I’m a bit conflicted about the term “man flu”, which seems to have become a fixture in British slang. On one hand, it seems to be a rather good joke. It calls attention to the way in which men often claim that their experiences are more significant than women’s. Men’s sport, men’s music, even men’s colds, are apparently the real thing, compared to which women just can’t measure up. So “man flu” seems a handy term to point to this devaluation of women’s experiences, and valorizing of men’s. Its cuts down to size some of the claims that women have it easier, that men do all the hard work and suffer the most.
My discomfort with the term[1] stems from the way it intersects with ways we allow men to talk about their illnesses – or don’t. By “we” I mean a sexist, patriarchal society which continually polices people’s gender and demands they conform to certain arbitrary – but nonetheless often damaging – roles. The way “man flu” gets used in everyday life seems to me to reflect an anxiety about men admitting to being ill. The intention may be to criticise society’s elevation of men’s experiences over women’s, but it has the effect of shutting men up when they start hinting that they don’t match to with sexist stereotypes of men as impervious and invulnerable.
I don’t mean this as a complaint that men have a tough time in a patriarchal society: they manifestly don’t. Nor am I suggesting that “man flu” is an idea which wicked feminists dreamed up in order to mock men. (Apart from anything else, you hear the term used by both men and women.) Rather, I’m saying that it plays into troubling ways we gender discussions of illness, and supports an ideal of men as powerful and not dependent on others. An ideal, of course, which serves to support men’s dominance in a sexist society. I’m willing to believe that I’ve got this wrong: to be told that actually I’m just irritated by women criticising men in a sensitive spot. But I think worth raising the issue, and I’d like to hear what other people think.
Firstly, the form of the term “man flu” recalls a spate of other “man” neologisms we’ve seen over the last few years. Though apparently carrying a very different meaning, it sounds oddly similar to “man-bag”, “guyliner”, “manscara” and Dove’s deodorant, “Men + Care”. As other people have pointed out before me, all these terms go to great lengths to separate the words they appear to be pushing together. If we assumed that men could carry handbags, there’d be no need for the term “man-bag”. If men lining their eyes seemed natural, it would be called “eyeliner”, not “guyliner”. Most blatantly of all, the title of Dove’s “Men + Care” explicitly excludes the idea of caring or being cared for from the term “man”. These phrases all emphasize that they’re putting something temporarily alongside the idea of what is naturally “manly”, thus bolstering the assumption that the two things don’t belong naturally together. The phrases have the effect of emphasizing the distinction between their constituent parts, and I wonder whether “man flu” doesn’t in fact have a similar undertone. Does it hint at the way being ill is kept separate from our society’s notion of a real man?[2]
Of course there are ways in which we, as a culture, are happy to allow men to display illness. Sports injuries, bruises, the occasional broken leg, even a scar or two, so long as it doesn’t disrupt the body’s general outline. But none of these disrupt the sense of the male body as essentially closed off, independent and presenting a hard surface to the world. On the contrary, they stage the male body’s impacts when it meets the physical universe. They call attention to the body slamming against other hard objects and bouncing off. I’m not suggesting these are not painful or unpleasant or damaging, but rather that our culture is more comfortable with recognising them as the ways a man can be hurt. They reinforce that sense of the male body as solid, impervious and with secure boundaries.
Flu is a different matter. It’s less serious than some of the things I’ve mentioned above, but it’s potentially an illness which seems less “manly”. It is less suited to that image of masculinity as hard and tightly boundaried. On a literal level, it involves the body’s borders becoming permeable and blurred. The nose drips, the eyes run, the whole body sweats. The body needs to take in lots of liquids at the mouth, which then reappear at other gaps in its surface. It becomes “leaky”, that term so often associated with women’s bodies, and associated with a misogynistic disgust at them. That rigid distinction which stereotyped masculinity likes to assert, between what is in the body and what is in the world outside, is undermined for a while. The potentially “feminising” element of flu might even be read from its etymology, since “flu” is a contraction of “influenza”. The term was borrowed from Italian in the eighteenth century, where it still held the older sense of “influence”, as in a force exerted by the stars. The illness was put down – at least rhetorically – to the traumatic and debilitating pressure of some passing star upon the sufferer’s body. Again, we’re used to hearing the idea that women’s bodies are subject to the moon’s phases as part of a discourse which imagines them as open to influences and forces beyond them. Flu looks like an image of the insecure body, the un-masculine, un-self-sufficient body, whose boundaries are permeable. These are all tropes that have been used to imagine, and revile, women’s bodies over the years.
It’s not just verbal echoes of guyliner and influenza that make me uneasy about the way “man flu” reinforces gendered images of the body. I’ve lived for many years with a disability which possesses some similar symptoms, though much less acute. Admittedly this is probably another reason why my ideas on this subject should be deeply suspect! I’ll admit my thinking is inevitably coloured by irritation at how difficult our shared discourse on illness makes it to talk to people about how I’m feeling. Mentioning head or muscle aches, blurry eyes, shivers, and so on, do tend to attract jokes about “man flu”. But it has also made me noticed how remarkably gendered people’s reactions to my illness are.
Put another way, I’m repeatedly struck by how uncomfortable people are with a man being ill. To the extent that they make jokes about how I’m actually a woman. I’m a fairly private person in many ways, and I’m lucky enough that people can meet me – indeed, know me for some time – without necessarily noticing I’m disabled. I don’t have to continually explain my illness, or talk a lot about it, though it’s something I’m trying to be more open about. So I’m not surprised that people are surprised, so to speak, when I tell them. I’ve had twenty years to work out what I think about it (I’ll let you know if I ever do…) and they’d had twenty seconds. But you might be surprised how often people’s reaction is to decide I’m female.
This can be a deliberate insult, of course. We live in a deeply sexist society, where one of the worst ways you can insult a man is by suggesting he’s a woman. So one might have expected the sports coach who reacted to my being off games for a long time with what the doctors were calling “post-viral syndrome” by asking me repeatedly in front of the other players whether I had got over my “ post-natal syndrome”. It’s part of that protection of the male body image as impervious and unyielding to suggest that any deviation from a particular demand on it – whether that’s a workout, a tackle, or simply an apparent lack of effort – is to call into question the maleness of the player’s body.
But it wasn’t just macho sports coaches who made jokes like that, and they usually weren’t intended as insults. Well meaning people, when told I had been sick at irregular intervals over the last few days, joked politely about morning sickness and asked when I was due. Mentioning how my body temperature soared suddenly resulted in knowing references to hot flushes and the menopause. These witticisms were intended kindly, to ease the potential embarrassment of the situation, but they – and all the others from which I picked these few examples – all shifted me carefully into a female frame of reference. It was as if there was no language to talk comfortably about a man who was ill, and whose illness involved blurring the outlines of that impermeable, masculine body map.
Once I started noticing, of course, these comments stuck out more and more. They all seemed to reflect a discomfort with the idea that a man could be ill in this way, not in total control of his body the way the stereotype demanded. That’s why “man flu” gives me pause, because its rhetorical structure – and its effect of forestalling men who admit being unwell – seem to actually reinforce sexist images about “real” or “natural” masculinity. I’m not worried about people criticising men for emphasizing the validity of their experience over that of women. But I do wonder whether this phrase actually encourages men and women to insist that expressing weakness or illness is literally incompatible with being a man. If so, that seems to be bolstering a patriarchal society, not critiquing it.
[1] Which is clearly a really heavy-duty discomfort, that you actually probably don’t even understand the gravity of, with me being a man and all…
[2] This speculation is supported by adverts for products like Lemsip, which tend to emphasize the idea that taking their product is “manly” because being ill is a womanly or boyish state. One advert from some years ago actually used the tagline “It sorts the men from the boys” as if taking the medicine was some sort of physical endurance test, reframing having a cold as something which could be “fought” aggressively to re-establish a manly image.
ian blackhall (@downwithwhiskas) said:
You’re a cunt.
Lori C. Snyder said:
Real men do not say this.
Rahmad said:
This is quite silly,
K said:
It’s a unique position that says that a phrase meant to insult one side of a social division is actually insulting to the other.
I don’t really care, as long as we can all agree that it’s bullshit and needs to stop.
Das Beta said:
You have misunderstood the term “man-flu” entirely. It is completely the opposite of what you claim it its.
ponyflash said:
I am in the military and see and hear these comments all the time for any sickness that takes away a person’s energy without taking away actual physical ability like breaking a leg or something major like that. The way I have come to understand why the guys I work with in the military will call someone feminine terms used in a derogatory manner is this. You should be able and are expected to overcome any type of non-major injury to your body and work at 100% capacity when told to work. That is what the military defines as being a soldier, which usually in the enlisted sector corresponds with “being a man” or “manning up.” I see the point of how the derogatory terms are not healthy for a society trying to equalize the genders, but manning up really does have a lot of historical reputation, at least in the military, of being something that men do. (see all of the soldiers who have won medals of honor, most of which had major injuries and still got their mission done.)
Also, I am not saying women don’t overcome those same type of obstacles, but in the military we are always given examples from soldiers who have gone above and beyond their call and given great badges of honor because of it. 90%+ of which are men.
jayess said:
You’ve misunderstood the etymology of the phrase; ‘man flu’ derives from the image that men whine like babies at the slightest sniffle – man flu is actually just a bad cold but men like to claim they have flu. The phrase was created by women to mock their male counterparts with the implication that women stoically continue on whilst men complain at the least ache and pain.
Antoinette said:
My thoughts exactly!
willabee said:
I was going to make this point! (By the way, hi Jem! How’s it going?)
I remember this most from college, when a girlfriend of mine used this to mock her boyfriend incessantly. Nto because he was not allowed to be weak but because (and I think this gets back to the first point of the joke) somehow by being a man the minute he got the sniffles the WORLD HAD TO END BECAUSE OH MY GOD THE SNIFFLES.
Hence, for instance, the following exchange which I’ve had many times in my life:
“Oh, no, is he actually sick? I’m so sorry, I’ll bring soup.”
“Nah, it’s just a bout of manflu. Don’t indulge it.”
(Okay, I never remember to offer soup, but I’ll pretend to be better on the internet)
For many of us, it probably came from watching our mothers – the generation one or two before us, who (even more than we do) had to contend with the double shift. If they got sick they might call off work, but I think many of us watched them continue to carry out a second shift at home. They continued to care for us. Something older models of marriage never insisted on our fathers doing.
Though, the more I write and think about this (at 7am, drowsily), the more the implications of that are only a small step from what you’re suggesting, actually. If what we assume is that when men start complaining about their heads is that they’re not REALLY sick and should carry on with their work, then we are also implying that somehow their bodies are incapable of real illness.
Nineveh said:
I think this is very much it. “Man flu” isn’t about men suffering real flu, but mocking the man who has the exact same minor illness that his female partner (or child of either sex) has just suffered from, but whereas when she was ill she was expected to get on with work/housework/childcare as normal and not complain, he takes to his bed and expects to be waited on hand and foot. It’s not about the illness, but about disproportionate behaviour and making demands of others, part of a “your concerns are trivial, mine are earth shattering” continuum.
Lori C. Snyder said:
And that is true of many men.
Lori C. Snyder said:
Because alot of men do this.
Some man said:
Absolutely correct. I can’t believe this author did absolutely no research on the term and wasted all this time writing an article that makes no sense at all.
Jesse McLeod said:
Not everything is sexist you know. Have you ever considered going outside and having a normal life instead of being angry about everything?
Given that this was posted yesterday, it could be an April Fools joke, but unfortunately it is no longer possible to tell the difference between feminism and satire.
Ilyn Payne said:
You have a very odd perspective, wherein you equate “weakness” with “female” and then claim men don’t want to be called “female”. The gender aspect is a (major) step too far… the problem is appearing WEAK, not appearing FEMININE. Yes, some people are being misogynistic when they use female terms to mock your weakness, but it’s not in an attempt to ‘feminize’ you, it’s to exploit the cultural bias towards men being required to protect and nurture those considered weaker (a group in which women in general are still considered part). Weakness is not permitted in today’s man; weak means useless, and a useless man is one that noone can abide. Useless, weak, disposable. Man up, or hurry up and die, so we need not waste any more time or resources on you.
Men will take great pains to avoid an appearance of weakness. For example, due in part to the casual employment of such bitterly anti-male terms like “man flu” and ubiquitous TV commercials that blatantly employ outright shaming tactics to mock ill men (in order to sell the latest elixir or cough drop), men take half the sick days of women. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/412320.stm
Ironically, rather than show compassion to the stricken, this very article tries to turn an ill man into a perpetrator of misogyny. By claiming the afflicted engages in self-loathing because of the “feminization” of his body, you create a narrative that turns his suffering in a statement about gender roles, completely devaluing the misery of his experience, and the misery of the knowledge that he loses respect from society with each moment he’s forced out of societal interaction due to his weakness.
Lori C. Snyder said:
Gee, lucky women don’t get
disrespected.
AdoringFan said:
I am a big fan of your particular brand of comedy. Do you ever go on tour?
ThatSpuds (@ThatSpuds) said:
Maybe you should stop being so critical of EVERYTHING and trying to turn it all into a feminist issue. Most things just are what they are. Crafting a set of goggles to dump everything into categories is just going to drive you crazier.
sarfreer@hotmail.com said:
I believe this article ignores the studies that men actually do tend to get worse cold/flu symptoms than women
http://www.theage.com.au/national/its-true-mens-colds-are-worse-20110624-1gjnv.html
Haywood Jablowme said:
I’m so sick of feminist twats at this point. Their complaining and crying act is so old and tired. Women have it good now in most civilized countries. Go cry about how Muslims treat women.
This article was written by a cunt, for cunts and only enjoyed by cunts.
Lori C. Snyder said:
You are a total mysoginist.
Get therapy, you Angry
Dickhead.Or maybe your’e just
cranky from the Flu.
raudskeggr (@raudskeggr) said:
This is well an truly hilarious, Quiteirregular! Your satirical portrayal of the tendency of feminists to over-attribute societal phenomenon to misogyny and patriarchy is pure genius.
Why, for most of the time i spent reading the article, I even had the impression that you sincerely believed the nonsense you were spewing out!
Bravo, and my hat is off to you. 😉
Jenny said:
Yeah, you’re an idiot. ‘Man flu’ is a term used by women to belittle men. Do some thinking and some research next time you’re tempted to type anything, anywhere.
bob said:
thank you. someone who actually knows what they’re speaking about. i was about to comment literally the exact same thing.
Dudemeister said:
It’s this sort of drivel that ensures modern feminism will never be taken seriously.
M said:
I thought this article was brilliant. I think that there is a dimension to “man flu” which is, as someone says above me, “the image that men whine like babies at the slightest sniffle” – the phrase is characterised, for me, by an element of mocking disbelief that the person is “really” ill at all.
However, none of that invalidates any of your points in my view around what happens when men are really ill and the sense of emasculation they may come into contact with. I’ve dated a great many men who refused to go to the doctor about anything untoward, and who were standoffish about being looked after when they were ill or seen to be physically unwell – but insisted I go to the GP whenever I experienced the slightest symptomatic discomfort. I’ve also dated men who when they were ill demanded I show up and look after them and took it very badly if I didn’t.
Illness was, either way, a sort of odd node of discomfort within the relationship – unless it was me who was ill, in which case, quite interestingly, the majority of the men (who were from a variety of backgrounds) were generally quite nurturing, and enjoyed taking care of me.
I think the stereotype of the man who will use a cold as an excuse to not work, where a woman will go to work high on Lemsip, might owe something to the terrain of social discomfort we live in around the gender pay gap, and the concomitant issues of women “having it all” and “doing it all”, including “children-AND-a-career”. There is a strand of an idea in there somewhere, I think, about men being socially “able” to “use” a cold as an “excuse” in this way, where women can’t “take the piss” so readily.
And then there’s the issues you name, around actual illness. And all of those are also, I think, very relevant and true.
I’d like to thank you for writing this piece. Ignore the haters. It’s a thoughtful, eloquent piece of writing, and it is also, bravely personal.
sasha said:
This article literally makes no sense at all. I’m British and ‘manflu’ is commonly used here and is clearly derogatory against men. It means the exact opposite of what you say it means. I’m not sure what to say because I’m completely bemused by this.
SeteSois said:
Jesus christ, you have some right MRA ravers commenting on this. How far gone into your own warped little world do you have to be to say that a writer shouldn’t be complaining because women have it good and then in the same breath call the writer a cunt three times. What the hell.
I agree with the overall idea of the article though the specifics of how the term ‘man flu’ seem to vary more than you give it credit here, though all the uses are likely to reinforce patriarchy.
Men are most certainly not allowed to be sick in this way but the combination of ‘man’ and ‘flu’ seems more to be about claiming this as very different from the normal flu or other debilitating diseases. Adding ‘man’ to the start, when used by a man and/or treated in the same way that you mention Lemsip and such do, makes a claim for it being serious and something that’s excusable, like a broken limb or other ‘manly’ bit of damage.
As such, it doesn’t harm the rigid manliness of the sufferer and keeps this patriarchal idea of the male body intact.
Of course, it can also be used in mockery in the ways you outline in your piece but I think that is a different use of the term which also strengthens the patriarchal notions of the male body.
Great piece!
hrovitnir said:
Hai! I am not going to read the other comments because I can’t be bothered wading through the morons.
As a female-presenting person I’ve always been super uncomfortable with things like “man flu”. And I think it’s entirely OK to talk about these issues without apologising for yourself! Saying “x is an issue” doesn’t mean “I think x is more important than y” unless you are really exaggerating the effects of the issue you are addressing +/- habitually sneering at issues other people face (see MRAs).
Personally I see “man flu” as a distinct phenomenon to “man bags” or even “male nurse”. The latter is a side effect of people struggling with people existing outside of rigid gender roles. The former to me feels like a form of “payback” *wink wink nudge nudge* for sexist stereotypes of women that ultimately perpetuates gender norms.
I fucking hate it. People make jokes to me about men being unable to find things, unable to multitask, being pathetic when they’re sick. Women do it in a way that implies an expectation of bonding and when men do it feels like a pat on the head.
It also has the side effect of making me feel almost proud of my inability to find things, and ashamed of my ability to multitask. Anything that gets a “that’s because you’re a woman!” is bound to make me snarl internally.
I don’t want to live in a world where “equality” means maintaining the status quo but throwing a few digs the other way occasionally. I don’t want to insult men for fun, I don’t want my gender to be dependent on arbitrary behaviours, and I certainly don’t want to give men an excuse for being dependent arseholes.
Because there most certainly are a subset of men that *are* pathetic when they’re sick. And it’s basically an extension of “I’m such a silly man, you’ll have to do all the cooking and cleaning” – expecting to be waited on hand and foot with no recompense.
In short, I dislike jokes about “man flu” because I do not like belittling people based on their gender, I *certainly* don’t like anything that’s basically a repackaged gender role enforcement, and I really don’t like the tertiary effect of making excuses for entitled prats.
Thank you!
Lori C. Snyder said:
I believe the correct term is
‘The Man Cold.’ I have seen
men with the flu & I would
say in general that men who
have the ‘Real’ flu act like the
rest of us.The flu is pretty serious & there is nothing
funny or ‘exaggerated’ about
a guy lying pale & weak when
he has the flu.If he complains
alot,it’s not really the flu.
The ‘Man Cold’ is when a guy
makes an extreme fuss over
a plugged nose & whines on
& on.Really annoying.
Some man said:
What a hypocrite you are. Firstly, do some research or ask your doctor, ANY DOCTOR, even a female one who will confirm for you that men suffer from the common cold more so than women. You ignorant fool. You are now undermining the suffering of men and using the exact type of demeaning language about men that you condemn of women. You privileged, misandrist, cretin.
Lori C. Snyder said:
It”s ‘Man Cold.’
When a guy complains
excessively about his cold,
whining and acting like a
spoiled child.The flu is nasty
and if a guy talks or rants alot
when he has ‘the flu’,then he
doesn’t really have it.The boys
that really have the flu are pale
& weak,& so sick that you don’t
mind taking care of them.
Lori C. Snyder said:
This friggin site.It either erases
my comment or posts 2 of
them.
Jo said:
I thought this was a good article that raised some interesting points about how the culture of masculinity intersects with illness and disability.
As I understand it, statistically men are less likely to seek medical help early – which can mean that serious diseases are not caught early and therefore become less treatable. The rigid binary gender norms of the patriarchy are often a double edged sword serving to reinforce the power structure whilst simultaneously doing a great deal of damage to both sexes.
Andrew said:
I think it is a phrase that is used to tar men with the same brush,some of us who don’t deserve it,that is what I find insulting,and it should be erased from women’s vocabulary.
Pauly McReidy said:
turns out you are wrong. feminism is wrong 😀
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/man-flu-appears-be-real-estrogen-helps-women-fend-virus