BY THE NUMBERS REPORT ON 'MAN SHORTAGE' IS MISLEADING.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

FORGET the continuing strife in Iraq or the Kobe Bryant trial; the big news for the single-girl set last week was the release of alarming census data showing that there are millions more single women than men in the U.S.

Millions!

It's true. The 2000 count of Americans found that for every nine unmarried, divorced or widowed hunks of masculinity out there, there are 10 similarly situated honeys vying for their attention, or so the information leads us to believe.

A good man is hard to find, the news told us.

Sigh. We marriage-age females are so conditioned to believe that if we don't marry as soon as we reasonably can, we risk the horrible fate of (gasp!) spinsterhood. A vast conspiracy, no doubt created through an evil alliance of all our moms, the Moral Majority and men who couldn't get dates in high school, has bombarded us with half-lies and innuendo since childhood. The odds are stacked against you, they told us, and we should say yes to the first man who comes along. So what if he doesn't have a job, or teeth?

This, I figured, was just another scare tactic to get us rushing to sign up for Internet dating or ``The Bachelor'' TV show.

Hold on. To my unwed sisters, I say, ``Relax, it's not as dire as it sounds.''

Luckily, I was born to be skeptical of everything, particularly things that don't make me happy. So I tracked down a copy of this census report to see for myself how bad it really is.

The numbers show, no surprise, that there are more single women simply because there are more women alive - about 7.1 million more, to be exact. However, in the generational continuum, this surplus of women occurs - and this is the critical point - in the late middle ages and golden years. (See for yourself. You can find the report at www.census.gov).

In fact, between the ages of 15 to 35, there are more - one million more! - men than women, most of them unmarried. In their mid-30s to mid-40s, women start to outnumber men by a few hundred thousand. After that, the existence of men drops precipitously until the age of 85 and above, where women outnumber men, 3 million to 1.2 million. To be blunt, boys start dying off a lot sooner than girls.

The data don't explain why, but scientific people have already established that more men engage in risky activities than women, like fighting wars and living in prisons and eating hot dogs. I guess it catches up to them. (It also probably has something to do with the fact that they do not listen when we tell them to, for example, take their heart medicine, not to jump out of that tree or, for heaven's sake, don't poke the rattlesnake with a stick.)

Plus, the younger men not only outnumber us, more of them are unmarried compared with the women.

So, you see, the so-called man shortage is really just a matter of perspective. As long as young women focus their sights on men their age or younger, rather than checking out the older, less-populated generations, they should have no problem finding eligible males. Though they might have to put up with a certain amount of video-game playing in the quiet evening hours.

While all of this number-crunching lifted my spirits, something still bothered me. If young women are more scarce than young men, then why all the propaganda about finding a man? They are everywhere.

That led me to what I can only describe as a sudden and life-changing realization: The stories fed to us about too many girls weren't created by a creepy conspiracy to scare women and to increase sales of that silly rules book.

No. These stories are created by a sweet conspiracy meant to soothe the boys who have been uprooted from their traditional roles as each successive generation of women becomes more and more independent. We don't need them to support us financially anymore, or to vote for us, or to fight wars for us, or to fix stuff around the house. We can and do all that ourselves, or else pay someone else to do it. And the rise of sperm banks even means we don't need guys, per se, to have kids.

But that's not to say men are unnecessary in our lives. Here's my important message to all the worried guys out there: We might not need you in the same ways our mothers did. But we do need your emotional support, as partners and friends against the world. And we still like you, and want you around, despite the risky behavior and the dumb the-pope-walks-into-a-bar jokes.

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(1 -- 2 -- color) Reports that eligible women far outnumber eligible men need not send bachelorettes scurrying to find mates on shows like ``The Next Joe Millionaire: An International Affair.''