If you’ve ever travelled in a fast Mumbai local suburban train, you must’ve seen a few young guys hanging out of the open door even though there are plenty of seats available, smiling in bliss as they close their eyes to enjoy the wind caressing their faces, blowing their hair back. Perhaps you recall boys in your speeding non –AC school bus in the good old days, shoving out as much of their arm as they could in delightful anticipation to feel the headwind. Do you recall any girls doing it? You don’t? I thought as much. What about those passengers on a flight who refuse to put on their seat belt during takeoff, unbuckling it as soon as the flight attendant walks past on her checks? It is likely they are all teenage boys. Perhaps to show the world they’re really cool, macho dudes? It is also likely you haven’t seen any girls unbuckling their seat belts during takeoff.
During my sea cadet days, I was ‘mentored’ by this senior, a 2nd Officer by rank, who during his night navigational duties from midnight to 4 am, would, with a touch of impatience, alter course and head for any ship approaching ours. He would maintain this heading till the other vessel, terrified, would panic and veer away from us, cursing our mothers on the VHF radiotelephone. Only then would my ‘mentor’ return the ship to her original track with a chuckle. By way of explanation, he’d tell me, an apprentice then learning the art of navigation, that life needed to be exciting, not boring, and that sea life otherwise was really boring.
There’s a point I’m trying to make. The above instances are not just coincidences. There is a name for it that I came across recently. It’s called the Male Idiot Theory (MIT). It supports the idea that men are….well, idiots. And idiots do stupid things. They’re driven to take ridiculous risks despite the clear prospects for self-harm, and for no defensible reason.
This phrase MIT was coined by an American cartoonist John McPherson, but it sort of made its way into the scientific literature. In a tongue-in-cheek, but scientifically sound article published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2014, researchers led by Ben Lendrem showed that men are more likely than women to engage in high-risk activities for which the payoff is negligible, even non-existent. To prove this study, the researchers obtained 20 years' worth of data (1995~2014) from the Darwin Awards to tally up the sex of each year's winner.
The Darwin Awards, in case you haven’t heard of them, are awards given to people who die in such astonishingly stupid ways that ‘their action ensures the long-term survival of the species, by selectively allowing one less idiot to survive.’ Winners of the Darwin Award must eliminate themselves from the gene pool in such an idiotic manner that their action ensures one less idiot on this planet. Nominations are rigorously evaluated according to five selection criteria – death, style, veracity, capability, and self-selection—to ensure the award is only given to the most worthy candidates. ‘The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honouring those who accidentally remove themselves from it in a spectacular manner!’ writes the website, cheerily.
Amongst the winners of the Darwin Awards are such awe-inspiring candidates like a terrorist who failed to put enough postage on a letter bomb. When it was returned to him, he unthinkingly opened it, and died from the explosion. It must be noted here that he was conscientious enough to put a return address on his letter bomb. Or take, for example, two drunken friends who willingly placed themselves on the path of a coming train in front of a crowd as they believed the train would simply pass over them. It did not. Other notable examples include the man who went kite surfing in a hurricane and slammed against several buildings, and a guy who shot himself in the head with his ‘Spy Pen’ weapon to prove to a friend that it was in fact real.
What the authors of the study—four, incidentally all-male—showed was that out of 318 total awardees in the Darwin Award’s existence, 282 of them were men—or 88.7%. Impressive percentage, isn’t it? If men and women were equally prone to risk-taking idiocy, such a disparity could never occur. QED—Men are idiots.
By way of explanation, the authors offer that males are willing to take such unnecessary risks simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem, or solely in exchange for ‘bragging rights’. Alcohol may be more likely to lead men to feel ‘bulletproof’ after a few drinks. Because men will be men.
Some more awardees…..for example, the three men who played a variation on Russian roulette, alternately taking shots of alcohol and then stamping on an unexploded Cambodian land mine. Spoiler alert—the mine eventually exploded. Then there’s the thief attempting to purloin a steel hawser from an elevator shaft, who unbolted the hawser while standing in the elevator. Too bad about the force of gravity that caused the elevator to plummet to the ground from a great height.
Hospital emergency department admissions, as well as mortality statistics, show that men are far more likely to die from accidents, sporting injuries, and traffic collisions. So this male ‘idiocy’ is costing many lives, and most don’t get a Darwin Award for their troubles.
Why are men more inherently risk-taking? It is believed that conditioning starts during pre-adolescence, when young boys are sort of brought up to test themselves. They are made to believe that there is social prestige in being gutsy. ‘Be a man!’ and all that. Boys are exhorted by their peers and the grownups in their lives to exhibit the ‘male’ trait of courage, or at least bravado. Men then tend to compete with each other as a way of asserting their own personality, as well as connecting with the men around them. You may have noticed tee-shirts for young boys that say ‘Rascal’ or ‘Terror’ or ‘Brave.’ But for young girls, the messages are cutesy. Like ‘Princess’, ‘Baby Doll’ etc. Girls are expected to be ‘sugar and spice and everything nice.’ Not boys.
On BBC Two’s show QI, a guest pointed out that men often don’t act like idiots until they congregate. When one man goes to an Indian restaurant in the UK, he will order a very normal curry. But if he goes with his friends, he will order the spiciest one! I think it’s the same as going to a pub. If a man goes alone, he’ll have a couple of drinks and go home. But if he is with friends, something is likely to happen to the wiring in his brain; each one of them will try to drink the others under the table. Arm wrestling after that is an optional event. Yes, many of men’s interactions happen at the level of competitions—often pointless. If your teenage son has learned to drive, he’ll most likely be very careful on the road if he is alone in the car. But if he has his teenage friends with him, it is likely he’ll try to emulate a Formula 1 race driver on the tracks.
Okay, so men are idiots. Or try their best to be. But, just asking—how did these idiots convince the non-idiot gender that they were somehow superior, and worthy of a higher pay grade in show biz, sports, and the corporate world? Go figure.
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