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by Hana Ibrahim

It's just a runny nose, and may be, just may be an itsy, bitsy increase in temperature. But to watch the unfolding melodrama of the unbridled snivelling, mewling and whimpering is to question the mettle of male machismo. And also wonder how we (the female of the species, that is), got pigeonholed as the weaker sex.

The unfolding saga of a mere male being afflicted with a runny nose... While checking his temperature for the umpteenth time and re-re-reassuring him that clammy palms do not mean catalepsy stage in Dengue Shock Syndrome, pause for a minute and reflect on...

Well, why is it that when a man is afflicted with a runny nose and a slight temperature he has the Typhus and is manfully facing his death? And when a woman is suffering from the same symptoms, it is only the most prosaic common-o-garden cold?

And while you are pontificating on the imbroglios of the man-woman sick syndrome, also consider the term 'Hypochondriac'. Webster's dictionary defines it as one suffering from morbid anxiety about his health. And although there is no specific gender definition, can you imagine a woman hypochondriac, treating an innocuous indigestion problem as something life threatening?

Guess not. Women suffer through their sickness unobtrusively, apologetically, even contritely. They don't make a Golden Globe vying grandstand on the sick bed. Being sick for them is a pesky aggravation, some thing that keeps them away from getting on with their chores and their lives.

A man, on the contrary, never falls ill quietly, or apologetically or secretly. He falls ill with plenty of oomph and an audience to record and appreciate that oomph. He requires someone to wipe his brows, someone else to fetch his hourly medication, another to contradict what the doctor has diagnosed and somebody else to watch how he manfully face up to that final hour.

Why do men afflicted with a runny nose and a slight temperature, turn from bulwark to blancmange before the odious bacteria can say 'gotcha'? Is it the macho concept of fear? A deep-rooted belief that behind every boil lurks the Black Death and under every pimple the Plague?

According to my friend Freddy, terror certainly plays its part. Men, he justifies, are just as susceptible as women, to the thought that a sore throat must be the start of something sinister... perhaps even a mutant sarcoma. Accepted. But what makes a man go to pieces I think, is the feeling that he is no longer in control.

To a man, (as has been often observed) routine isn't the straight jacket he is forced to wear, but an old suit he has lovingly tailored and crafted it fit his precise emotional contours. Remove it and he is naked.

Not only unclothed, but also unprotected against predators. A man's life is about keeping a front -the firm handshake, the matching tie, the cherry blossomed shoes, the dismissal of danger. Afflictions, no matter how trivial, blows all that apart. The germs smash through his defence, trundle over his personality, and dismiss his achievements as if they don't exist, and in no time at all have the ego hopelessly surrounded. Illness is the only opportunity men get to show weakness - so they milk it for all its worth.

The result is total surrender: of the whimpering, self-pitying, 'get-me-a-hot water-bottle, mop-my-brow-please-mummy, I-can't-suffer-through-this-alone' kind of surrender. It is the running-up of the white flag and the abandonment of oneself to the luxury of total defeat.

Men, I'm beginning to discover, divide their lives into two distinct states of being - one on duty and one off duty. When they are on duty, they behave as required - they dress smartly, suck- up to the hierarchy and they are ever-so-slightly flirtatious with their secretaries. When they are off duty, they wear shapeless sarongs and insult everyone in sight: It is a well-regulated world, everyone knows where they stand.

The trouble with illness is that it doesn't subscribe to the same clear code of conduct. With illness they never know where they are. When a man is sick he likes to know precisely how sick - that is, should he take three days off or set out immediately for the Himalayas to make the most of the brief six months left to him? (of course he would like to assume the latter).

Transactions between a male patient and a male doctor are conducted through a thick filter of understatement: for 'sore leg' read 'broken in six place,' for odd twinge' read 'eye -watering agony that kebabs me every 10 minutes'. If the man is telling his wife, of course the reverse applies. A cold becomes pneumonia; a sore-throat laryngitis, and the common flu, the Bubonic Plague or Ebola Virus or worse.

If his doctor is a female, however, the man won't raise the subject. Which female is going to fancy a guy in pain, unless it is his mother?

All things considered, it is no wonder there is no such thing as an andrologist (the male version of a gynaecologist). Which arm of medicine is going to devote itself to the quirky, fatuous complexities of male illness, where a runny nose is the prologue to something life threateningly serious and a slight increase in temperature is the onset of combination of Scarlet fever, Dengue and who knows what else?

So in the absence of andrologist, the burden of coping with the male malady continues to fall upon the shoulders of those noble volunteers who have borne it for centuries past, unpaid, un-thanked and largely un-regarded. Women. And they call us the weaker sex.

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