Why Men Die Young ... and Why You'll Live Longer

Herb called Annie at noon and said, "I'm taking the train home early. I have something to tell you." When he got home he told her his job was over. He had been called in and told he was through. Just like that. In all his adult life he had never worked for another company. Here he was, over 50, and he had no idea what he would do now, what he should do, where to start. He looked gray. It was as if the world had come to an end for him, but he was still alive.

And Annie, my neighbor, told me about the depression, the numbness, the horror and the angina pains. Herb, who was a legend in the industry and who had made his company the pioneer it was, thought he was going to be there forever, and now he was paralyzed. Annie's reaction was different. She had been a model and a design director and was now living full-time in a little country town taking care of two children she'd had late in life, making exotic flower arrangements for wealthy weekenders, helping her time-pressed executive sisters plan their daughters' weddings. She had already learned to adapt to changing circumstances.

"I'm not into that kind of long-term planning anymore," she said. "I used to have it all figured out. I'd finish my education in so many years. Make big money modeling for so many years and then switch to another career. Get married by such and such a time. Have children five years later. Take a short maternity leave from my job; hire a housekeeper and a nanny.

"But after I had my first baby, all that tight-assed control just had to go. I've had to learn to take it as it comes. I've stopped planning years ahead. It's a relief, not having those long-term plans and constant worry when you can't meet them."

When Herb lost his high-powered job, Annie was willing to pick up the kids and move, finding something to do in whatever city they ended up moving to. This turned out not to be necessary. A small rival agency asked Herb to redesign their graphics. But he still looked "gray in the face," Annie said.

And I thought, there it is, that's why women live so much longer than men in America today. Maybe the younger men, who won't have--and who can't expect--the kind of straight-line, lifetime careers that came to such a traumatic end for Herb, will learn to live flexibly like Annie. Maybe they won't die eight years earlier than women as American men are dying today.

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It has bothered me for a long time that men die so much younger now than women. Life expectancy for American women today is 80; for men, only 72. At the turn of the century, both men and women had an average life expectancy of 45 to 46 years. In all species, females have a slightly higher life expectancy than males. They are the ones who give birth; evidently their hardiness evolves for the survival of the species. But this increasing discrepancy between the life expectancies of men and women is a phenomenon of this century. And perhaps it's a final remnant of society's not taking women seriously that the scientific research institutes don't spend billions of dollars to find out why.

If I were a man, I'd get quite angry thinking about that. Why shouldn't men live as long as women? As a woman, I get angry thinking about it. My father died in his early 60s from heart disease. My mother buried her third husband at 70, turned her amateur card-playing skills into a professional career as a duplicate bridge manager and died at 90 only after a stupidly protective young doctor made her resign from that job and go into a nursing home. In the past year alone, three men I loved, two around my own age, the other six years younger, died of heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. I miss them. I am lonely without them.

As a woman, as a feminist, I feel no urge to gloat over the strengths-that-have-no-name that make women live longer. I want to ask seriously: Why shouldn't men live at least as long as women? Going back over my research for my book The Fountain of Age and thinking about the men I've interviewed, I've come up with some startling answers. If I'm right, men who are now in their 20s, 30s and 40s may not die as young as their fathers. The future Herbs may not have to go through his trauma. They are already being forced to learn the skills that may make them live longer. The changes in men's lives that are accelerating at this time--changes that seem threatening and not always welcome--may add up to a new kind of strength in men. These changes may make them more durable and more reliable than machismo, may lead to longer life. And the woman--man equality that this entails will end the war between the sexes and will transcend the politically correct feminist battle lines and masculine backlash that have preoccupied us in recent years.

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The research conducted over the past 20 years provides some clues. It is remarkable how unprogrammed age deterioration seems to be, how variable from individual to individual, how much it seems to depend on what you do or don't do. Recent studies in Sweden and in the U.S. have shown that deterioration and decline among women and men don't show up until they are well into their 80s.

Those men smoked. Those men ate a lot of red meat, eggs and butter. Those men, in the increasingly competitive, hierarchical white-collar bureaucracy of midcentury life, didn't exercise. My mother played golf and tennis, taught us to swim and took exercise classes when we were growing up. My father's only exercise was fishing on our annual two-week vacation in Wisconsin.

Competitiveness and greed caused an increasing number of men to die from heart disease in the quarter century after World War Two. The recent decline of this disease can be at least partly explained by the new consciousness of diet and exercise, by the new awareness that hard-driving, type A behavior makes one a candidate for heart disease and by the advent of the two-day weekend (my father worked in his store until after six o'clock every night and all day Saturday). But that female--male discrepancy remains. The amelioration of heart disease has turned out to be as great or greater for women, despite the predictions that once women took on those jobs and careers that were driving men to early graves, women would also die younger. They do not. All that juggling seems only to strengthen women.

The factors that contribute to long life, according to studies at the National Institutes of Health, are more complex. What separates those who live long, vital lives from those who deteriorate with age are purposes, projects and bonds of intimacy. Work and love, as Freud said, are the basis of personhood. Freud may have been wrong about women, but he wasn't wrong about everything.

Since bonds that keep us human and purposes that use our abilities and keep us moving in society are so important in the latter stages of life, it is clear why women have an advantage over men. Women, especially those who have lived through the enormous changes of the past 30 years, have had to keep reinventing their purposes and projects, reinventing their selves, in response to change. Psychologists and anthropologists used to bemoan the "discontinuities" in women's lives: to have to move suddenly from tomboy to sweetheart, from college student or career woman to the isolation of housewife and mother, and then, with women's liberation, back to school, starting new careers in midlife or after the nest empties. In this generation, women are trying to have it all at once, or in sequence, with no clear lines or support from society on exactly how, or when, to do it all.

For older women, age itself was just another change, a signal to reinvent oneself. It was also a basic part of their traditional strengths, and perhaps essential to survival of the species, that they had to be sensitive to change, had to keep responding to it as their children grew, as their men moved. They also had to respond to changes in their own bodies, such as menstruation and menopause. There's no question that women's zest, ability to love and desire to explore untried paths continues throughout midlife.

On the other hand, masculinity was defined as the ability to knock down the other guy and keep ahead in one's career, to say nothing of standards of sexual potency or prowess.

It's men's dirty secret, which guys don't talk about much even with one another, how they feel when they can't knock down the other guy so easily, or get it up, as they head for 50 and beyond. But what's no longer a secret is the increasing frustration, rage and depression felt by men in their 40s and 50s who, because of company takeovers or downsizing, are suddenly out of a job and its security and benefits. Some men in their 60s are out of the work force for good because of "voluntary" early retirement.

Downsizing and forced retirements affect women too, but they have had more experience finding temporary and part-time jobs. They've learned to create services and small businesses to help support themselves and their families, or even moved into professional careers at midlife. In the face of age, adapting to the discontinuities that used to be considered handicaps for women turns out to be a strength.

The research now shows that men and women who have single careers for their entire lives, no matter how powerful or successful, will not live as long or as vitally as those who have done more than one thing and have the flexibility nurtured by those changes.

As for the ability to nurture, women have been trained for that task from the beginning. Not long ago, women were supposed to live for love alone, and were to be solely responsible for nurturing their children and aging parents. Recent research shows that career women today still take most of the responsibility for nurturing--which, it seems, cultivates a flexibility that enables them to live when most men have retired or died.

But men are now sharing in that nurturing, though not yet equally. Men learning to nurture is the stock of movies, situation comedies and television series. There is such a focus on single dads, widowers and divorced men that actresses complain of no parts.

In my generation, when a man's wife dies, the man is likely to die in the next two years unless he remarries. Then his life expectancy goes back to normal. If he survives five years alone, his life expectancy also goes back to normal. Evidently, he has by then acquired the skills of self-nurturing. When a woman's husband dies, she may grieve but she doesn't die. She has the elemental skills of survival and the flexibility to respond to change. She's not even necessarily interested in remarrying ("I've nursed one through already"), which is just as well. The men her age are either dead or turning in their wives of 40 years for 20-year-olds and starting over again with new babies.

The crucial life-extending element in bonds of intimacy is not necessarily sexual. It is the ability to "touch" another, to be your authentic self with another and be accepted. Research shows (continued on page 86)why men die young(continued from page 66) that a crucial factor in cancer remission is the presence of a confidante with whom a patient can share feelings. The way this affects the immune system is biochemical, and it can't be replicated by drugs. That same research shows that women are better able to express and share their feelings than men.

I have a hunch that men under the age of 50 may not die so young. Perhaps more important than exercise and diet is the fact that younger men are not so likely to define themselves by the ability to knock the other guy down or by sticking to a career. And, by necessity or desire, they spend more time nurturing. The increasing equality between women and men and the economic changes undermining men's dominance demand a new kind of sharing, which may ease the burden of dependence and open new lines of communication between the sexes.

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The men my age, or those five, six, ten, even 12 years younger than I am, are dying. My women friends have had their bouts with breast cancer or arthritis, but one and all, they're still going strong.

The triple bypass has become so common among these men that it hardly raises an eyebrow. But it still makes headlines when a powerful man such as Steve Ross is felled by prostate cancer only months after putting together an enormous corporate merger. Meetings were postponed last summer when Disney chief Michael Eisner, the epitome of the Eighties empire-building media mogul, was rushed into quadruple-bypass surgery at the age of 52.

I was driven home to New York one night from my son's home outside Philadelphia by a man who runs a car service. My son had been his first customer when he started this service after retiring from a high-risk branch of the oil business. In his 60s now, he has a fleet of 18 cars and employs older men and women, careful, experienced drivers who have retired or need to moonlight. He told me about his chest pains when he was in the oil business and of the cardiologist's dire warning. He got his partners to buy him out.

"My heart's just fine now," he told me. "I sleep all night. I make enough. My kids are educated. I don't need a fancy house with the right address. I don't need a fancy office. I enjoy running this service. I enjoy driving people like your son and getting to know people like you. I've got 18 drivers now, but I take the customers I want to drive myself. I've got a lot of time to live now, and I'm enjoying it."

On a plane to Chicago, I met an old acquaintance, in his 70s now, who told me that he sold his big public relations firm with its 100-person staff and trendy accounts. "I do only the accounts I really believe in now. I don't even have a secretary." So he flies coach, not first class. "That won't kill me," he said, laughing.

For many men in my generation, the end of a career brings panic, often misdiagnosed as heart disease. Even a painter friend, who used to enjoy shocking the critics and is now doing a nostalgic series about Greta Garbo, complains: "They don't want us around taking up their attention. They don't want to see us. It's time for us to leave."

A different pattern is beginning to emerge among the younger men I see. It's as if they don't intend to live--or die--as their fathers did. They see no future in hard-driving, heart attack--breeding careers, even as they keep moving up in the corporate rat-race themselves.

My "media escort" in San Francisco works for publishers on an ever-changing part-time schedule. But at night she plays in a country music band. The members of that band, in their 30s and 40s, define themselves as much by their country music gigs as by their careers. By day, one runs a pizza parlor, one is a lawyer, one a computer software expert, one a legal secretary, one a social worker. Somehow, the men and women seem to fit their kids into all this, sometimes bringing them along. No rigid linear career for any of them, the men as flexible now as the women, putting everything together--job, music and kids.

Lecturing in Seattle, I met Hank Isaac, 47, who has been in this new mode since his 30s. An industrial designer and engineer, he was getting ahead in a big corporation where long hours and constant business travel kept him from spending much time with his wife, Kathleen, and daughter. A modern couple, respectful of each other's careers and carefully allotting "quality time" with their child, they got the sense of real time slipping by. So they took the risk of giving up their corporate jobs in a Midwest city and sold their house in the suburbs. They moved to Seattle, where they now live on a 45-foot trawler on the water. Hank and Kathleen jointly run a toy store, and their daughter, now 14, helps out after school and on Saturdays.

Choosing this type of career are men who have been successful in the corporate world, and I also see it adopted out of necessity by men downsized from supposedly secure careers into the kinds of jobs only women are expected to take. But they are kept from the total crash that sent such men to suicide during the Depression because their wives already work those not-so-glamorous jobs. And, in varying degrees, they share the child care, the trips to the dentist, meetings with the teacher and the attention to clean socks and report cards.

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Younger men are beginning to realize that there is no lifetime security now, no sure climb to the top, no matter what they study in graduate school. I see it in the MBA classes I lecture to in my role as visiting professor in the Leadership Institute of the University of Southern California School of Business. There is an anxiety, a new insecurity that makes students realize the importance of flexibility, of "doing what I really want to do" instead of that Eighties obsession with making a quick million on Wall Street. At the same time there's a new security that enables men to make choices even if they do not ensure a multimillion-dollar future: Their wives earn enough so they can take that gamble.

A woman I once worked with has been promoted to a top job in cable television, and her husband and kids will have to move from New York to California. But he doesn't object, because her salary has enabled him to leave the corporate world to go to graduate school, which he can do in California as easily as in New York. He wanted more control of his own life before it was too late.

With that sort of existential, take-it-as-it-comes approach, career moves no longer can be planned. Life keeps changing, as it has for women all these years. Relax and enjoy it, as the lawyer and the computer whiz playing drums and electric guitar in the country music band in San Francisco are doing right now. I doubt those men will die much younger than their wives.

As for those all-essential bonds of intimacy, the news is also good. I think of (continued on page 151)why men die young(continued from page 86) my father, dead in his early 60s of heart disease, and the support he could never get from my frustrated mother. Forced to quit a newspaper job when she married him at 21--a businessman's wife did not work in Peoria, Illinois in those days--she never found enough to do with her energy. Bridge, shopping, tennis, golf--she did it all and did it well. Perfect dinners, ringing the dinner bell for the maid, running the women's division of the Community Chest one year, the Sunday school the next, taking up eurythmics, even gambling her "allowance" on the stock market.

All I remember is the sound of their fighting, arguing behind the closed door of their bedroom every night. Rarely did we see a sign of tenderness or affection between them. Nothing he did, nothing we, the children, did, was ever enough for her. And it got worse during the Depression when the business didn't make enough to feed her fantasies. We were drawn by our mother into a conspiracy against him, not to let him know if she spent money on a new outfit for herself or us. Besides, he worked late every night and all day Saturdays. On Sundays, he was really tired. Her mysterious, painful ailment (colitis, I believe) got better when his heart disease required her to run the business. And so he died in his early 60s, and she lived until 90.

It is different with my sons. Life is shared--both the earning burden and the children, if not fifty-fifty certainly near enough. The wives of that generation do not need to live through their husbands; they have their own careers to think about. They do not want to keep the children to themselves. They like it when the daddies carry the babies in their backpacks. Though it's a hassle, one or both stay home from work when a kid's fever suddenly soars or a sore throat threatens to turn into pneumonia. My sons diaper their babies with as much dexterity as their wives, though there's no question who is mother and who is father. Maybe there is still a power struggle over child care and housework, especially if one earns much more than the other. But it's not the drastic power imbalance that existed when women didn't earn, were totally dependent on their husbands and took out their rage and frustration in ways that undermined their comfort. After all, there is more than one kind of power in any family, and women, kept from financial power, had to retaliate by denying and manipulating the power of love.

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These changes in the economy and the workplace lay the basis for a healthier relationship between men and women. According to The Economist:

Women have not, on the whole, taken men's jobs. But "women's jobs" have expanded in the past couple of decades while traditional "male" jobs have been disappearing. A larger proportion of women than men usually work in service industries, and women are less likely than men to work in manufacturing [or heavy industry]. So as manufacturing jobs have vanished, it is mostly men who have been thrown out of work.

The gap in pay between women and men had narrowed by the late Eighties, though more so at the bottom end of the pay scale than at the top. Women, of course, have vastly increased their education and job training recently. In the U.S. in 1988, women in their early 20s earned 90 percent of the hourly pay of men of the same age. Women 45 and over were paid an average of 45 percent of men's hourly wage, The Economist reported.

But as one economist put it: "It's not that great jobs were appearing for women at the bottom of the scale. It's just that there aren't any more good jobs for low-skilled male workers." And while the glass ceiling remains, men, downsized from their previous good jobs, have had to take some of those low-paid "women's jobs."

It would hardly help to tell a male secretary that the flexibility and responsiveness he has had to acquire since he lost his "good job" are conducive to the long, ever-changing life his female colleagues look forward to. But the fact is that men and women at all tiers of the wage scale are going to be taking the same kinds of jobs, all of them "temporary," all likely to require new skills and learning and the ability to master change.

And with the great majority of mothers now working outside the home, reality has replaced feminist ideology in requiring men "to share equally the nurture and daily care of their offspring . . . to become more than after-hours buddies and playmates and to take on the less appealing aspects of child care."

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Through all the power struggles over housework and child care, there is a glimpse of a new kind of intimacy based on sharing the burdens and joys of what used to separate men's and women's worlds. But you might not guess it from the rhetoric of angry feminist sexual politics, and from the backlash rhetoric and defensiveness of those beleaguered "male oppressors."

Are Men Really That Bad? headlines Time's February 14, 1994 cover, its Valentine showing a man with a wedding ring on his hand and a real pig's head.

Masculinity is in disrepute. Are we really as awful as they say we are? We are "They," "Them," "the Enemy." The "manly" virtues (bravery, strength, discipline and, egad, machismo itself) remain admirable only by being quietly reassigned to women--to Janet Reno and Hillary Clinton.

The Cold War is over. The war between the sexes has some potential to take its place, to fill the need for portentous conflict with seemingly enormous issues and irreconcilable differences. Men and women at one another's throats, or waving knives at one another's private parts.

Time to give gender a rest. Time to stop staring at life through the single monomaniacal lens of gender politics. We might spin the thought that good can come of each sex thinking the best of the other. Only bad can come of each one thinking the worst. Quite a long time ago--remember?--we used to fall in love.

The same stirring can be heard in the feminist voices coming from a younger generation. Writer Katie Roiphe was virtually crucified for her attack on the excessive focus on date rape among college feminists. Naomi Wolfe, whose The Beauty Myth was the latest feminist best-seller, now summons her sisters to stop clutching the shroud of victimhood and get on with their economic and political empowerment. In Who Stole Feminism?, Christina Hoff Sommers viciously derides politically correct feminist conferences but makes a serious point about the way gender issues such as date rape, self-esteem and sexual harassment have diverted the movement from the economic issues of equality.

I can attest to that. The four major demands of the first important march of the modern women's movement--the Women's Strike for Equality, which I called on August 26, 1970, on the 50th anniversary of women receiving the right to vote--were equal opportunity for women in jobs and education, child care centers, the right to abortion and our own political voice. Television covered the unprecedented march of 50,000 down Fifth Avenue but focused on extremists who called pregnancy barbaric and likened marriage to cancer. As a result, as Newsweek reports, "When ordinary women hear about feminism, they automatically think 'man-hating.'"

The war between the sexes wages ever more violently today in the media, which heighten and distort its most violent expressions. But does every woman in America really identify with Lorena Bobbitt? O.J. Simpson got a police escort as he drove his white Bronco down the freeway. And the polls showed that large numbers of women and black men sympathized with him. But the polls also showed that the great majority of those supposedly villainous white males do not support Simpson, despite his celebrity as athlete and sportscaster.

Such violence and the terrible anger that feeds it are real. There were real causes for the feminist outrage, a rage that generations of powerless women suffered in silence, or took out on their own bodies or on their husbands and kids. Violence against women is often masked as "the war between the sexes." There no longer can be a passive acceptance of wife beating, rape or any other form of violence. Men not only perpetrate violence, they are also the main victims of violence in America today. Violence is one of the leading causes of death among young men. Violence--no longer in wars but in cities--is one reason men don't live as long as women.

The horror and outrage and, yes, the mixed feelings about the violence of Lorena Bobbitt and O.J. Simpson are perhaps a final symptom before the fever breaks. I see, in the new voices calling for peace between the sexes, signs of hope as well as backlash. Women had to march for equality in jobs and education and for the right to control their bodies. We empowered ourselves, finally, to blow the whistle on rape, wife beating and sexual harassment, and we had the Constitution interpreted to cover women's right to control their own reproduction, despite zealots who bomb clinics. We won the right to eat in restaurants and drink in bars where "men only" used to make the business deals.

We have been able to make these changes only with economic independence, as our income has become essential to the family's survival. Our personhood as women and those traditional taken-for-granted services in the home have acquired a new respect. And now men are losing their good jobs and their role as sole provider. They have to depend on women now, not only for love (which was always a more important power than men or some feminists admitted) but also for sharing. The new power struggle over the housework and the kids and the garbage may be less damaging to men than the hidden rage of women's absolute dependency.

I often warned that sexual politics was a deceptive diversion from women's road to equality, which has to be political and economic empowerment. Today it's an even more dangerous diversion: Sexual backlash and the war between the sexes make easy scapegoats. The political outrage generated by Anita Hill, when those senators still didn't get it, got more female senators elected than ever before. But a feminist demand to keep women in the workforce but fire the men would not make sense. (I, for one, am trying to rally my sisters to join with labor groups and others to demand a shorter workweek and flexible job sharing as alternatives to downsizing, which would help both women and men in the child-rearing years.)

Perhaps the Bobbitt and Simpson tragedies will wake us up, women and men, to the terrible folly of no-win sexual warfare. Men will live longer when women are strong enough to realize that they don't need men as scapegoats anymore. We need you, and you need us now more than ever.

For many men in my generation, the end of a career brings panic, often misdiagnosed as heart disease.