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J. Steven Svoboda is a member of TheMensCenter Advisory Council, an Independent attorney active in human rights law and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC).
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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
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
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