Thinking about risk and vulnerability in CSMM

Abstract

As the world nears a year and a half of a global pandemic, academic work has increasingly detailed the gendered effects of Covid-19. Whilst early on, data indicated that men were at a higher risk of dying from Covid-19 (Peckham et al., 2020), recent data has shown that women are in fact much more likely to suffer from Post Covid Syndrome (or ‘long Covid’) leading to long term potential health implications (Sudre et al., 2021). The explanations for this have been largely couched in terms of biology and the science of sex differences – predominantly around men’s weaker immune responses. Though, behavioural explanations arising from gendered socialisation and norms have also been offered for why men are more likely to catch, develop symptoms and die from Covid-19 (Ruxton & Burrell, 2020, p. 14). An article in The New York Times, for instance, argued in 2020 that adherence to ‘toxic masculinity’ is a predictor of whether or not men are likely to wear masks (Gupta, 2020), something which has empirical support (Mahalik, Bianca, & Harris, 2021), whilst others have shown that men are far less likely to comply with recommendations and more likely to under-rate the threat of Covid-19 than women (Galasso et al., 2020). Men also represent a lower percentage of those who are vaccinated with even one dose of a vaccine in many countries. Differences in vaccination rates are undoubtedly, in part, due to the fact that women are more likely to work as frontline workers in healthcare and elderly care but the differences also reflect gendered differences in approaches to health. The argument that gender affects men’s health is well-trodden territory: the question is why? Courtenay’s (2000) article on the necessity of including an analysis of masculinity in an analysis of wellbeing famously claimed that this could be explained through men’s attitude to risk through adherence to certain constructs of masculinity. As he notes: ‘men also construct masculinities by embracing risk. A man may define the degree of his masculinity, for example, by driving dangerously or performing risky sports – and displaying these behaviours like badges of honor’ (p. 1389). Lohan (2007, p. 498) similarly argues that men are, on average, both more likely to take health risks and far less likely to seek help for risks to their health than women. With regards to CSMM, how men regard their bodies has been important to conceptualising issues of risk. Connell’s analysis of the ‘body inescapable’ inMasculinities (Connell, 1995, pp. 52–56), as well as the experience of feelings and emotions in pro-feminist, men’s consciousness-raising groups (Seidler, 1991) have observed how the ‘disciplining’ of men’s bodies has been linked to embracing a Cartesian rationality of mind over matter (Lloyd, 1984; Seidler, 1994) where dominant forms of masculinity are expressed in the exercise of will. The ableism of such theories (Hearn, 2015), especially neglect the way in which ageing men, particularly, experience a sense of changing embodiment which might not be easily divided into discrete categories of positive or negative (Hearn & Sandberg, 2009; Thompson, 2018). This is where the interconnections between the twinned issues of risk and vulnerability come in. The issue of how risk relates to the Covid-19 pandemic has been highlighted in a previous NORMA editorial (Mellström, 2020) and how risk generally relates to masculinity has been