Ill will
Petronella Wyatt
T°paraphrase Noel Coward, it's just too bad about the boys. The situation for the male sex is becoming worse and worse. Men have already been warned that they will not be needed in future — sexually, at least — because of advances (non-sexual ones) in reproductive medicine. Now scientists are claiming that simply being male is like having a 'terminal disease'.
Of course all women know that men suffer from a terminal disease. It goes under various names — some of which are unpunctuality, unreliability, self-pity and football. But this new disease is far more serious. Apparently, the higher risk of various illnesses and premature death that men face compared with women makes being a man a health hazard.
A study led by Dr Alan White of Leeds University suggests that men are almost twice as likely as women to die before the age of 75. They are also more likely to get cancer and have strokes, to be killed in accidents and car crashes, to commit suicide and to die through mental illness. Another reason men kick the bucket much earlier than women is that they allegedly see themselves as strong, self-dependent figures and therefore often refuse to go to a doctor.
I would have thought that the last statement counts as one of the most laughable for a long time. Men too strong and selfdependent to see a doctor? What tosh! Men generally refuse to see doctors because they are absolutely terrified of them. Mention a doctor to a boyfriend and the gung-ho, over-the-trenches he-man of a minute ago will turn into a whimpering wreck. 'Oh no, I'm not going near a doctor,' he'll say when you suggest that, if his back pains are really so crippling, perhaps he has pulled a muscle and ought to seek advice. This will be followed by a cry of, 'If I go to a doctor he'll tell me I've got a tumour.'
It is men, not women, who imagine, like the narrator in Three Men in a Boat, that they're suffering from every disease in the medical dictionary except for housemaid's knee. It is men who spend days cowering under the duvet. coughing and spluttering like phoney Violetta Valerys, convinced that the end is nigh and blood will soon be spouting from their mouths, when in reality they have nothing more than a mild cold. In the same situation most women simply get up and get on with it.
It is true, conversely, that men play with their health more than women do. They drink more and eat more, and what they eat will generally be junk food. But this is not because men are braver and tougher but rather that they are more careless of their physical appearance than women and are therefore perfectly happy to eat that sixth bun slathered in icing sugar.
Luckily for them, men can absorb alcohol and bad food with fewer harmful effects. If this were not the case, then half the males in England would be dead after the European Cup, the Test match and every other major sporting event. Indeed I am often surprised that many of the men I know, given their troughing, live as long as they do.
If men die earlier than women, I feel we should look for another reason. Men seem far more aware and less accepting of mortality than members of my sex. Perhaps they like to see themselves as tragic figures. Or perhaps the subconscious legacy of their ancestors having died young in so many wars plays its part in this constant fear males have of popping their clogs.
Any woman will have found — often to her profound irritation — that boyfriends or husbands in the pink of health are always talking about their deaths in the most fearful and dramatic way. Females, on the other hand, as creators of life, have an inner sense of the eternal and appear to take these things more calmly. Perhaps the real truth with regard to men and their comparative lack of longevity is less complex than scientists imagine. Perhaps the plain fact is that men simply frighten themselves to death.
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