Of Men And Women: analysing the coupling game

Preambles

Student of sociology and like sciences are of the opinion that by the time people reach marriageable (loosely defined) age, the sexes are about equal in terms of numbers.

In this article, "we" set out to disprove this inexact scientific deduction. While we tender no statistical proof nor render/formulate any hypothesis; while we may reasonably be assured that the scientists who "should know" will look upon us with disdain and disgust; we are nonetheless persuaded that we would have come close to achieving our aim (which in itself is hazy and largely undefined) if we are able to elicit a giggle or two from the reader by the time he/she finishes reading this piece, and the time and paper or disk-space on which this article is written/stored would not have been wasted. Having said all that, let us proceed.

Ground rules and assumptions

As we all know, the world is not an ideal place; thus we will start off by calling a spade a spade i.e., by saying that the world is a chaotic place (none of that nonsense of talking about "the degree of entropy".) But even amidst all the chaos, we can easily see a certain uneasy equilibrium in effect/existence. We will thus try to improve on this less than ideal environment by making the following assumptions. We exclude China (no offense intended) which for her own "reasonable" reasons, has taken family planning to nothing short of scientifically scandalous (Whatever happened to "multiply and take dominion?") having said all that in one breathe, let us make some progress.

As we pointed out earlier, scientist believe that by the time people come of age, the sexes are about equal in number. If we go back a little, science tells us that on the average, more boys than girls are born, but that during early childhood and the teenage years, "nature" favours girls over boys due to certain reasons: young boys are more susceptible to being overcome by the numerous ills of childhood; also boys are more likely to indulge in potentially life-threatening "sports" of various types and levels of legality than girls. Thus by the time boys and girls eyeing each other are ready to take things to a serious level, the sexes are about equal in number. So one may then most reasonably assume that courtship among the human animal should be quite easy since we are basically "monogamous", unlike some of the other animals on this planet who are disposed to maintaining harems and thus making true one-to-one everybody-has-a-mate equilibrium in coupling almost impossible? Wrong we say. Another breathe gone; we must therefore proceed.

The meat of the matter

It is common knowledge that historically, the mating of men and women have produced some strange specimens (and we are not talking the hunchback of Notre Dame). Apart from the lucky 6 million or so who can be said to be "perfect" (visually from a purely outward physical sense), the rest of "us" are statistically (ab)normally distributed around the afore-mentioned hunchback. Six million we said? A quick math would suffice at this point:
            Say every 1 person in a thousand warm-bodies is perfect, that would give you 6 million out of
            an estimated (I don't think that includes the villages roundabout my "town") 6 billion people
            worldwide - and we think that is even being optimistic. Remember we have no statistical
            evidence - just our deduction from observations.
Among these imperfect mass, there is a large percentage of people approximating a common "value" or "acceptable" threshold in their level of plainness and un-striking (purely) physical characteristic - emphasis on "physical" here because quite a few of the afore-mentioned subset are actually "human" in every sense of the world: sociable, considerate, smart and capable of sound reasoning. Enough of Beating About the Bush (BABbling).

Sampling the subject

In order to create the needed necessary ideal conditions/environment for our "study", we will exclude the "perfect" 6 million along with the 1 billion Chinese people (note though, that everything that we have said so far and will be saying here also applies to the Chinese). Our study group will thus be an approximate 5.9 billion humans in total which we will refer to (for want of a better expression) statistically as sample size N. We will for the sake of simplicity assume that N has equal number of young "pair-able" males and females.

Beauty is in the ...

If every male and female in N were to be identical in appearance and behaviour (God forbid!), we would have ended this piece here. But the fact is that N is made up of a large number of those people that make a statisticians life hell, and also makes it next to impossible to formulate laws of human behaviour that works the same way every time, both at the micro and macro levels i.e., no matter the sample size. Three sample cases are: believers of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "beauty is only skin deep" and the downfall of Troy spoil the broth and trashes all established laws governing inter-sexual interactions among humans!
Hmm, wonder if we can take out a patent on the term inter-sexual interactions, hmm.

Not so straightforward my pretty

Having laid the groundwork, let us now truly sink our teeth into the "real" issue at hand - as it were, we are about to look at the issue through our magnifying glass - at this stage the best we can hope for is not to get burned!

Diseases and genetics

It is a fact that due to genetics, some people are more predisposed to certain diseases. (Before you go committing a crime and blaming it on your genes, better do some research to find out how prevalent your particular genetic defect is and how easy it is to convince a jury that you should be let off easy or else you will be looking at a long time in the gallows or more seriously, you might get "the chair"!) Cancer in all its various forms comes easily to mind. Deformities of all sort too - genetical and those caused by man's tampering with nature and certain drugs such as the notorious (drug used in d 70s for pregnant women).
S.S. (not the Fuhrer's men) - Sickle Cell Anaemia among Blacks - we can't call them African-American since that would imply that only American blacks are "blacks". What are we then to do with "African" blacks and all the various shades of chocolate between black and white?

Mind your manners my dear

Societal factors:

Success - success can be a serious factor in determining how "pairing" takes place
Class - class in its various forms - upper, middle and lower
Parenthood - "my dear, you couldn't possibly marry that man, not even a drop of blueblood flows in his veins! I am sure you can do better than that" (kings, queens, lords etc)
Education - not only how high you progressed but also where did you acquire that progress (Cambridge, Heaton, Harvard etc)
Wealth - for better not for worse!
Sexual preference - do you fancy a man or woman, or do you even fancy a human being at all! (homosexualism, lesbianism etc)
Culture - polygamy and (parental choice of spouse)
Religion - what do you believe in? (that is if you believe in anything at all)

Putting all the cards on the table

We will now make our assertions and give you some data to mentally chew on (all based on N as previously defined).

20% of men and 20% of women in N are on the next level of perfection (after the perfect 6million that is)
Ignoring factors discussed above, we can reasonably assume that the afore-mentioned 20% of men want the aforementioned 20% of women
But complicating the matter is that 50% of the remaining 80% of men (making 40% of men in N) "also" want the 20% of women mentioned above.
Since some people believe that women are not as "physically-only" as men (whatever happened to money), we can say that 40% of the remaining 80% of women (making 30% approx of total number of women population in N) also want the specified 20% of men.

Let us summarise the "facts" we have at this point:

                  Men (100%)             |                 Women (100%)
-----------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------
M_A - 20% (perfect) <--------------|-------------> F_A - 20% (perfect)
                  ^                                   |                                   ^
                   |                                   |            __________|
                   |_______________|_____|_____________
                                                       |           |                              |
                                                       |           |                              |
                    _______________|_____|                             |
                   |                                   |                                          |
M_B - 40% (not so perfect) <-----|------------> F_C - 30% (not so perfect)
                                                       |
                                                       |
                                                       |
M_C - 40% (not so perfect) <-----|------------> F_C - 50% (not so perfect)
                                                       |

Thus all the groups are unbalanced (excuse our analysis, we have always had a little problem with statistics).

Let's draw this meet to a close if you don't mind

We can blame our forebears for their choice of mates. May be if they had been more careful, the situation will be approaching the equilibrium science wants it to be.
On the other hand, who can predict the future? Which is why man will never be God!
And on a closing note - which is why cloning in the Schwarzenegger/6th Day sense will never (never I say!) be possible and computers will never be truly "aware" or capable of "true" thought (nothing like a little bit of controversy to end a piece eh?). Have you ever considered the number of things a single human does

simultaneously and
without much thought from long practice of repeating the same thing?
DUI*, deep thinking and driving for example.

So my friend, if you know what is good for you, "give it up for God!"

Finis.

*DUI - Driving Under the Influence is the 21st century politically-correct way of saying a man is drunk!

(10-June-2004)

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