Sexism is unhealthy: Machismo and why men die at a younger age than women.
If one were to believe Bild, the leading German newspaper, erectyle disfunction is the gratest health concern for men. However, according to health statistics there are much more alarming issues regarding men’s health.
Last Tuesday, on 20th June 2017, Bild, one of the biggest tabloids in the world by circulation, carried a sensational headline advertising a page long interview with an author of a sex research about the beneficial effects of sex, barbecue and football on men’s health — “So gesund sind viel Sex, Grillen und Fußball!”– and most importantly erectile dysfunction. Apart from the toxic sexism of the whole article (more on that below), a look at the statistics on health outcomes by Eurostat — the statistical agency of the European Commission — shows that men’s health problems are much more serious in the European Union, including Germany than Bild suggests: men are generally unhealthier and have a lower life expectancy than women.
In the interview, with the title “A lot of sex helps a lot”, a Professor Dr Frank Sommer of the German Association for Man and Health explains everything there is to know about erectile dysfunction. According to Dr Sommer, who is supposed to be the world’s first university professor for men’s health, the capability of a men to getting it up is pretty much the key to his health. The penis, says Dr Sommer, is “like a seismograph, an important indicator for deadly diseases such as stroke, heart infarct, but also diabetes”, and high blood pressure.
Now, I am not a medical doctor, and I do not want to question that erectile dysfunction can signal other more serious problems, nor am I suggesting that it is not a problem affecting one’s life quality. But the interview and the highlighted statistics are just about penis and sex. One of the most disturbing questions and answers in the interview is about being unfaithful to one’s partner, because it is supposed to help the problem. Dr Sommer explains that with age men need more stimulation — as he formulates more information in the head — to build up an erection, and a new woman can trigger that. But, he adds, when the penis tissue is damaged already too much, “even the hottest young woman” cannot help. Then follows questions about how to find out if the nightly erections are still happening, if masturbation or Viagra help. Barbecue and football, these two quintessential manifestations of manhood also help (and obviously, there are no men who do not like to play football and eat juicy grilled meat, are there?).
What is the problem with the interview? First, it is blatantly sexist. While sex for most of us is certainly an important part of a relationship, there are perhaps many equally important things, and intimacy cannot simply be equalled with sex. Women should not in any context be reduced to the role of a sexual stimulant for men as in the question and answer “do cheating on your long-time partner help” (see above). Moreover, no one should suggest — and a medical doctor under no circumstances — that only young women can be sexually desirable (it would have been interesting to hear the learned opinion of Dr Sommer about the age threshold above which female human beings stop being sexually desirable for men, and of course for who else could and should they be desirable than to men). Not to mention the question, which was bothering me all along, while reading the interview: do only straight men in long-term, monogamous relationships suffer from erectile dysfunction? Not to mention the fact, that the reason for the whole interview was supposedly to disseminate the findings of a research on sex in Germany, but somehow it is only about heterosexual men, and most of all their (our) penises.
Second, this interview did a disservice to a very important topic: men’s health. Because despite access and quality of health care is gendered favouring men over women all over the world — a problem recognized by the World Health Organisation — men’s health is much worse in the European Union than women’s. Death rates for men are consistently higher than for women for all main causes of death except from breast cancer (which is although not strictly gender specific, affects only a tiny proportion of men). This figure from the Eurostat on 2014 data shows this alarming pattern. It is not only diseases that affect men to a much higher degree than women but death from alcohol and drug abuse, traffic accidents, and suicides. The gender gap is consistent across the 28 EU member states.
This is by no means a European problem. According to the WHO, health outcomes for boys and men are worse in most parts of the world. In most countries men are less likely to use health services and when they use them, they are less likely to report potential symptoms of diseases. Moreover, as the same WHO report found “men’s poorer survival rates “reflect several factors — greater levels of occupational exposure to physical and chemical hazards, behaviours associated with male norms of risk-taking and adventure, health behaviour paradigms related to masculinity” (see more here). That is, precisely the kind of perception of masculinity, which the Bild article also strengthens, where the ability to have an erection is pretty much everything about to be man (apart from football and a steak of course) is at least part of the problem.
These disparities in health outcomes are also reflected in the fact, that men die at a younger age than women: as the World Economic Forum reports, the life expectancy of women is globally 71 years, while of men is 69 years. But there are huge differences between countries, Russia leads with an 11.6 years gender gap (64.7 for men and 76.3 for women). The gender gap in life expectancy exists also in Germany: according to the data of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental organisation of rich and industrialised countries, life expectancy at birth in 2014 was 78.7 years for men and 83.6 years for women in the Federal Republic.
To sum it up: Germany’s leading print daily newspaper, which is the eights biggest in the world, and the biggest outside Asia, should tone down its sexism — or perhaps just stop with it — and deal more responsibly with an important subject. The problem is not that an article about men’s health also talked about erectile dysfunction (which is certainly a problem, and Bild is after all a tabloid, not a peer-reviewed medical journal), but that it reduced the subject just to that.
Men’s physical and mental health is worse than women’s in almost every country, which affects their partners and children as well. How many doctor’s appointments did you indefinitely postponed in the last 12 months? I never got to the doctor’s despite having a number of quite alarming symptoms. I promised my wife that I would go and see a doctor now for real. And I will, I promise I will…
