Stock up on cold ones, it's a manmergency!

[Trigger warning for misogyny and gender essentialism]

We live in a world where it's still controversial to openly discuss the scale of the GRID AIDS crisis, where migraines, if the dominant culture is to be believed, are primarily caused by reading too many Danielle Steele novels, and where women are encouraged to squirt toxins down there into their vaginae to promote health. In this world, still reeling from a prolonged he-cession, I give you the latest public health emergency: MANFLU!

The Daily Mail (sigh):

"Women have suspected it for years – and finally, they have proof: when it comes to illness, scientists say men really are wimps.

According to research, the working man is much more likely to succumb to a cold than his female colleague when the pressure’s on."

Yes, men, why do you have to be so feminine and sick? Can't you learn to be fighters?

The Scotsman [Edinburgh] has a pretty good take down of the research and the accompanying Mail story. Since my sweetie tells me CBS' The Early Show covered this super serious story this morning (as of this writing, they don't have anything online), here are a few thoughts:

The study The Mail cited involved surveying workers from 40 South Korean manufacturing firms. So, the results are (as always) grounded in a specific cultural and socioeconomic context.

Researchers asked participants if they thought they had caught a cold in the past 4 months. I briefly worked for some epidemiologists, and this methodology is certainly, um, easy? It's like that time when NIH asked 50,000 bank employees if they suffered from any undiagnosed cancers. Except in this case, it actually happened.

Here's a fun fact: the South Korean study found that women were more likely than men to get colds. Whoops!

The manflu (or man cold, as The Scotsman helpfully points out) is all in the interaction between reported stress and reported illness. Men who reported being under more stress were more likely to report that they had a cold in the past four months. There wasn't a correlation between reported stress and reported illness in women.

This might be an interesting finding. I mean, why might this be the case?

Maybe women tend to be under more stress than men, what with that oppression business and all. That could overwhelm any effects of workplace stress.

Maybe men are more likely to be in management positions than women, which, if correlated with stress (positively or negatively), could make the statistics tricky.

Maybe (um, probably absolutely) there are gendered implications of reporting stress and illness.

Maybe (absolutely) there are gendered aspects of socialization that impact perceptions of stress and illness.

Or maybe men are a bunch of girls and therefore we should feel sorry for them, because unlike girls, they are more likely to get sick (except they aren't).

Tough call.