Professor Heinrich von Storch, 1801
Working for many years in the field of demography, I have carried out a number of research projects and published several books. It has become increasingly interesting to work in the past few years because the public now sees statistics that had earlier been closely guarded from not only the people but also the experts. As to high mortality, the public has gained an impression that this has emerged only now and Ukraine is the worst case ever. Untrue. Although it is now very distressing, this has always been the case. The mortality rate in this country, high as it is, is still not the highest in the CIS. However, no matter how bitter it sounds, the demographic problems we inherited from the USSR have not disappeared but, on the contrary, become aggravated since independence, with males taking the heaviest toll. Patriotism means speaking the truth, National Security and Defense Council Secretary Yevhen Marchuk recently told The Day. This is especially true of the demographic situation.
ADAM AND EVE
If asked to name literary characters who embody, in the aggregate, the various features of human mentality and nature, I would single out five: Don Juan, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Taras Bulba. Since it is more difficult to characterize women (at least for me), I have finally chosen the personalities of Carmen and Anna Karenina. Naturally, each of us can draw up our own lists. For example, should we put Othello, Prince Myshkin, or Iago on the list when the question is of men? But it is still harder with women... Tatiana Larina and Natasha Rostova pivot on the same mental axis that Anna Karenina and Carmen do. What about Joan of Arc and Lady Macbeth? Is there anything female about them?
The genes that determine our most important physical, physiological, and psychological characteristics are grouped into distinct units. Each of such units is called a chromosome. While each cell of the female body has 46 chromosomes, that of a male has, if I may say so, 45.5 chromosomes. This 0.5 can be considered the chip off the “normal” female chromosome. In fact, this chip is responsible for all that makes a man a man from his beard to mathematical prowess. Summarizing this rather simplified situation, we can conclude that the male is something of a mutant distinguished with comparatively greater physical force, aggressiveness, and proclivity to abstract and logical thinking than the female. While force and aggressiveness characterize animal males, abstract logical thinking determines the gap between man and rooster, man and orangutan. There being no harmony in human nature, men are humanity’s most disharmonious part. It is nice in principle, for it is bipolarity that provokes high intellectual and emotional tension owing to which the best representatives of the male gender can create things. Medical researchers have, however, a somewhat different view of this problem, for men not only do not live but also do not get sick and die the same way women do. To protect myself from misinterpretation, I will say that I mean psychophysical differences between the allegedly weaker and the stronger sexes, in which case the question of which is better or worse makes no sense: no one is better or worse, but we are all different. And this is precisely what turns a population from a mixture of individuals into a system of them.
“ABSOLUTION” FOR MOTHERS AND GRANDMOTHERS
It is a banal truth that women outlive men. In today’s Ukraine, average life expectancy varies among oblasts from 72.2 to 75.4 and from 60.1 to 66.9 years for our Eves and Adams respectively. In other words, the male upper range is significantly lower than the female lower one. Another specific is that the difference between the demographically best and worst regions is only 3.2 years for women and 6.8 years (twice as large) for men. This means that women are less sensitive, compared with men, to the socioeconomic hardships that affect life expectancy. Although this trend can be observed in other countries as well, it was and is much more pronounced in the former USSR and the current CIS (except for Central Asia) than in, say, Sweden or Japan. Why? The point is in physiological perfection of the female organism: an Eve develops increased resistance to such unfavorable factors as hunger, thirst, heat, cold, infection, pain, or bleeding. Conversely, men are less perfect because they have been, so to speak, poisoned with their own androgens, the sex hormones responsible for all things male. This is no accident. Since women are supposed to bear, breast- feed, and raise the child, they must be prepared to do so under the most unfavorable conditions. Just as men must be able to bring a piece of mammoth meat to the cave and repel anybody who might try to take it away, they need force and aggressiveness developed by their otherwise harmful androgens. Now there are no mammoths but there still are androgens, and man still remains organically aggressive. Now a few words about grandmothers. The common perception is that they have played such a great role in child-rearing from time immemorial, that evolution took special care about female longevity (“absolution” from an early death). Conversely, in those times grandfathers were of no use to a commune once they lost potency and strength, so they were by no means the fittest to survive.
CRISIS OR CATASTROPHE?
Let us now look at the problem through the eyes of a coroner who has taken off his gloves and is writing down the cause of death in the autopsy report. In 2000 myocardial infarction claimed the lives of 8,300 Ukrainian citizens. Little wonder, for this pathology belongs to the so-called diseases of civilization, and more or less the same thing occurs in Europe, America, and Japan. As the following table illustrates, the ratio of the dead is “in favor” of men, which in fact reflects the case of “absolution.”
13,200 deaths from infectious diseases is too high a figure for a European country, the more so that 11,000 of them were caused by tuberculosis. I am not going to dwell on the epidemic of tuberculosis, which is already in the focus of public attention. But look at the ratio of genders. Is it not terrible? Not least among the causes of this are our correctional facilities, which “correct” primarily men, who get infected with Koch’s bacillus and, to quote a Gogolian character, “recover like flies would.” I will add that three out of four HIV-infected and AIDS patients are males. Poor Adam.
Unable to discuss here the whole range of causes of death, I will only dwell on two most vulnerable items. Diseases related to alcohol abuse have taken their toll of 12,700 our compatriots over the past year. Accidents, poisonings, and injuries have claimed 73,600 (!) lives, with almost 15,000 people committing suicide. Men account for most of these demographic losses. In social terms, the situation will look still more menacing if we take into account the age at which people die a violent death. While the average ratio of men and women in this group is 4.3:1, the ratio in the most reproductive age of 15 to 49 years is 6:1 (see the figure). The same age period embraces those doing time (85%) and those looking for a job abroad (almost exclusively men, except for one specifically female profession). While the demographic situation in Ukraine as a whole can be described with the word “crisis,” it will not be an exaggeration to apply the term “catastrophe” to men.
CLINICAL DEATH AFTER CLINICAL LIFE
Five centuries ago, Doctor of Philosophy and Medicine FranНois Rabelais said that every man has the right to get married, be rich, and live in freedom. What I would add to this undoubtedly sound advice is the quest for a certain objective in life which requires if not aggressiveness then competition and rivalry, for these are some of the most important essential qualities of Adam. With men being fighters and revolutionaries, nature has bestowed on women the great mission of conservatism and conformity. It is the balance of these opposite tendencies that creates social harmony. Let us turn our gaze back to Soviet times and recall that daycare facilities, schools, youth camps, military barracks, and prisons rested on the same educational principle: repression. Being an individual was considered an obstacle to joining the anonymous community to be cemented together by the uniform communist ideal. Individuality was oppressed and broken. Every year the school turned out millions of the obedient who had already become indifferent to Pavlik Morozov (Soviet boy killed by a supposedly kulak relatives for denouncing his father to Stalin’s secret police — Ed.) but failed to learn anything better during the time officially designated as mature socialism. Girls and women managed to adapt, one way or another, to the system by force of their innate pliability. But it was more difficult for boys, teenagers, and men, including both those who had become obedient (for this is not a male trait) and those who rebelled (for the system considered them enemies). The rebels would ripen into dissidents and criminals, while the obedient would form an army of socially crippled, lazy men without ambition, who could only find inspiration in soccer, vodka, or kowtowing to Communist Party bosses. Then freedom suddenly fell upon us. Women have, as usual, adjusted themselves: they are today the backbone of the state. The men have buckled under the pressure and become stratified: the most aspiring of them took to politics and business or went seeking jobs to Europe, while the rest flounder in their native soil, as a rule utterly without social prestige, decent pay, or prospects. They drink, do drugs, steal, kill, go to prison, die foolishly on the roads, throw themselves out of windows, or tighten a noose round their necks.
AN EVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENT
Will my dear readers please take without prejudice what is written in this chapter, although parallels between the behavior of some representatives of Homo sapiens and that of hyenas (Hyaena crocuta ) are shocking indeed? To begin, let us refer to Alfred Brehm’s well-known book The Life of Animals and quote the following passage in translation from the Russian edition, “Hyenas look unattractive, even ugly, with an elongated body, a thick neck, a big head, a hideous muzzle. The curved front paws are longer than the hind ones; the ears are rough-shaped; the obliquely-set eyes always rove, glitter terribly, and have a repugnant expression. Hyenas possess a repulsive voice, something like infernal laughter; they are horribly voracious and greedy. They exude a foul smell. They feed mostly on carrion. The mother loves and protects her posterity only when they are very young, then she abandons them to their fate. Hyenas often eat one another, especially the wounded and killed. Hyenas rarely procreate in captivity, but this can be explained by the difficulty to distinguish between the sexes.” The point is that Brehm did not know that the social organization of hyenas was characterized by strict matriarchy, with the lowest female in the hierarchy wielding greater power than any of the males. Except for a brief mating period, males are kept out of the pack at a certain distance, where they prowl, eating what is left over by females. The consequences are that having assumed male functions, females have to let their organism be filled with androgens. A female embryo, which develops in a semi-male hormonal medium, accordingly has semi-male genitals (hence Brehm’s difficulty in distinguishing between the sexes). This causes the first-born pups to die, and then the androgen-saturated mothers rapidly lose maternal reflexes, leaving unattended or even eating their babies.
The evolutionary experiment shows that a social organism consisting of aggressive females, downtrodden males, and abandoned infants can only survive if it feeds off carrion. I would hope better for us.
The term, excessive mortality among men, is an old one, for this phenomenon by no means emerged in Ukraine. Yet, we must regard it today as a real threat to national security. What could remedy this situation? “Only” a sound (capitalist) economy that would allow one to work, earn well, and to spend money at his/her own discretion. Then Eve and her three little children would see their Adam off to work every morning and see him in every evening by the door of a tidy home.
IN LIGHT OF TODAY
As it seemed to me during my sojourn in the US, American feminists struggle for the right to let men go first through the doorway, help them to put on a coat, and pay their own restaurant tab. I wish them every success (although most Americans take as much interest in this as they do in the mating dance of mosquitoes). In this country, however, women are intensifying the struggle for their rights, first of all, the right to be elected to Verkhovna Rada. But here I have certain doubts provoked by a well-respected lady who has worked many years for the benefit of her gender but said after a recent two- day congress of Ukrainian women, “It is so good that THEY are not elected to parliament!” To my mind, let them be elected, but I find it difficult to understand the difference between feminine and masculine national legislation. Sincerely hoping that there is no difference at all, I am thus very far from worrying about the gender of a people’s deputy. Moreover, there are examples of political, so to speak, inversion, the brightest of them being Ms. Yuliya Tymoshenko and Mr. Viktor Yushchenko. I will only remark on their style, not the essence of their positions. Ms. Tymoshenko is determination, consistency, and clarity. Mr. Yushchenko demonstrates double-talk (or even nothing at all), waffling, orphan reflexes (search for a father), and attempts to make up his deficient words with too many gestures. But should Mr. Yushchenko lead a certain women’s party, I am one hundred percent certain that he would poll three times as many votes as Our Ukraine.
