Death and How To Avoid It - Part Two by Dave Jaffe

               Part Two


    Why do women usually outlive men? I can't say for sure. But biology tells us that the female of any species outlives the male.
     In the world of us humans, women in the western world do take better care of themselves than men. They exercise more as any visit to a local aerobics class shows. These classes are jam packed with women. Yet fewer men show up to jump, sweat and strain. Women also watch their weight more than men.
    That doesn't mean that all women are hauling anorectic looking bodies around. Women pile up the kilograms as they age just like men. Yet overall women do try to control their weight more than men do. "My wife's keeping me well fed," a chunky 40's something male told me as he slapped his big stomach. Yet this man's wife was quite thin. She was following a far healthier path than her spouse. For keeping thin does extend your life.
     Women also lead less reckless lives than men. They don't endanger themselves as many men do. "Women don't climb Mount Everest," a male mountain climber told me way back in the 1970's.
 This isn't true to-day. The second wave of feminism came along in the late 1960's and allowed women to do many things like mountain climbing that only men used to do.
      Still even to-day women take less risks than men.A drunken car driver is far more likely to be a man, and usually a young man than a woman. And therefore that male is far more likely to die. Every year more than 2,000 Canadians die in car crashes and here far more men than women end up dead, especially if alcohol's involved.
     Women are also far more likely to end up as criminals especially if the crime is violent. Over 600 Canadians are killed every year by someone else. And the person who's stabbing, shooting or strangling someone else to death is eight times more likely to be a man than a woman."If only women committed crime," one female prison guard told me, "we could close nine out of ten prisons."
      Men far more often than women rob banks, fight in streets or playgrounds, become illegal drug addicts, steal from stores and commit fraud. Surprisingly men are also more likely to become prostitutes than women. Crime by the way is a young man's game and a very dangerous one too. If you want to die young, become a criminal.
      Another plus for women is that when illness strikes them, they're much more likely to go to a doctor than men."I'm not going to run off to see a doctor every time I get a little pain,"my father used to say. He tried to stay away from medical offices. Yet woman aren't like this. They go doctors when they're in pain or feel their body temperatures rise. So here's another reason why women outlive us males.
   Then there's the choices that men and women make as they go through life. We'll look at this in the next part/.