‘Man flu’ is a derogatory and sexist phrase. It’s as insulting as ‘women belong in the kitchen’ and deserves the same amount of outcry.
We know from modern feminism that we should pay attention to people’s statements about their own lived experience: that this evidence should not be lightly dismissed just because it does not chime with our own experience. Yet when a man feels awful from a lurgy that we assume a woman has also had but powered through, we forget that obvious point.
Do we have ‘man cancer’? Or ‘mangovers’? Other common sicknesses seem to afflict men and women similarly. If men are determined to milk disease for all it’s worth, how come they universally seem to pick colds and flu, and there’s no trend for other problems?
In fact, the macho world of male culture makes men determined to power through many ailments that they shouldn’t. Is it likely that man flu is a unique exception, with all men conspiring against womenkind to pretend that it’s far worse than it really is?
It should be obvious to anyone but the most bigoted that colds and flu must genuinely make men feel worse. Isn’t this a curious sex difference worth investigating? Could we devise some treatment to make them experience these incredibly common diseases as mildly as women do?
I suspect not, but trying would be better than laughing at men for telling the truth. I think it has something to do with the sinuses. Colds and flu make you feel bad because the sinuses become blocked. I’m not an anatomist, but I believe that this creates a pressure in the head. The sinuses might help cool the brain or, I don’t know, act as a waste conduit. Or maybe they buffer the brain from lurching about in the skull as we move around, since air is more compressible than water and therefore a better bumper.
Whatever the case, men have bigger sinuses than women. Is it possible, just maybe, that colds are worse for people with bigger ones? Perhaps they need the cooling effect more, or perhaps filling a larger cavity with snot creates more pressure inside the head than filling a smaller one. Perhaps a larger sinus simply has greater capacity to generate the noxious inflammation that causes the feelings of unwellness, by virtue solely of its size.
These are all far more viable theories than a global
conspiracy of male weakness. But people, even women, enjoy bigotry and laughing
at others, so I am sure that the myth of man flu will not die. And so there will be men the world over who will be encouraged to drag themselves into activity they are too ill for, mocked, belittled and disbelieved for telling the truth.
