Stand by Your Manhood (17 page)

The consensus is clear: in a world of grey areas, consent is always black and white – but the protection of anonymity must be too.

THE TRUTH HURTS – BUT NO
more than terminal cancer, sudden cardiac arrest or having one of your testicles surgically removed. You may want to remember this as you read the following chapter, because, although it isn’t typically feel-good stuff, it’ll also certainly feel better than each of the above – and might just save your life.

According to the Office for National Statistics, men don’t just lead in nine of the top ten killer diseases, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, pneumonia, diabetes and
cirrhosis of the liver – you know, the really fun ones – we also die five years earlier than women in a life expectancy gap that’s increased 400 per cent since 1920.

This alone should be the klaxon-sounding wake-up call we need to storm Parliament and start a protest – or, at the very least, a hashtag. Then again, given the amount of well-being warnings we’re bombarded with on a daily basis – smoking kills, drugs are bad, eat five a day, mind the gap, caution: filling is hot – we can be forgiven for lazy reflexes. It’s a bit like the emergency evacuation procedure on a plane: yeah, yeah, we know – let’s just get going and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Except, whilst aeronautical disasters are pretty rare, our own crash landings are inevitable. In fact, we’re dropping like flies.

We are, dare I say it, the Malaysian Airlines of the genders.

Which is exactly why the following pages square up to a fear most human beings are exceptionally skilful at ignoring: the nagging reality that, from the moment we are born into life, the clock is ticking. From the sound of the starting gun, death appears over the horizon and is racing towards us faster than a drunk driver in a double-decker. The crucial bit nobody dares address – which is why it needs an entire chapter here, part-written in big shouty capital letters – is that, in the ugliness of dog-eat-dog survival, it’s men, not women, who are thrown under the bus.

A report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that ‘in almost two-thirds of London’s wards, the gap between men and women’s life expectancy is wider than the national average of 4.1 years’. In the city’s more deprived parts, ‘women outlive men by more than twelve years … That’s worse than Russia, the country where, relatively, men live the world’s second-shortest lives compared to their female counterparts.’ A fact backed up by the World Health Organization.

Forensically, the BIJ report noted that, between 2007 and 2012, NHS Primary Care Trusts in the capital’s Haringey, Hammersmith & Fulham, Brent and Camden ‘spent a total of £4,830,095 commissioning women’s services outside the NHS over the past five years, and nothing on men’s’ – a trend which is visible nationally, with female care almost constantly ranked above men’s.

The ultimate insult? It’s all done at our expense – literally and metaphorically. The National Health Service is funded by the public purse, but it’s men – yes, men; you know, the hairy ones on the gurneys – who pay a whopping 70 per cent of UK income tax. Just ask the Queen. A Freedom of Information Act request to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs revealed that men coughed up 71.2 per cent of it for 2010/11, yet were thrown crumbs in return.

The people at the top know this and have done for
ages. Fifteen years ago the UK’s Men’s Health Forum published stats that, for every £1 spent on men’s health, £8 was spent on women’s – but since then little has changed for no good reason. Or, rather, one very
bad
reason: we live in a medical matriarchy.

In other words, male life is cheap. Primark cheap.

Sadly, this isn’t just a domestic issue. Data gathered from Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council – the body which allocates all government funding Down Under – recently found a ‘spectacular gender gap’, with ‘men’s health problems being allocated a quarter of the funding women’s research gets’. In fact, men’s health ranked thirty-sixth, ‘behind sexually transmitted infections and just ahead of parasitic infections’.

Stateside, Barack Obama may have promised change, but what he’s actually proposing is short change. The Affordable Care Act is littered with random inequities for men. Browse through it and you’ll find 134 references to women’s health – great – but just two for ours, and even then they’re fleeting. You’ll find an entire chapter dedicated to breast cancer, yet prostate cancer isn’t even mentioned.

Forget the American dream, this is a bloody nightmare.

‘I wrote in
Time
magazine that women should pay more for ObamaCare because they get more, which is fair, but I’ve never seen such a vitriolic response,’ says Hadley
Heath, a senior policy analyst specialising in health, economics and fiscal policy at the Independent Women’s Forum in New York. ‘There was real abuse for the suggestion that men shouldn’t bankroll women’s healthcare, but then I realised it’s not about being fair, it’s about giving women a good deal at any cost – even if that cost is men’s lives.’

Like I said, the truth hurts. But, according to Gloria Steinem, it can also set you free – well, once it’s pissed you off. What pisses me off, however, is that rather than being the subject of sympathetic public concern or the odd fundraising gala, men are just repeatedly told it’s all their fault. Every day, some self-appointed expert lays the responsibility for our government-endorsed premature deaths on ‘the narrow definitions of masculinity’, as if The Rock himself is sat there divvying up healthcare funding.

This is bollocks.

Men aren’t dying sooner because they’re ignorant or proud – it’s because the entire system leaves them to rot and, politically, they’re discouraged from doing anything about it. After all, that would be sexist.

Don’t buy any other excuse, ever. In fact, look at what we
do
buy. Trends in print media blow this ignoramus excuse out of the water. Sneak a peek into any man’s house and, right there – in the ironically named living room – is a stack of
Men’s Health
magazines, our biggest-selling
monthly, with twelve million readers. Fine, after a few cursory, laconic glances they’re left to gather dust at the side of the sofa – suggesting the mere presence of a six-pack increases the likelihood of us getting one by sheer proximity alone. As if it’s contagious, like Ebola. But who cares? They still double up as glossy pieces of proof that the first step to good health – the desire to live long and prosper, as Dr Spock asserted – is already within us.

‘Men’s relative lack of self-care compared to women is a contributing factor to their shorter life expectancy, but only a
very minor
one,’ says Dr Timothy Spector, a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College.

Indeed.

This, rather appropriately, shifts the blame back onto the people who deserve it – the big cheeses who make all these
Titanic
-era women-and-children-first decisions for us. The same experts who are personally responsible for making men 25 per cent more likely to suffer one of the 152,000 strokes in Britain each year, for example.

OK, fine, there’s no incriminating paper trail to say they’re directly to blame – no chain of emails we can present to an official inquiry – but only because there needn’t be. Rather than expending precious energy creating our downfall, the architects of this fatal structure – usually armed with private healthcare, I might add – know they can get exactly the same results by doing nothing at all. ‘Let them eat cake!’ they say, fully aware the fat will eventually collect around our middle and block our arteries, rendering us a few million fewer to worry about. Job done.

I know, I know. It’s bleak stuff and I sound like a cranky conspiracy theorist, but – hey – at least I call a spade a spade. If we apply the Alcoholics Anonymous theory of recovery to improving men’s health, the first step is admitting a problem exists in the first place. So it’s funny that when men do die – even, say, as civilian casualties in a bomb explosion where it’s
definitely
not their fault – they vanish from the English language. Newsreaders with Oxford educations suddenly develop a Gareth Gates-style stutter with the word ‘m-m-m-m-men’ and report that ‘Two hundred people died this afternoon – including seventy-four women and three children.’ Oh, right. And who were the others? Extras from
The Muppet Show
?

Rather than object to this and say ‘Oi! Matriarchy
– NO!’, we’ve realised it’s much easier to name just one man and grieve for him specifically. This is allowed (for now).

I write these words on the same day Rik Mayall dies of a massive, sudden heart attack. The comedian was just fifty-six when it happened – not old by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, fifty-six doesn’t just
seem
young these days, it
is
young. As the life expectancy goes up, the mean age for what’s youthful also increases. But he didn’t just have age on his side. The
Young Ones
star was also actively looking after himself; he collapsed following his routine morning run.

Naturally, everybody shared their sympathy. ‘What a waste! So sad! Life’s unfair!’ But in recognition of all the out-pouring, his wife said: ‘I’m sure you all know Rik’s response would be something along the lines of: “Well, thanks very much all of you … now fuck off!”’, which was perfectly fitting because, without his household name status, Rik Mayall would’ve been just one of the 200 people who die of heart disease each day; the majority of whom are men. That’s 73,000 each year.

Still, there’s absolutely no sense of urgency about stemming this constant, preventable loss. On the contrary, people panic about cellulite instead.

OK, I’m tub-thumping, but perhaps I need to in order to be heard over the huge vortex of crap thinking which
goes hand-in-hand with men’s health. Not only aren’t we immunised, funded properly, debated or treated equally to women, we also aren’t given the same empathy as them. When former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott revealed he had bulimia, the world laughed. Yes, eating disorders are funny! Who knew!

The Sun
declared his condition a misdiagnosis, saying: ‘He ‘wasn’t a very successful bulimic. As in so many other areas of life, not very successful at all.’ Meanwhile, the ever-moralistic and equality-conscious Jezebel produced a ‘What Prezza Was Eating … Daily Guidelines for Men’ – complete with fat and carbohydrate content – which showed others how to develop the illness. They also binged on the idea that ‘men can really make an achievement out of this shit’, whilst insinuating fathers were to blame.

Well, I’ll be damned: the feminists at Jezebel are sexist.

But at least they prove a point. After all, would women be spoken about like this? Would it be tolerated? No way. Which is a whole other killer malaise: the fact that men still aren’t allowed to be weak on their own terms. Just look how TV adverts for high street pharmacies constantly show women multi-tasking through stage four leukemia, whilst men go to bed with a sore throat. The subtext is that women are stoic heroines, whilst men who get sick are wimps.

When men don’t discuss their health concerns it’s not because they’re wired this way, it’s because they’re responding to social codes of behaviour. After all, if they say anything they’ll be greeted with shaming tactics to stop them. Look at something as brilliant as Movember. It has been a global success and saved countless lives, yet journalist Arianne Shavisi wrote in the
New Statesman
that ‘Movember is divisive, gender normative, racist and ineffective’.

Her precise gripe was that Movember is really about ‘white young men ridiculing minorities’, whilst being ‘sexist’ and celebrating ‘imperialism’. Dispensing more pearls of wisdom, she added that it was inherently misogynistic because women can’t grow facial hair. Now, perhaps she hasn’t used the London Underground at rush hour, or wasted an afternoon in Stoke Newington, but that’s definitely not true. Besides, not every single action has to be extended to the opposite sex. We are equal, but different. One approach doesn’t always fit all.

Regardless of this, she insisted it’s women who are suffering, not the men shitting themselves because they’ve been diagnosed with cancer and might die. ‘In solidarity with Movember, some women have also relaxed normative shaving-etiquette … [but] instead of being met with the same teasing words of encouragement … [we learn that] female breaches of prescribed gender norms are
quickly policed, and may result in disgust,’ she added. ‘Movember is a reminder that women should think carefully before subverting their sexually objectified bodies to join in with boy’s games.’

Fortunately, what resulted was a hilarious stream of faith-restoring, common-sense clarity in the comments section.

One reader responded:

Another wrote: ‘Burst out laughing at the first mention of the word “racist”, then, as I realised you were serious, I felt a kind of astonished pity.’

Personally, my favourite was simply: ‘I. WANT. TO. CRY. This is why we can’t have nice things.’

Turn on the TV for light relief and you’ll see the same thing, but in a different guise. When Steve in HBO’s
Sex and the City
got testicular cancer it was, according to the scriptwriters, comedy gold. We had Kim Cattrall’s alter ego leaning over a snooker table with a cue, saying she only had ‘one ball left to pot’, which was charming. I know when I’m stuck sucking on a Milk Maid – the iced lolly, not an actual farm girl – in a chemotherapy unit trying to fight testicular cancer, I’ll hold onto this clip and gain strength. Yet, when the same character gets breast cancer, she suddenly turns into Stephen Sutton, who, I might add, was anything but the typical weak man as he looked death straight in the eye, full of dignity, and raised £4 million for charity, bagging himself a posthumous MBE too.