more vulnerable than men to infectious diseases, but once male scientists got a grip on the microbes and brought those pesky critters to heel, women started living longer than men.

As far as I know, women have never thanked men for it.

Myriad reasons are used to explain the modern death gap between the sexes — some of them genetic, others behavioral, and still others cultural. If you’re inclined to view behavior and culture as mere outcroppings of personal and group genetics, I guess it’s all genetic. Although one could make a solid case that men have certain genetic advantages that have led them to invent nearly everything of value that humans have ever invented, the sad fact is that men are more biologically disposable than women. Until some lonely male genius perfects an artificial womb, it will remain a fact of nature that one studly man and 100 fertile women would be able to repopulate the world much more easily than 100 studly men and one fertile woman.

Among the genetic reasons for why women live longer than men:

• Female fetuses are statistically more likely to survive in the womb than male fetuses.


• Boys are more prone to developmental disorders than girls.


• Larger-sized animals tend to have shorter lifespans than smaller animals within the same species. Despite those millions of obscenely fat black women, male humans on average tend to be larger than female humans.


• Men are much more likely than women to die from heart disease, which may in part be explained by the fact that testosterone weakens heart muscles and can cause arterial plaque, whereas estrogen serves as a buffer against cardiovascular ailments.


• The Y chromosome is more likely to develop mutations than the X chromosome (women are XX and men are XY), which may make men more vulnerable to an array of ailments such as cancer.


• The frontal lobes of girls’ and young women’s brains develop more quickly than those in boys and young men. Frontal lobes are associated with judgment and weighing the consequences of one’s actions, which may explain the higher incidence of reckless and violent behavior among males.


• Females are widely thought to have stronger immune responses and the ability to produce higher quantities of antibodies than men.

On average, men also behave differently than women — which may help explain why they die younger:

• Men are much more likely than women to avoid physicians, eat unhealthy diets, and allow mental disorders to go untreated.


• Compared to women, men are more likely to smoke, drink, and abuse drugs.


• Men are also more inclined than women toward performing dangerous activities such as driving recklessly, committing homicide or being murdered, and risking life and limb merely to prove their masculine bona fides.


• When it comes to “avoidable deaths” — i.e., those attributable to behavior — the US has a higher rate than any other country. But according to a 2006 study from Leeds Metropolitan University, “In every country there is an excess of male deaths due to potentially avoidable reasons.”

Widespread cultural norms also lead men to an earlier grave than women:

• Despite Hillary Clinton’s intensely stupid claim that “Women have always been the primary victims of war,” a study of American casualties during the Second World War found that “Women made up only .1 percent of the military’s 405,000 war-related deaths” — i.e., about one in a thousand. Throughout history and everywhere on Earth, men have been the primary combatants and have suffered the heaviest losses of life during war. Men, and hardly ever women, are expected to both fight and die in war.


• Men also make up the roaring majority of those who die from job-related deaths: As of 2014, women comprised only 8% of workplace fatalities.


• “Compared to men, women have larger and more intimate social networks,” so when women fail, they have a much vaster array of fluffy pillows to brace their fall than men.


• According to a 2012 study, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do” when convicted for the same crimes and are “twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted” than men.


• Possibly as the cumulative result of social norms that favor women all across the world, men commit suicide at much higher rates than women.

And yet despite all this, it’s shoved down boys’ throats since birth that they are unfairly privileged relative to girls.

I remember one summer in my early adolescence sitting on the steel benches outside our rooms in the cheap little motel we visited every year in Wildwood, New Jersey. I listened in silently disgusted wonderment as my mom and sister gleefully mocked my father and brother-in-law for their looks, their behavior, and their misfortunes. This was back before feminism was used as a front to lower wages and force women to work, so for my mother and sister, they weren’t really on a “vacation”; they were just on a trip away from home. I’m not sure where my father and brother-in-law were during this extended mockery session; maybe they were in their rooms snoring off the exhaustion from working their balls off the other 51 weeks every year. I marveled at how vicious and ungrateful mom and sis sounded.

Then, of course, their mates died before they did. For the last 20 years of her life, my mom lived off the money she’d been bequeathed from the dead husband whom she ridiculed behind his back. My sister got divorced before her husband died, but she was able to milk child support out of that hapless, toupee-wearing sucker.

How many other men work themselves to death while their ungrateful womenfolk cackle behind their backs like sharp-beaked hens? How many more are forced to endure their women cackling right to their faces?

It reminds me of a joke I heard a long time ago that never ceases to be grimly funny:

Q: Why do men die ten years before women do?

A: Because they want to.

Men inhabit a world that everyone insists is a “patriarchy” but then works them to death as their cunty women belittle them and scoop up the fruit of their labor once they’ve croaked.

More than any other reason — or maybe as a result of all the other reasons combined — men die younger than women because they want to.