For the Love of Men

by Liz Plank

  Because men still hold the vast majority of positions of power and authority in our society, that gendered power dynamic is so frequent it’s often invisible to them. But very rarely is it invisible to the women. Power is like social mobility: the people who know the most about it often have very little of it. Because my friend hadn’t acknowledged the power dynamic between them, he hadn’t been able to see how she may not have been able to say no to his advances. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but given that the floodgates have now been opened, men are held accountable and have a real interest in not screwing up with them.

  RULE 2: WHEN TRYING TO DATE A WOMAN AT WORK, USE THE RULE OF ONE

  In a post-#MeToo world, a lot of men are worried this is the end of office romances. As a person who has been smitten with a coworker more times than I’d like to admit, I don’t think it needs to be. In fact, almost half of people have at one point dated someone they work with and a third of those relationships ended up in marriage. Women being actually believed when they report sexual harassment didn’t ruin romance; in fact, it reset the rules of romance for the better. If you want to make sure you don’t cross the line, follow the official policy that was instituted at Facebook and Google: you only get one shot. Office romances are allowed as long as there’s no conflict of interest and a coworker only asks another once. If the answer is ambiguous (“I’m busy,” or “Maybe … let me check”) or is a full-on “No,” the person is no longer allowed to ask. Dating at work is simple: you only get one shot.

  RULE 3: BE AWARE THAT IF THE ATTRACTION IS MUTUAL IT’S NOT HARASSMENT

  Many men complain about not knowing if a flirtation will be taken as harassment. But here’s the thing: if you’re not sure if you’re flirting or harassing, you’re probably not flirting. Buddhism teaches us about conscious eating, conscious walking, and I think men need a practice of conscious flirting, especially in a work setting. Many men go into flirting with a woman as conquest, like she’s a mountain they’re trying to climb. But if they only approached flirting by putting her first, they would be able to tell right away if she was interested. The subtle cues are key and paying attention to them is even more important in the workplace since you’re both stuck there if things don’t work out.

  RULE 4: YOU DON’T HAVE TO AVOID WOMEN: JUST STOP HARASSING THEM!

  I’ve spoken to a lot of men (and women) who say they’re afraid of hiring women now. Not hiring women to solve workplace harassment is like tackling the extinction of the sea turtles by killing the ones who are left. Refusing to be in the same room as a woman after dark doesn’t exactly accomplish ending sexual harassment. It’s discrimination. Women are not the problem. The men harassing them are.

  RULE 5: WHEN IT COMES TO CHIVALRY IN THE WORKPLACE, ASK IF YOU’RE NOT ABLE TO TELL

  Men should approach acts of chivalry in the workplace with a simple rule: definitely ask if you can’t tell (what’s appropriate). Ask if she needs help, but never assume she does. Be attuned to a woman’s reaction when you offer up an act of chivalry. For instance, I once had a coworker who insisted on holding my bags constantly, even after I would tell him I didn’t need help. He wouldn’t just require that he handle large bags (which honestly could have been at least useful) but would insist on carrying even the smallest handbag, making me feel like he thought I was inept because of my frail lady bones. That’s not chivalry; it’s patronizy (yes, I made that word up). If a woman says no to an act of chivalry in the workplace, believe her. On the flip side, I once worked with a producer who wouldn’t offer to help me with anything. He would just watch me struggle and it was just as annoying. Now I know this sounds like men are damned if they do, damned if they don’t, but generally as a rule, one should never operate in extremes. It’s really hard to offend someone by offering help. In fact, it’s the lack of attention to the answer that usually causes problems. As my friend’s highly mature 9-year-old daughter told me when I asked her if men should open doors for their female boss, “I have nothing against polite people.”

  And what goes an even longer way and literally cannot backfire is offering to do traditionally female jobs for women in the workplace, like taking notes or doing administrative tasks. Even if you weren’t in a position to take the food order or keep the minutes of a meeting, giving a woman a nod for doing it signals an appreciation for her time and work and a recognition that those are laborious tasks, too, even if often performed by women without acknowledgment. Opening the door for your female boss is nice, but booking the conference room so she doesn’t have to is even better.

  And there are some acts of chivalry that have a place in the dating world but no place at work. My friend Regina is an executive at a prominent media company and laments the way she is greeted differently from her male peers by collaborators. While men usually get a handshake, she often gets a hug. At one video shoot she was conducting, she reached out to the subject they were interviewing with a handshake and he ignored her hand while extending his arms to embrace her. “I’m sorry, I just can’t shake a woman’s hand,” he quipped. This is where chivalry can go too far. Women don’t want to be treated differently; they want to be treated equally. Don’t hug the women you work with unless you are hugging the men you work with. But how does one know which acts of chivalry should stay in the dating world and not migrate to the work world? This brings me to the next rule.

  RULE 6: DON’T DO ANYTHING FOR A WOMAN THAT YOU WOULDN’T ALSO DO FOR A MAN

  Would you hold the door open for a man? Absolutely. Would you hug him and say you just can’t shake men’s hands? Absolutely not. If you wouldn’t do it for a man, then you probably shouldn’t do it to a woman. That’s the only gut check you need. Pretend like people don’t have genders. Don’t assume they can do less or more based on any part of their identity for that matter. People think that taking identity into consideration means treating people differently, but what it really means is treating everyone equally.

  The mark of a real man is being able to tolerate a chest infection for three months before laying off the smokes or asking for medicine.

  —ROBERT WEBB

  11 If Patriarchy Is So Great, Why Is It Making You Die?

  When I went to the most feminist country in the world to try to save men from the hellscape of gender equality, I was shocked to find out many were not interested. Iceland has received much attention for its number one ranking in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, a measure developed by policy makers to calculate the level of equality between women and men. The country has been at the top of the list for more than a decade. And it turns out that female empowerment seems to make women and men pretty happy—the country ranks as the fourth happiest in the world. Perhaps Icelandic people’s carefree attitude has something to do with the high-quality universal free health care. Or perhaps it is the state-sponsored childcare, the generous parental leave for both fathers and mothers and the phenomenal social safety net. Whatever it is, the equal-gender political representation in government seemed to be creating some pretty neat laws that kept people of all genders feeling pretty peachy.

  Every man I engaged with didn’t view gender equality as charity; he viewed it as a necessity. “To have a decent society we need everyone to do their share,” Gísli Marteinn, a young father and local news media personality in Iceland, told me. He had been described as the “Jon Stewart of Iceland” and more than lived up to the hype. He hosted one of the most watched political shows in the country, where he enforced a gender-parity quota for both his production team and his guests. I met him at a restaurant he had opened up with his wife and friends in a neighborhood of Reykjavik that he claimed had the highest equal-pay ratio. He said Björk lived next door, which I joked must help increase that neighborhood’s standing. “No one feels like we’ve got it in Iceland. Every year something comes up and we look closely in the mirror and say, ‘Wow, we still have far to go,’” Gisli said. What irked him wasn’t all the rights women were getting but rather how much
men’s political and economic advantage in society was still not eradicated yet. “I hate it when Icelandic men use it as an argument that we don’t need to discuss that.”

  Most of the attention is on how great Iceland is for women, but far underreported is how great it is for men, too. The country may have been crowned the best place on earth to be a woman, but could it also be the best place to be a man? Based on the men I talked to and the research I conducted, a feminist regime doesn’t lead to widespread male misery. In fact, one of the most interesting statistics I couldn’t get out of my head is that Icelandic men enjoy the highest life expectancy in Europe. It also has the smallest gender gaps in life expectancy in Europe, which means that men live almost as long as women do. If the number of years spent on earth is one of the strongest predictors and indicators of the well-being of a population, Icelandic men were doing pretty well.

  Although happiness and well-being are strong predictors of health, there are numerous other health factors, and the more research I did, the clearer the relationship between overall gender equality norms and male health became. There are a whole host of other health problems men experience that are linked to toxic masculinity and lessened if there was more gender equality. Given the way that we often talk about gender equality (if women gain, men lose), can uplifting women also benefit men?

  It’s not just Iceland. Other countries with stronger gender equality are countries where men tend to fare better. Don’t believe me, believe the data. According to the research done by Norwegian sociologist and men’s studies expert Øystein Gullvåg Holter, there is a direct correlation between the state of gender equality in a country and male well-being. Men (and women!) in more gender-equal countries in Europe (Iceland included) are less likely to get divorced, be depressed or die from a violent death. Correlation does not equal causation, but it is nonetheless interesting and worth noting that male well-being does not suffer in a country that is focused on ensuring women’s well-being. In fact, living in a feminist nation can enhance the lives of men, too. Just like minimizing income inequality in a country benefits the country as a whole, so does limiting gender inequality. In the same way that rich people don’t lose out (and, in fact, actually benefit) in a country where income inequality is low, the same goes for men in countries with lower gender inequality. Gullvåg Holter remarks that although a lot of attention is paid to the way income inequality reduction has positive ripple effects on the country as a whole, very little academic attention has been paid to how gender equality also has those positive collective impacts. These benefits are myriad, but for now let’s stay laser-focused on how feminism can help men live longer.

  It’s hilarious that gender equality helps men live longer, because one of the most frequent men’s rights activists’ arguments to derail a feminist’s argument is to point to the fact that men die sooner than women and that because of this, the focus on women is unwarranted. Although it’s true that women tend to outlive men in almost every country in the world, the solution these advocates envision—a world without feminism—is the opposite of the solution. Feminism is the antidote to shorter male life expectancy, not the cause of it. Saying feminism makes men die earlier is like saying firefighters cause fire or that pain relievers causes headaches. Men’s rights activists fear that any examination of idealized masculinity is an attack on men when scrutinizing it might be one of the most effective ways to help them.

  Instead of invalidating feminism, the problem of early male deaths could be (at least partially) solved with more feminism, not less. Although men’s rights activists revere the patriarchy and do anything they can to cling to the status quo, several of the reasons why men don’t live as long as women can be traced back to the patriarchy—that thing that’s supposed to make them so much better off. Mind pretzel, right? Let’s dig in.

  PATRIARCHY PROMISES MEN FREEDOM IN EXCHANGE FOR CHAINS

  First, let’s get the facts straight: in almost every society across the world, women live longer than men, and the majority of centenarians across almost every country are female. The only exception is in certain developing countries where females can be so undervalued that they are more likely to be killed at birth or neglected through being deprived of appropriate food and care. It’s the reason there are fewer girls than boys in countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and the life expectancies between men and women are warped.

  But in the vast majority of modern societies, the stereotype that women last longer doesn’t just apply to sex, it applies to life. On average, women will live about six years longer than men and a lot of it is explained by biology. In fact, across the animal kingdom, the female species tends to outlive the male, including primates and other warm-blooded animals. Female macaques, for instance, outlive their male friends by about eight years. Some of it is hormonal (estrogen might have a protective effect on limiting the likelihood of developing heart disease, for instance), or could be largely in part due to the fact that women have two X chromosomes while men only have one. This offers women chromosomal superiority and a significant health advantage over men. That’s because if one of a woman’s X chromosomes has a mutation or an irregularity, the other one simply kicks in. Because men only have a single X chromosome, they’re stuck with all its deficiencies. That’s why disorders and diseases that stem from X chromosome abnormalities, like hemophilia and color blindness, rarely affect women. Chromosomal differences may also partly explain why the vast majority of autistic people are male (although women present different symptoms than boys and we aren’t as good at diagnosing it). These chromosome differences also partly explain why most stillbirths and premature deaths happen to boys. In fact, male infants are less likely to survive than their female counterparts because they tend to be more fragile and vulnerable to disease and death. Left under the same circumstances, female babies have a higher chance of survival, full stop. Data on famines, epidemics and slavery conditions shows women have always been more likely to survive under grueling circumstances (and stick around for longer even when they are not healthy). The researchers from the University of Southern Denmark put it very simply: “baby girls were able to survive harsh conditions better than baby boys.”

  Although there’s an assumption that being female is associated with being more frail, nurseries tell a whole different story. The fragile gender is not the female one. In fact, as Susan Pinker notes in The Sexual Paradox, “From day one, male embryos, although more numerous, are more susceptible to the effects of maternal stress. When the going gets rough, female embryos are simply more likely to make it. They’re better girded to survive the uncertain first hours after conception, and they’re less likely to be affected by obstetric disasters, disabilities of all kinds, and early death. Even pollution hits males harder.”

  Pinker brings up a striking study performed of Hawaiian children raised in poverty-stricken conditions in the 1950s that was conducted by psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith that found large disparities between the genders. Girls had far higher IQs and half of the boys ended up experiencing learning problems in school. While one in five girls died in infancy, more than half the boys did. Susan Pinker concludes “from a biological perspective, being female simply offers a protective umbrella from cradle to grave.” Although testosterone is often associated with giving men an advantage later in life because it’s associated with muscle development and stamina, it’s associated with many of the factors that put men at higher health risk, like cancer, heart disease and HIV. Because it lowers the body’s immune response, male embryos are more fragile, and that explains why premature girls are more likely to survive and thrive than their male counterparts.

  But the other part of the gender life expectancy gap is what scientists literally call man-made diseases.1 These are illnesses or medical conditions that have been created by us as a result of the way we’ve chosen to organize our world. These circumstances fall outside of the realm of biological determinism and are completely cultural: smoking, alcohol,
high-risk behavior and more work accidents. When you look at the list of behaviors that the World Health Organization lists as responsible for this discrepancy, it’s hard not to see the stronghold of the patriarchy. Their report sums up the differences in expectancy as explained by:

  [G]reater levels of occupational exposure to physical and chemical hazards, behaviours associated with male norms of risk-taking and adventure, health behaviour paradigms related to masculinity and the fact that men are less likely to visit a doctor when they are ill and, when they see a doctor, are less likely to report on the symptoms of disease or illness.

  So according to WHO, there are three big (highly modifiable) reasons men don’t live as long: men’s relationships with work, risk and doctors. Let’s quickly examine each of these in order.

  1. MEN AND WORK

  We won’t spend too much time on this because there’s an entire chapter in this book dedicated to challenging men’s relationship with work. To put it simply, men are much more likely to die on the job than women, but due to shifts in our economy, this is changing pretty dramatically, especially here in the United States. The vast majority of deaths on the job (about 93 percent depending on the year you examine) are male and men do still tend to dominate riskier industries, working in such fields as high-tech agriculture or as electrical power-line installers or truck drivers. The top most dangerous jobs are (so far) all in male-dominated industries. Certain men are more vulnerable than others. Immigrants and men of color, for instance, are even more at risk and have higher numbers of injury or death than white men. However, the most dangerous jobs are not fast-growing jobs; if anything, it’s quite the opposite. As more and more men move out of heavy manual labor jobs, work-related deaths will be reduced. These economic changes are actually the number one reason the gap between the life expectancy of men and women has been slightly reduced in the last few years.