I wonder how much longer women live if they cut off their tongue?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/31/men-and-other-mammals-live-longer-if-they-are-castrated-says-researcher31 May 2024
Men and other mammals live longer if they are castrated, says researcher
Cat Bohannon tells Hay festival audience it is not known why men go through life ‘smuggling two little death nuggets’
Whether it is the fountain of youth or the elixir of life, men have travelled the world looking for the key to increasing their longevity.
They should be looking a bit closer to home, according to one leading researcher – although after they do, they might end up taking the years God intended for them.
When it comes to increasing the lifespan of any male mammal, “there is one way you can intervene”: castration.
Cat Bohannon, the celebrated author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, said men went through life “smuggling two little death nuggets”, with research suggesting an orchiectomy can lend a few more precious years.
Speaking at the Hay festival on Friday, Bohannon said castration was a “way to make male mammals live longer”. This effect was observed in American men in the mid-20th century who were institutionalised, usually because of mental illness, and castrated, and in Korean eunuchs. The castrated men lived longer than their “regularly balled peers”.
“You can castrate it. Cut off its balls. Don’t try this at home,” added Bohannon, a researcher with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition.
While it used to be thought that the average lifespan discrepancy was behavioural – “dumb boys doing dumb boy stuff” – it in fact “seems to have something deeply to do with the immune system and cellular repair”, she said. Males “get more infections” across their lifespan and “more cancer, and the prognoses in many cases tend to be a bit worse”.
Cont.
