With her reply to one of my comments over at Womanist Musings Renee got me to thinking about suicide. I have been making this tongue in cheek observation for years but did not look up the statistics. Women actually perform worse than I had been saying. One only needs two statistics to prove that women are grossly less competent than men. Attempted suicides and the suicide rate.
Women were three times as likely to attempt suicide in 2001. In that year 24,672 men committed suicide compared to 5,950 suicides committed by women. That means that men commit suicide 4 time as often as women do with 1/3 the attempts. That means that men are 12 times as likely to succeed at trying to kill themselves.
Killing a human being is not a difficult task. It is no secret what it takes to end a life. It is especially easy to do if the victim is co-operative. In a suicide the victim is by definition co-operating with the killer because they are the same person. How incompetent does one have to be to fail at such a simple task.
/snark
Statistics are from suicide.org.
Dirk Obbink convicted
1 year ago
4 comments:
Larry, You've taken what is normally a tragic subject and made me laugh. But seriously, I think we know the reason succeed at suicide less often than men: Women mainly use suicide attempts to get attention and have no real intention of ending their lives. Men sometimes use suicide attempts to get attention but far more often do want to end their lives. Why? Because, in general (there are always exceptions but in general) men's lives are harder.
Since women are the child-bearers, evolution has caused men to find it natural to shield women from the harsher aspects of life. That's life, and its no more useful to complain about than it is to complain about gravity. I just wish more women would admit it. But then again, humoring them when they claim victimhood status is part of the male instinct, too. So what can we do but make the best of it and try to find a woman who will not abuse the awesome power she has over us?
Meadster
There are many reasons why men are more successfull at suicide. Women's lives being easier than men's is not among them. Every one thinks that their role is the harder one unless they use their human empathy to see that we all have it rough in different ways. Your pitty party is no more valid than any other victim group's.
I was stating a theory based on what I've observed. Can't say I've done a scientific study, so there's a good chance I could be wrong.
I agree that "we all have it rough in different ways," though that doesn't mean some don't have it rougher than others. Still, I can't prove that women generally have it harder than men, so I would be interested to know why men more often make serious attempts to kill themselves (as opposed to attention-seeking fake suicide attempts).
I think that men are more likely to view allowing oneself to be stoped from doing something that one sets out to do as a personal failure. Women see being stoped as circumstances outside their controll and therefore not a matter of shame.
Women are more likely to be emotionaly manipulative than physicly abusive because it is hard to phsicaly abuse someone who is much stronger than you are.
The two sexes view being rescued differently. A man is more likely to be embarassed about needing rescue. A woman may even fantasize about it.
There are three guesses just off the top of my head.
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