I am so tired of reading about “hegemonic masculinity” and all the advantages it’s supposed to confer.  What is hegemonic exactly about having measurably worse health care, dying significantly younger, being of a gender that dies in 95% of workplace fatalities, and having few resources (rarely even an acknowledgment) invested in violence targeted at your gender.

I just finished a book called “Understanding Men and Health:  Masculinities, Identity and Well-being” which was full of this nonsense of hegemony but did nevertheless have some fascinating points to make, like the following:

1.  We often hear that modern healthcare developments were developed to focus on helping men.  This was indeed sometimes the case, although mostly because it was acceptable to use men as ginny-pigs on which to experiment with new and dangerous treatments.  But ironically, today’s men are less likely to enjoy the medical benefits obtained through such humiliating and damaging experiments on their fellow men.   As those supposedly defining the normal body and exercising “hegemonic power”, men in the 20th century became less appropriate subjects for study and examination:

“Yet the (male-led) development of health promotion/education services around this time did very little directly to target information or health promotion campaigns towards such men.  Rather, as Welshman’s (1997) work on health education during this period shows, such services and campaigns were more often targeted at mothers, infants and schoolchildren…As feminists have rightly pointed out, it was the poor state of men’s health that generated cause for concern.  Yet, the patriarchal nature of health service structures determined that subsequent actions - including the development of a health visiting service, the establishment of maternal and infant welfare clinics, and an expansion of school health services - focused atention (and thereby responsibility) specifically on women and children.” (pg. 136)

More insights in the next post…