I have been watching and greatly enjoying Survivorman, a show where a Canadian musician strands himself in various inhospitable places and has to survive for seven days alone without a camera crew. It’s been fantastic for the writerbrain, teaching me weird and fascinating trivia… maybe not so great for me as a reader, since I now read fantasy novels where single people without gear spend weeks tramping through knee-deep snow without dying and say “NOT GONNA HAPPEN!”
Yes, I know. The magic of being the protagonist trumps reality!
But anyway. One of the things Survivorman attempts to do is simulate how you might end up in these situations: getting lost while on hiking, crashing in the mountains in a glider, losing your dog-sledding team, etc. At which point he demonstrates how you can use what you’d have in that situation to survive. I’m fascinated by how he turns random bits of flotsam into useful things… but I also can’t help but wonder just how different Survivorman would be if it was Survivorwoman.
“I used the underwire from my bra to fashion a snare trap.”
“An unused tampon makes good tinder.”
“This is a bad time of month for me to be stranded because my dietary needs are far more rigorous than they would be the rest of the month.”
Too, unlike Survivorman who seems to tramp off everywhere with maybe a multi-tool and a bottle of water, women are socially conditioned to have purses. I don’t know about other women, but once I hit momhood my purse became more like a backpack. I have Benadryl, several different kinds of medicine and bandaids, wipes and tissues, mirrors and nail files and sewing kits… and that’s just off the top of my head! If I fall off a safari jeep on the African plains, I’m already better off than a guy who’s got maybe his wallet in his back pocket, if that.
I know there’s a touch of humor to my musing here, but it does make me wonder about the differences in survival needs—and chances—between women and men. Do my hormone levels make it harder for me to survive on a few ants as food? Does menstruating make me more trackable by predators? And how strange is it that we can watch a show like this and have it be transparent that the narrator is a man, because of course, survival is exactly the same for a man or a woman… right?
I wonder.
Good question about survival. Particularly the purse! My wife’s a vest person, and it will break your foot if she drops it on it.
Being a non smoker makes survival more problimatic as I don’t have matches. But I usually stay away from back boonies, and have a well stocked car for winter driving in Canada (a must do for inter city).
Ed Wilson
I was actually randomly reading about the Donner Party a couple months ago (I did say randomly…) and the article talked about how more woman survived starvation than men because men metabolize proteins more quickly – i.e. once your body starts eating its own muscle, men are screwed – and woman naturally carry more body fat stores anyway (hello, evolution, thank you!). Of course, the Donner Party was a group not a single person, so there were further factors in that in mixed-gender parties, men often end up doing the most physically intense work, which burns up calories faster too. But the physiological stuff applies even for a stranded individual.