Men’s Health Week: It’s time to stop looking inwards for solutions

Men: Complex, but capable of changing the world.

Greg Bruce is a multimedia journalist with the New Zealand Herald

OPINION

A few days ago, I read a fascinating study in which University of Auckland psychology researcher Chelsea Pickens interviewed 31 single New Zealand men on the subject of masculinity.

Her subjects were full of interesting and sometimes disturbing insights but the one that really stuck with me was this: “I presume you have some questions or points to keep the discussion on track? It’s quite easy to get side-tracked on this sort of thing, so you’ll have to make sure you capture information that you can actually use.”

It took my breath away. It was the apogee of mansplaining; absolutely unbeatable – mansplaining to someone who is literally studying (among other things) mansplaining.

It was far from the only example. Another classic of the genre was the man who told her – a doctoral candidate in psychology – that, “Men present, women choose, that is actually that’s it, like you can find any number of psychological studies to back that one up”.

Of course you can’t find any number of studies to back it up, although you can find many that refute it, but the truth or falsity of the incorrect claim is beside the point.

The point is that the situation was so ludicrous as to be comic: A man who had presumably once read a comment on Reddit felt qualified to explain psychology to a woman who was literally an expert in the field.

I tried to imagine the inverse situation: an uninformed woman explaining a subject to an expert man. I couldn’t.

It wasn’t my intention to write about mansplaining. It was my intention to write about my own health issues, which are myriad: anxiety, depression, existential dread, insomnia, loneliness, night terrors, blood in stool, early signs of digital arthritis, gluten intolerance, excessive earwax and blah blah blah.

I’ve written about all of this, much of it more than once and could easily have done it again, but there is a time to turn inwards and a time to turn outwards and I feel like I’ve run out of inwards to turn to.

When we talk about health, especially in the lifestyle pages of publications like this one, we almost always do it individualistically: What can we do to fix OURSELVES?

Sometimes this is the right approach, like when we have haemorrhoids, but what about the many, many problems that have been created for individuals not by the decisions they’ve made, but the ones that have been made for them?

What I’m saying is that we are swimming in a soup that is not of our own creation, and while we can make decisions about how best to cope with the soup’s toxicity, mightn’t it be better for all of us if we just made a better soup?

The soup goes by many names: the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, but the basic ingredients are all the same. The impact of the soup on women was well-documented in the hit 2023 movie Barbie and the impact on men equally well-documented in the lesser-read but critically acclaimed 2022 book Rugby Head. Despite such high profile pop-cultural accountings, there is still surprisingly little focus on the soup in places like this one.

Men’s Health Week feels like the ideal time to rethink that – a time to think about men as a collective: what we’re doing well and what we’re doing badly. It’s not about blaming the men who tried to explain psychology research to a psychology researcher, but about understanding why they felt compelled to do so.

I feel qualified to say something about this, since I grew up in the ‘80s and to a lesser extent the ‘90s, which was a time of great and horrible masculinist intensity – a time in which boys and men freely used the word “gay” as a pejorative, and in which the assertion of heterosexual excellence, dominance over women, physical strength, and verbal cruelty were key measures of one’s place in the social hierarchy.

Research shows that this is no longer the case, or at least not to the same extent. Notions of “acceptable” masculinity are now far more diverse.

Being obnoxious is obviously still helpful in, for instance, getting you elected to public office, but hopefully not for much longer. The research shows that homophobia is fading, “homosocial intimacy” among heterosexual males is on the rise, and straight male rugby players sometimes spoon in bed. The point is not that the world is fixed, but that there is hope – that the world can and does change.

But this change hasn’t happened because it’s “inevitable” or “natural” or any of that nonsense. It has happened because people have fought for change: People who have suffered, or have seen suffering, or believed things could be better; people who have told important stories, asked important questions, done the research; people who have spoken truth to power and never accepted that there is no alternative.

And we need it to carry on, because while things have changed, they still suck. For every straight male rugby player spooning his friend in bed, there are too many still punching each other in the head. Men still value strength and devalue vulnerability; value knowing stuff and devalue listening to and learning from others; value self-reliance and devalue interdependence.

Men’s health is not just prostate cancer, depression and erectile dysfunction. It is poverty and loneliness and social isolation and climate change.

It is living so far from your workplace that you have no time with your kids before or after work; it is having no choice but to drive your car across town every day and pay $3 a litre for petrol; it is being surrounded by too few green spaces and too many fast-food restaurants.

Some of these might be things you can fix by yourself but it’d be much easier and better for all of us if we solved them together.

Men’s Health Week could be a time for us to think of ourselves as individuals trying to deal with our admittedly painful haemorrhoids, or a time to think of ourselves as a collective – a single organism that has proven powerful enough to wreck the planet, and which is therefore presumably powerful enough to fix it. I vote for the latter.