Men, gender, and health: toward an interdisciplinary approach.

t has been nearly 30 years since the first scholars began s t u dying men’s health. Early wo rks had provo c at ive titles like “The Hazards of Being Male”1 and “Socialized to Die Younger.”2 Although these authors stimulated new interest in men’s health, little came of it. It was, perhaps, difficult to sell the idea that men, as a group, were endangered; mortality statistics about their comparative disadvantages notwithstanding, most men are more powerful than women at every level of social and economic class. Few men in most cultures have sought to claim the identity and territory of the at-risk, not-so-powerful man revealed by most men’s health scholarship. Or, perhaps, the very problems that endanger men’s health conspired to undermine discussion of it—especially among men. It is not the easiest thing, the study of men’s health. Open the door, and you are quickly in a different world , full of mind-bending term i n o l ogy (some of wh i ch wo rks and serves better than simpler terms to engage the meaning of masculinity and its challenges, but some of which simply generates fog and seems intended only to fortify an emerging discipline by armoring it with arcane neologisms). Read about men’s health and you encounter both the “spin” of panicky overstatement and the dense thicket of sociological jargon. The trouble is, the overstatements are not all wrong, and the jargon has evolved because standard terms and descriptions somehow fail to name or characterize adequately the issues that pertain to gender, health, and, especially, masculinity. Our concern about men’s health is not sufficiently addressed by traditional concepts of disease, nor by the usual health statistics. It is, itself, telling that neither our language nor our concepts of health have, until recently, accommodated the theories and questions most central to understanding the relationships among health, masculinity, and men’s well-being. Chances are, though, that you have come to hear increasingly clear signals amidst the rhetorical static. The media have begun discussing issues related to the well-being of boys and men. Although simplistic notions and stereotypes abound when men’s health is popularized, the presence of men’s health (and of a magazine bearing that name) on n ewsstands and television shows suggests the gra d u a l development of a shared, public concept of men’s health. But what do we really know about men’s health? What do we know about the things that happen in men’s lives as a result, or consequence, of their gender—which, unlike their biological sex, is always understood in social context—on men’s well-being? And (an even bigger question): What are the relative contributions of sex (biologically and genetically), gender (socially), culture (the human environment), and the natural environment to men’s health and well-being? In this theme issue, we begin to answer some of those questions. The Jo u rnal of A m e rican College Health responds here to a “call to action” published by one of us in its own pages.3 In what is the first issue of a professional journal devoted entirely to the subject of men’s health, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines—psychologists, health educators, sociologists, physicians, and public health specialists—explore what we currently know and discuss the implications of that knowledge for practice in college health. The seven pieces published here range from a theoretical macro-view (Schofield et al’s distinguished summary of the development of thinking about men’s health) to the deeply practical and particular (Rogers et al, reporting on Guest editor Will H. Courtenay is a professor at Sonoma State University and director of Men’s Health Counseling in Berkeley, California; Richard P. Keeling, editor of the Journal of American College Health, is an independent scholar and college health con sultant in New York.