(~3 minutes to read)
Man Flu is a joke.
Or at least, that’s what it started out as—a humorous dig at “wimpy” men, by women who believe the male of the species doth protest too much when it comes to minor ailments.
Some of those women might even go on to say that nothing compares with childbirth for pain and suffering, which is why their god gave the job to women.
My limited research budget prevented me from tracking down the origins of the term, but it seems it’s a twenty-first-century coinage that came about as a way to shame men into manning up—an ironic term in this context if you come to think of it—when they’re sick. Apparently, we wimpy men exaggerate the severity of our symptoms in order to get sympathy and be waited on hand and foot by our womenfolk, even if they’re flu-ridden—or in the middle of childbirth.
One thing that puzzles me is why the flu and childbirth are mentioned in the same breath. Influenza is a contracted disease, whereas—criminal violation aside—the cause of childbirth is consensual, and sometimes even self-inflicted. There have been many claims—one notable—to the contrary, but as yet I’ve found no supporting scientific evidence.
Mind you, after fifteen babies, pregnancy and childbirth must seem like a chronic disease.
I have a great deal of sympathy for women in general, and for their role in baby making in particular. Perpetuation-of-the-human-race-wise, you definitely got the short straw, right from adolescence to menopause and beyond. But perhaps evolution messed up somewhere on the way with Homo Sapiens’ birthing equipment. I mean, David Attenborough’s never shown film of a female elephant shouting, “Get this ******* thing out of me” and swearing that she’ll never again let her partner within a hundred yards of her with “that thing”, whereas that scene has been played out myriad times during births around the world.
Based on that tenuous evidence, cow elephants have every right to call female humans out for being wimpy. There. Don’t pass judgement on other people… or you might be judged yourself. By elephants.
I cannot imagine being torn asunder as an eight-pound version of me seeks egress. But then my pelvis is narrower, has a smaller subpubic angle, a less round pelvic brim, and a narrower and deeper lesser pelvic cavity than the average female’s. My tailbone is also more rigid.
There; now you know more about my loins than I did four hours ago.
Oh—and it goes without saying that I don’t have the necessary exit.
Some of us mere males take the fear of man flu stigma to heart and try to tough it out when we get sick. (Here I should state that I cannot recall Mrs. H. ever accusing me of suffering from man flu.) But when a cough-and-cold-and-possibly-influenza meet asthma in the over-sixties, that toughing-it-out tends to create something that regular asthma meds and over-the-counter cough remedies are no match for.
If that sounds to you like it might be autobiographical, you’d be right. And it’s the reason I’m writing about man flu and childbirth instead of something more interesting like why wombat poop is cube-shaped.
Man flu might be a jest. But some of us can’t take a joke. Or maybe we try to improve our respect for our female partners by eliminating man flu as a diagnosis before we trundle round to urgent care / emergency / A&E. We live and learn.
All I can say is sucks to my ass-mar.
And thanks for reading.
* The title is a paraphrase of a quote from “Lord of the Flies”