View from the North 40: Pamville News: Beyond mansplaining

Clinical Assistant Professor in family medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland Dr. Kyle Sue recently published an article in British Medical Journal that The Guardian described as a “wry” scientific look at how men experience cold and flu virus symptoms worse than women do. Yes, a guy named Sue was looking to prove that “man flu” is a thing.

In a not entirely thorough treatise based on some scientific studies and some not-so-scientific stuff, Sue proposes in part that men feel worse when they’re sick because they are more sensitive than women and they have weaker immune systems because they have high testosterone.

Sue suggested that more studies need to be done on the subject, while also offering as a positive note that an evolutionary tie-in could be that, over the millennium, man flu has preserved the most manly of humans. It’s true, he says, because the higher the males’ testosterone, the more likely he would be lying in bed with the debilitating achy-sniffles when danger hits, thus surviving to contribute to the gene pool.

No word yet on how the general male population feels about being called sensitive, weaker than women and big chickens hiding behind a box of tissues.

However, this article — tongue-in-cheek though it may be — could be a starting point for actual research into a kind of scientific research version of mansplaining.

Maybe man-plus-justifying will catch on and we can describe it as “manifying.”

Pamville News will be here to report on the first academic articles like one from someone named Dr. Ama King publishing a study on how childbirth is harder on men than women. Psychological damage occurs when men, traditionally the do-ers, have to sit by while women do all the pushing, the study will say. One result of this, the study will conclude, will be postpartum man-depression — so much sadder than the woman’s, the study will say.

Additionally, because men’s hips are typically narrower than women’s relative to their body sizes, sympathy contractions are harder on men than real contractions on women, the study will say, and this can sometimes result in a neurological disorder referred to as John Wayne sashay syndrome.

The struggle, King will conclude, is real.

The next study will be one that blows the roof off the glass ceiling theory.

Researchers at some place like Goodman-Best University’s Department of Economics and Important Stuff will prove that the glass ceiling does not exist because if it did, men would be able to see it as they look down through the crystal floor they’re standing on.

But for the sake of their chick colleagues in what they like to think of as the department’s sub-branch called Home Economics and Girl Stuff, their study will look at a hypothetical situation in which the glass ceiling did exist and was shattered.

Demonstrated by way of a breakthrough mathematical formula which finally will prove that money equals power, the study will conclude that shattering the “hypothetical glass ceiling” would create a “gross imbalance of power” in which fewer men would be in top positions because as many as half would be taken by women.

Cultural disarray would result, the study will say, if this translated to equal pay for equal work and greater valuation of jobs seen traditionally as for women. If the average annual income for working women equaled that for men, the study will propose, other means would be needed to economically quantify that men are more important.

Further cultural down-shifts would occur, the study will conclude, if greater income for women meant easing the burden on men to be the sole or major income earners and gave men more time and lifestyle choices.

Because this is Pamville, the everyday men will be all like, “Where’s the problem here? Honey, I can’t find the problem here. Could you help me look for it? Thanks.”

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Sorry I picked on guys two weeks in a row, but “man flu”? He had to go there? at [email protected].