Yes, Men Are Idiots. And Science Can Prove It

Men are idiots. No, truly, they are, and now all the long-suffering, eye-rolling women of the world have the hard science to prove it.

A bunch of British researchers who, may I point out, are all men, have done a study on what they call the male idiot theory (MIT).

The research, published in the traditionally quirky Christmas issue of the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), takes a look at sex differences in “idiotic risk-taking behavior” where the payoff is tiny and the outcome is either extremely injurious or extremely dead.

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First, there are the incontrovertible numbers: Men are more likely to be admitted to an emergency room with accidental or sports-related injuries, and more likely to die in a traffic collision. This may be because men are more likely to participate in bruising contact sports (hello, NFL) or do insane extreme activities such as BASE jumping (don’t ask).

On the other hand, as the scientists write, it “may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.”

To prove this, the researchers reviewed the data on the past 20 years of winners of the Darwin Awards. These tongue-in-cheek honors are given to people who kill themselves doing something supremely stupid, thereby removing themselves from the gene pool and ensuring that one less idiot will survive. Some examples: the guy who opened his own letter bomb after it was returned for insufficient postage. Or the man who wanted to prove his gun wasn’t loaded by putting it to his head and pulling the trigger. It was.

Dennis Lendrem, of the Institute of Cellular Medicine at Newcastle University in England, and his colleagues analyzed the award winners and found that men won almost 90 percent of the awards from 1995 to 2014. “This finding is entirely consistent with male idiot theory (MIT) and supports the hypothesis that men are idiots,” they concluded.

The scientists go on to say that MIT deserves further investigation and that they intend to do so, probably at the next Christmas party.

Photo: dangubic/iStock

 

 

 

 

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