Editorial Big boys don't cry? Mental health and the politics of gender

From Suet Pudding to Superhero: Representations of Men’s Health for Women

Men’s health has been receiving increasing attention in recent years, both in the media and in academic literature. In February 1998 a British Sunday newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, ran a three-week special feature on ‘A woman’s guide to men’s health’. Linguistic representations of health in popular media are revealing of social concerns regarding both the control of health and health care, therefore we critically analysed these texts using post-structuralist, discourse analytic techniques. Men’s health was constructed as ‘in crisis’ and men tended to be aligned with culture (and work) and women with nature (and health). Paradoxically, certain traditional gender dichotomies were both challenged and reinforced within the texts. However, within the five patterns of discourse we identified (men’s health in crisis, woman as nature/man as culture, the risk-taking superhero, man as infant and health for productivity), women’s current position in society was negatively portrayed and functioned to persuade women that it is in their interests to be responsible for men’s health, although without taking overt control. We conclude that the main representations of men’s health for women in this series reinforce unequal social relations which does little to benefit women or men.

‘The Problem with Men’: Working-class Men Making Sense of Men’s Health on Television

Men have higher rates of premature death than women, and may arguably have higher rates of serious illness. One explanation often suggested to account for this is that men are considered to be stoical about illness and reluctant to seek help for it. This article explores the role of media representations in the construction of men’s views about health. We investigate how a small group of lower socio-economic status men make sense of the reluctance to seek help notion through an analysis of texts from three sources: a television health documentary, individual interviews with the men and a focus group discussion in which the men discuss the documentary. The television documentary frames its presentation to promote early detection and help-seeking. We conclude that televised coverage of men’s health is an important site of social discourse through which men’s health is rendered meaningful. However, it is not accepted passively, but negotiated, resisted and interpreted into men’s lives.