Men Are Such Babies When They Get Sick… Right?

We’ve all heard this before. The “Man-cold”. The running jokes about how men are suddenly and dramatically rendered utterly useless by the same common cold that the lady-folks so mightily battle while attending to both their own duties, and those of their incapacitated male partners.

Please, tell me more about how you are dying a terrible and unjust death; don’t mind the fire-hose style leakage of my sinus cavities. Can I feed you some more soup through your favourite bendy straw?

I had this thought myself the other day, when I had to put on my mom-voice and tell my boyfriend that he needed to go get some more tissues to blow his nose, rather than continuing to snuffle over the webcam microphone. “Men are such babies when they’re sick,” I thought to myself, as he trudged petulantly to the bathroom.

Wait, what? Let’s stop and think about this for a minute.

When you look at it, it really is kind of a sexist notion, isn’t it? Sexist in the sense that it presents a sweeping judgment of gender-based incapacity, right? I was seized by a sudden guilt of having, in some strange way, swung too far in my feminism and grown comfortable with denigrating men in ways so similar to the statements I fight against when directed toward women. Where does this idea come from? Let’s be completely honest: when I get a cold, I am *just* as whiny, useless, and infantile as your average butt-of-the-joke dude. And me? Not a dude! So why ignore this behaviour in myself, in favour of making a gender-based generalization?

Because Patriarchy.

No, no, hear me out. Patriarchy tells us that men are the strong, hard-working providers, and women are the nurturing care-givers. This is of course an oversimplification, but stick with me! Within the patriarchal framework, men are under much more pressure to be consistently strong, consistently achieve, and be “successful” (whatever that means). Feminism, in its many waves and forms, has resisted this framework in a variety of ways; consequently, we now have a culture in which men and women share similar pressures in terms of strength, work value, household maintenance, and child-rearing. Yes, the balance is still uneven, but I think we can all agree that 21st century women bear the weight of much higher expectations of competence than we did fifty years ago (because now the world knows we ladyfolk can be competent, hooray!).

But here’s the thing. Those stale old notions of women not quite measuring up to men still linger in the cultural subconscious in subtle ways. It’s not yet fully accepted that women can be equally competent; we consistently have to work hard to prove that we can sustain the weight of responsibility that feminism has given us (which we have done, many times, over and over, but that’s another discussion for another blog post). It is this cultural dynamic that is the root of the idea in question – that when confronted with a cold, men are babies and women are superheroes. Or at least, still moderately functional human beings.

My hypothesis is that men have tacit cultural permission to indulge in regressive behaviour when they get sick, because they have to be so damn strong and capable the rest of the time. Women, on the other hand, are still proving ourselves; perhaps we feel that we don’t have the same permission to regress and indulge in our weakened state, because of the anxiety that this temporary weakness (the state of being ill) will somehow conflate with a larger, more permanent and gendered weakness. We consistently feel the burden of proving that we are equal or better, even when the big bad rhinovirus takes us down.

So! My question is, have we passed the test yet? Have we proven ourselves enough to feel comfortable being weakened from time to time? And perhaps the biggest question of all: is our culture ready for men and women to suffer equally under the tyranny of the common cold? Can we start saying “sheesh, people are such babies when they get sick!” yet?

• feminism
• gender
• illness
• man-cold
• patriarchy