The body and soul of men's health

Newspapers can be curiously conservative, whatever their politics, in how they present health features and health news. Leaving aside the news agenda, women’s health features, naturally, tend to feature women’s health but then forget women are more than breasts, ovaries and uteruses.

 

I’m a woman who doesn’t actually appear to have ‘health’ at all, as I have no children, no problematic menopause nor any anxiety, depression or chocolate cravings.  I do, however, wonder about heart disease, dementia, aortic aneurysm and bowel cancer, none of which are, apparently, women’s health issues even though I'm a women and they are my health concerns. I am also a gender traitor. I do not buy into breast cancer terror. I might get it, I might not. Like a lot of women I might get a brain tumour or Parkinson’s. I stand an excellent chance of getting at least one of the 96% of things that carry women off each year that aren't breast cancer.

 

Men’s health still appears to be a minority interest in the competition for press ‘space’ for health stories.  As the UK is stuffed full of men whose life expectancy and health is, by and large, much worse than women’s, this is entirely counter intuitive. However, things are changing and have been, gently, over the last fifteen years or so. As further evidence of this I noticed another little ripple in the waters, as a result of my extended newspaper reading on health.  

 

The Times now does its re-launched Body and Soul supplement on Tuesdays. This week’s [11 May 2010] supplement was ‘normal’ i.e.  it wasn’t marketed as having any spin in particular but there was a slant, intended or not, in the editorial balance of the stories.

 

There were 13 separate pieces in it that related to health and psychology. One big feature, a couple of middle sized ones and the rest fillers or regular columns.

 

The cover story feature was about body image in men, expressing concerns about the ideal promoted by the young male models' abdominal definition on the front of Men’s Health magazine and its ilk. It also suggested that the look was entirely unnatural in any case, since some models were dehydrated and had dieted to the point of light headedness in order to have the right ‘look’ for their photos. So the story was that this version of men’s health is unhealthy, whether you are the male model taking part, or the man buying into the imagery at the newsstand.  

 

Next there was a snippet about older men and women, warning about the dangers of unprotected sex - neatly subverting the dismal stereotype of older men not getting any sex, by giving advice to older men who are; a profile of the health of Bear Grylls, chief Scout and global bug botherer, who blokily broke his back for the SAS;  a regular column for men called ‘Too male to talk’ which does what it says on the can; a piece debunking the recent story that just being near a pretty women is bad for men because it raises their stress levels to dangerous heights; then there was a question to the psychologist Tanya Byron titled ‘My grandsonshows no empathy. Should I worry?'; and, finally, there was a piece on outdoor gyms, which, though written by a woman and non-gendered as a story, featured three men healthily exercising alongside her, in the photo.

 

So, by my count six and a half (the outdoor gym) stories were actually about men’s health and psychology. The Times Body and Soul editor hadn’t labelled it as a men’s health themed issue. They just wrote the content like that and thought it was normal.

 

Good. It was!

 

They also managed to avoid the cliche that men’s health is only about balls and penises. I look forward to the day when the health of women is also covered with a similarly broad but gender sensitive perspective.