Can Men’s Risk-Taking Behaviours be Called ‘Health Promotion’?
Soffer, M. (2010). The role of stress in the relationships between gender and health-promoting behaviours Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-6712.2009.00751.x
Many people bang on about why it is that men keep falling off the twig so many years earlier than women do. How can this be? Women, after all, tend to ‘report more illness and stress than men’ (Soffer, 2010, p.1). The answer could be related to the fact that while women tend to take care of their health, men do everything they possibly can to smash it to bits. For example, Soffer (2010) found, through looking at other people’s data, that men don’t brush their teeth, and that we drink too much, drive recklessly, fight at will, smoke immense amounts of weed, fuck lots of cooch and skip breakfast (p.1). In essence, as much as the men’s rights movement would love to blame women for everything, men effectively self-destruct.
Soffer’s (2010) research on the gendered nature of health-promoting behaviours came up with the delineated findings that whereas men exercise, stay trim and don’t snack, women, on the other hand, sleep well, don’t smoke or drink and eat muesli every morning (p.6). The meaning of all this I have yet to digest, except that hegemonic masculinity cops a fleeting rap here for keeping men hung-up on self-control (2010, p.7). All of which makes me think that there must be much leaner places than Sydney, Australia, where almost every man I see is a monstrous, sedentary lard-arse, chocked up on KFC and free-flowing beer. How men can be at once self-destructive and self-preserving totally escapes me.
In terms of health-promoting behaviours, Soffer (2010) advocates for men to be more like women, and vice versa (p.7). I wonder. He refers to the life-limiting impact of stress upon women, for example, with respect to their obsession with weight, but he has nothing corresponding to say about the life-limiting impact of stress upon men (p.7). That is a pity. I would argue that men suffer under immense stress to live up to masculine ideals and thus shape their help-promoting (or lack thereof) behaviours accordingly. One need only look at the higher morbidity and mortality rates in men to recognise that we are seriously gendered into shutting up, and fucking up. Some critical reflection on that insidious form of stress would not have gone astray in this article…
As the personal is political…
We learn risk behaviours as part of our individuation and socialisation and we associate them with good times because of the hormones released.
Basically, we take risks because we have learned to like the buzz.
Almost all the women I have known have smoked far more than me in absolute terms, drank far more in relative terms and exercised less than me.
But, as the fat guy with a family history of obesity & cardiac probs, should I blame my genetic inheritance or my lifestyle for my potentially shortened life? Or both?
One thing I won’t be dumping on is ‘the immense stress of living up to any masculine ideals’… that would be like happily overweight women blaming their sad years of widowhood on stick-thin models.
There really isn’t a connection unless you give a damn. And frankly, most people don’t.
We learn masculine ideals from the year dot and the rewards and punishments associated with either ascribing or detracting from them. Alas, those masculine ideals include demonstrating careless disregard for one’s own physical and mental health and demonstrating strength through risk-taking behaviours. Like the buzz? A purely hormonal pleasure process? I think not. Humans are fortunate enough (or not) to possess cognition and reason, the ability to make good and not so good choices. Men will continue to be sicker and deader than women so long as masculine ideals remain, in theory and practice, as they currently are. A kinder, gentler man would seem to be in order.
I agree with your thought that men bring with them more than a hint of cognition and reason, and also at times an unwillingness to take responsibility – to blame things on others (or genetics). I think that they take more than a few risks – whether it be with over-eating, drinking in excess, smoking, not exercising or the other risks that give a buzz – driving under the influence, avoiding tax or having affairs.
I think too that there are plenty of women (non-smokers) out there who eat, drink and exercise appropriately. Of course, both sexes are guilty of overindulging and not giving a damn for the consequences. Both men and women.
It does seem to me to be an individual choice – and it is a choice – for each of us to make regardless of gender. There are just some people – men and women – who refuse to take responsibility – who live for the moment whether that be the taste of yet more food they don’t need, a cigarette, another drink or a quick romp outside of marriage. I would argue that whilst buzz and hormonal pleasure may come into it for some, for others it is at best greed and at other times a reasoned choice made despite the destruction it may wreak on their own life or the lives of others.
Yes, I hope it is ‘choice’, albeit often bad choices. The argument that ‘men can’t help it’, we were just hard-wired that way, is often held up to excuse all the bad choices that individual men make. While I can well understand the pressures placed upon men to adhere to masculine ideals, for example, taking unnecessary risks and avoiding necessary health care, that is not to concede a bleak structuralist position in which we are reduced to the role of passive agent in our own lives. Men, perform masculinity and thus it is up to individual men, to decide if they might perform certain aspects of that masculinity, differently.
This is an old opposition, isn’t it?
Of course, we should, as a society, be more concerned that men die so much earlier than women. It certainly concerns me, I can assure you!
But, some of us learn to grow up to be Ulysses and some, Telemachus:
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
Wouldn’t it be a sad and poorer world if we were all predictable, prudent and mild? It would certainly put a lot of academics, psychologists and lawyers out of a job.
Of course, given Daniel Nettle’s work on the co-location of genes for psychosis and genius level creativity, perhaps we have another reason to be happy that there are a few screwed-up guys out there…?
Every man is entitled to be as reckless to himself as he wants to be, just so long as he causes no harm to others in the process. So, in that regard, men can drink, smoke, eat fatty food and leap from tall buildings in a single bound, if they so choose. But we will have to stop complaining and start accepting the resultant gendered imbalance in poor health and drop-deadness.
As for a genetic basis to personality, and personality disorders, I think that we are merely pausing to ponder the current version of phrenology, with cause and effect bumps that will latterly prove resistant to categorisation. Ironically enough, the corrective genetic lab work that has already started to roll out, will be hugely obsessed with how to make angry, violent men as bland as plain toast.