Excerpt: 'When It Comes to Guys, What's Normal?'
June XX, 2005 — -- When it comes to men, just what exactly is normal? How do you -- or the man you love -- behave compared to other guys? The fact is, men are both entirely predictable and utterly surprising, according to author Bernice Kanner.
"When It Comes to Guys, What's Normal?" takes a look at who men really are, how they behave in the kitchen, bathroom, office, driver's seat, and wherever they happen to be on the planet. So pull up a chair and see how you compare.
There are 102.2 million of you (men, 18 and older) in America. Some 19.56 million of you are 25 to 34, just a shade less than the 19.68 million women that age. In a recent year 85 percent of all men held a job, accounting for 53 percent of the workforce. You earned on average a weekly salary of $732 ($164 more than what the average woman earned).
The average American man measures five feet nine inches (about a quarter of an inch taller at night than in the daytime) and weighs 180 pounds. He has a 41-inch chest, a 35-inch waist, and a 40.5-inch hip. His waist and hips will thicken with age and when he gains weight it will most likely be in the center of his body, particularly around his stomach. His penis is six inches long while standing at attention. He is circumcised (some 78 percent of American men are). He'll live to be 73.
Four in 10 expect to make it to 100, but few want to. The average age they want to live to is 9 1. Four times as many men fear ending up in Shady Acres as they do passing quickly from a sudden disease. Men die from accidents, suicide, cirrhosis of the liver, and homicide at a rate at least twice as high as women do, and they're even more likely than women to die due to floods: driving around barricades in low-lying flood zones and drowning in high water.
Two out of three feet a lot younger than their chronological years and 63 percent figure they've got more energy than most other guys their age. They also have more confidence. Seventysix percent feel more self-assured than most of their friends. Only three percent concede that they generally need several attempts to get the car parked.
At age 45 the typical American male has a one in 3,333 chance of developing prostate cancer. By age 75, the chance drops to one in nine. The average American man over 45 has a nine percent chance of dying from lung cancer, a 5.6 percent chance of being taken out by a stroke, a 3.7 percent chance of succumbing to pneumonia, and a 2.8 percent chance of giving it up to diabetes. As he ages, the average guy loses 12 to 20 pounds of muscle, 15 percent of his bone density, and two inches of height. His counts of oxygen-carrying red blood cells also drop along with his sexual vigor and testosterone levels.
The typical man has 100,000 hairs on his head (the diameter of those strands is twice that of women's hair) and he loses 20 to 100 of them a day. By age 50, the typical man has lost 12.1 teeth. If offered a Groundhog Day invitation to return to any age, the mean age men chose is 39.
