The Psychology of Men’s Health
By Christina Lee
and R. Glynn Owens. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002
What a fascinating mix of the
(mostly) wonderful and the (periodically) regrettable this short book
represents! And yet in a funny way it may presage a bright future
ahead for the men’s movement. I will try to clarify in this review why
page for page, there are few books that are more important for a men’s
activist to read.
So why do I suggest that this is a
particularly important book for masculists to read? Constrained by
their profoundly clouded glasses, Lee and Owens nevertheless manage
some genuine, nuanced and at times edifying sympathy for male
psychology. The authors sketch out, time and again, (though they might
not phrase it this way) how feminist arguments can be flipped to call
for sympathy for males. This plays out in at least two different ways:
(1) men are analogized to women and a call is made for attention and
support for men’s gender-specific burdens and contexts just as
feminists have extended to women; (2) the authors demonstrate how
neglect of men’s health impinges on women who are partners, mothers
and daughters of men, and thus how promotion of women’s well-being
goes hand-in-hand with attention to men’s needs. They also show that
stereotypes that only men are providers, for example, constrain and do
disservices to both males and females. Lee and Owens may, without
realizing it, have written a sort of playbook demonstrating many of
the holes in the feminist football team’s defense and showing men’s
rights quarterbacks some of the most useful patterns to have our wide
receivers and tight ends run. So all you “sports fans” out there, buy
the book, do your homework, learn the anti-feminist flea flickers, and
let’s PLAY BALL!
Although it would have made more
sense for them to lead off their book with their three-point manifesto
rather than waiting for the final pages to reveal it, nevertheless it
is an excellent one: “First, research should focus on health and
well-being in its widest sense, rather than on illness. Second, it
should emphasize the extent to which individual behavioural choices
are constrained by the material, social, cultural and political
context. Third, it should recognize and explore diversity among
individuals and among groups of men.” The authors have not attempted
a comprehensive survey of the field of health psychology, but rather
have crafted a sort of executive summary of extant research on
pertinent subjects. An interested reader can easily follow up and
learn in greater detail about any topic of particular interest. The
authors’ 28-page references section, nearly a quarter the length of
the text, contains detailed citations for every study they mention in
the book.
Frequently Lee and Owens manage to
retain their sympathy for males. At other times the feminist blinkers
restrict their view so powerfully that the reader finds himself or
herself more tantalized by what is omitted than edified by what is
present. Periodically one must slog one’s way through the muddy creek
of their turgid terminology. They regularly toss in tiresomely
familiar and at times unintentionally hilarious feminist jargon,
including heavy larding on of such terms as “patriarchy,” “hegemony,”
and “essentialist.” In a book which not only professes to cover but in
fact does cover the psychology of men’s health, it is hard not to feel
that viewing the subject through feminist glasses is somewhat like
attempting to use Einsteinian relativity formulas to try to figure out
the English to use on a trick pool shot. At best the writers occlude
their subject and at worst they positively smother it. On the other
hand, their attempt to cover all pertinent subjects broadly (if
thinly) sometimes leads to painfully obvious statements, such as the
unsurprising observation that women express their emotions more than
do men.
It would doubtless be asking too
much of the authors to expect them to transcend the received gospel of
feminism, and indeed right on page one they trot out the canard that
“unquestionably” research and theory have neglected women and
“overwhelmingly focused on men’s lives and men’s experiences.” Yet on
the very next page comes the first demonstration of their (relative)
open-mindedness within their own chosen mindset. The authors comment
almost off-handedly that their book aims to “demonstrate that
patriarchy is not necessarily advantageous to all, or indeed to
any, men.” [emphasis is mine] Yet surely this is one of the most
remarkably male-sympathetic statements ever made by someone writing
from within an avowedly feminist framework.
Lee and Owens go on to repeatedly
call throughout the book for the same sort of empathetic gendered
interpretation of social pressures on men that feminism has applied to
women. They sensibly yet almost uniquely state that we should be able
to extend sympathy to men for being buffeted by their gender-specific
social forces just as we currently do with women, and note that
psychological research almost never does this. If the demands for a
certain body shape induce women to health-damaging anorexia and
bulimia, then the expectation that men should have visible muscles
induces many males to abuse steroids. If social expectations force
women into motherly roles regardless of their desires, then the same
forces constrain men to full-time provider status without reference to
their wishes. Most strikingly, they pursue this analysis in
discussions of suicide and murder-suicide and even elliptically
suggest that it might be applied to studies of criminals. The authors
point out repeatedly the complete or near-complete absence of
investigation into many areas relating to men’s health psychology and
forcefully call for these holes to be plugged. Thus they effectively
contradict their page one statement that men’s health concerns
dominate research.
The authors particularly shine in
their discussions of suicide and old age. I learned more than a few
things and especially appreciated their attention to specific cohorts
such as men of color and gay men. Interestingly, men’s suicide rate is
not relatively higher in Asian countries. Alcohol consumption is
strongly associated with suicide, and men from marginalized groups
such as sexual and racial minorities unsurprisingly kill themselves at
a much higher rate.
Make no mistake, occasionally the
serious defects in the authors’ philosophical framework leads to
unforgivable slipups, as when Lee and Owens blindly reiterate the
feminist canard that a genetic connection is irrelevant to fatherhood
and compound their insulting error by suggesting that rather than a
completely understandable genetic and evolutionary strategy, the
emphasis on lineage derives from a patriarchal desire of men to
control “their” women and children. Ugghh! Later the writers make the
truly unparalleled suggestion that men at the top of their professions
experience few conflicts between work and their personal lives because
they have “fewer responsibilities and more discretion over their
unpaid labour in the home.” One can only assume from this monumentally
asinine statement that the writers have never spent a moment outside
academia in the workaday world. One more item for the “which world do
you two live in?” department: Lee and Owens evidently believe that
“little effort [is] made in most countries to enforce child support
payments.” I wonder if there is any way we can place these two in
positions of power in child support enforcement divisions anywhere in
the English-speaking developed world?
On the other hand, the writers
earn serious points for their comment in the chapter on the family
that men are often “defined out” of the family by psychological
researchers. I learned (although I had always suspected this to be
true without being certain) that women actually are more likely per
capita to be injured in high-risk jobs and high-risk activities than
are men. It is men’s monumentally greater exposure to
situations involving substantial hazards that leads to their much
higher injury rates.
Authors Christina Lee and Glynn
Owens are two feminist academics from Down Under, the former an
Australian public health professor, the latter a Kiwi psychology
professor. Despite their academic affiliation, Lee and Owens have
retained enough gender-equity fibers in their constitutions that they
managed to complete this remarkable study, which applies feminist
principles toward a review of men’s health issues. “The Psychology of
Men’s Health” explicitly positions itself as a trailblazing work,
intended to stimulate the development of “a psychology of men’s health
that views men in their social context” and analyzes health issues as
multiple-variable, interactive phenomena which depend on social and
cultural context. I congratulate Lee and Owens for mostly succeeding
at their rather ambitious task, particularly in a book as succinct as
this one. They make a solid case for a holistic, whole life approach
to promoting men’s health and psychological well-being.
©2003 J. Steven Svoboda
