If you had a chance to live forever would you? Billionaires have begun funding projects to do exactly that, live forever. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos are among two prominent names that are behind this movement, two men. This is what I will be talking about in this week’s blog post; the idea of immortality has occurred in almost every human’s minds, but how seriously do you take this notion?
The Chinese began searching for an immortality pill centuries before the common era and humanity has still yet to find one. Scholars today debate as to whether technological advances in cellular biology and cybernetics will allow humans to one day live forever. In summary, modern medicine will advance to the point where cancer will be eliminated, biological aging can be reversed, eventually leading to the goal of humans being able to live forever.
How does this relate to gender one may ask? Well, a recent study found that men supported the development of Indefinite Life Extension more than woman did. Indefinite Life Extension is defined as modern technologies constructing a way to allow humans to live forever. Additionally, they found that woman were generally more religious than men and religiosity was a mediating variable in this gender difference. So why is it this?
From personal experience, this conversation arose during a double date I had with my girlfriend and another couple. Both myself and my male friend agreed that living forever would be intriguing, while the females both disagreed. The woman stated that living forever would ruin the quality of life and that life would become a bore. My girlfriend specifically said, “One of the parts of being human is being mortal”. I can agree with that statement, however, mortality personally scares me. What happens when we die? Well for one, I am not religious so that does not lend an answer to me. Nonetheless, women were also said to believe more in an afterlife than men.
The mediating variable of religion is interesting. Religiosity in America is declining, with fewer people identifying with Christian sects while more people are denouncing religion. In other words, America is becoming more atheist. How is it then religion is a mediating variable? Perhaps women are more comfortable with their own mortality than men are. The study found that women have less positive attitudes towards anti-aging products, “despite the fact that women are more regular consumers of anti-aging products”. This finding seems odd, but the fact that women are generally more religious and believe more in an afterlife relates to women accepting their mortality more than men.
So maybe it is that women are more in touch with their own mortality than men are. Or maybe it is because women are less optimistic about the science and technology needed to accomplish Indefinite Life Extension. An additional mediating variable was exactly this. The author’s of the study claim that the reasons for this gender difference is, “partially explained by women’s less positive attitude toward science, as well as by stronger levels of religiosity”.
In summary, the study states that women do not support Indefinite Life Extension because they are generally more religious and do not believe in the science required to accomplish this goal. However, their findings conflict with others, and the mediating variables may have further confounding factors that attribute to the findings. The authors concede that future research needs to be done to truly understand this gender difference. Although these conclusions are based on empirical evidence, I will provide two different explanations as to why this may be happening.
An alternative explanation extrapolated from a study indicates that narcissistic men are more inclined to subscribe to patriarchal power structures. Therefore, part of being narcissistic and patriarchal is that one is selfish in their views of afterlife and power structures. The relationship to the afterlife meaning that men are selfish and do not want their own lives to end because they feel they are more important to the world than they truly are. The power structure in that since society is and has been historically patriarchal, therefore men feel as if they should be inclined to live forever. In other words, these views relate to men feeling that by living forever, they can contribute to the world more than if they were dead. Not saying that I subscribe to this point of view, nonetheless, it was an explanation that occurred to me.
Next, I will address the explanation for women. This idea arose to me out of a conversation with my girlfriend and is generally theoretical, not empirical. The consensus is that women generally do not want to live forever because they have been and continue to be marginalized in society. Marginalization such as the historical practice of coverture in the British Colonies (women being legally and economically subordinate to men) to the gender pay gap or reproductive rights issues today. The above mentioned historically patriarchal society and the disenfranchisement of women have not been solved yet. Therefore women may generally, consciously or unconsciously, view the future of women as a struggle lending to negative views towards Indefinite Life Extension.
So, women may be less supportive of Indefinite Life Extension technologies because they are generally more religious and do not believe the science will be able to reach such a capacity. These two further explanations do lend a different lens to the topic at hand and I do believe that the argument for women is stronger than that for men. Nonetheless, further research clearly needs to be done in order to find the true meaning of this gender difference. In conclusion, I would love to hear your thoughts and criticisms if you have them and I hope you enjoyed this post.