You might be interested in this article which is part of a debate
on gender stereotyping in the January 2006 issue (Issue 9) of Men's
Health Forum magazine.

Life in the fast lane?
Dr Alex Scott-Samuel (Senior Lecturer in Public Health,
University of Liverpool)

Why did I squirm when I first saw a Haynes health manual, and
when I saw the June 2005 MHF cover showing England footballers
holding up these books? And why do I instinctively associate
this approach to health education with more obviously
unacceptable publications portraying violence or pornography?
The use of footballers and car manuals in health education
exemplifies gender stereotyping in action. This in turn asserts
the acceptability of prevalent masculine gender roles. Violence
and pornography involve the acting out of prevalent - if
excessive - masculine gender roles.

We are not talking about either/or situations here: there is a
continuum that begins with gender stereotyping in parenting and
socialisation (in clothes, in competitive, risky and aggressive
behaviours, in male emotional illiteracy), and extends through
sexist education (girls don’t do engineering), advertising
(female ‘bits’ on hoardings), bullying in the workplace
(especially in total institutions like the armed forces) to
politics (male-dominated parliaments preside over more wars and
more violent societies) and to most aspects of our wellbeing.

In other words, the apparently harmless gender stereotyping
represented by health advice in car manuals is but one end of an
insidious spectrum of patriarchy which continues to dominate
most human societies in the 21st century. Unsurprisingly (and
paradoxically, given the aim of these manuals)  the impact of
patriarchy extends to health itself. Our research suggesting
links between patriarchy and men's shorter life expectancy (1)
has attracted widespread interest (and was the journal’s
most-downloaded paper in the month of publication).

On the one hand, it might seem pointless to draw attention to
phenomena as common around the Cabinet table as in the public
bar, and prevalent in virtually all races throughout the world.
On the other, such behaviours are potentially preventable
through changes in parenting and socialisation, and more
effective prevention of the ways in which patriarchy expresses
itself in society.

There are of course other problems with the car manual approach:
I heard on the radio just the other day a woman saying she felt
patronised by the way that pink gadgets such as mobile phones
and MP3 players are currently being marketed. In the same way,
men are arguably being patronised by the inference that they are
too stupid to think about their health except when it’s
disguised as football and cars. In addition are the facts that
many men are not attracted by these stereotypes, and that
research suggests there are many ‘masculinities’ that are not
characterised by the avoidance of preventive health behaviours.

It was interesting to see MHF president Ian Banks (MHF, October
2005) defending the manuals in terms of men's tendency to think
about their health in a mechanistic way. Quite the contrary: we
should be actively seeking to eliminate the kind of misleading,
mechanistic thinking that turns our bodies into engines and our
health into a commodity to be bought and sold.

In summary, the car manual approach to health oversteps the
carefully drawn line between on the one hand, valid attempts to
engage difficult-to-reach people through effective social
marketing and on the other, patronising, sexist gender
stereotyping which reinforces patriarchal and unhealthy societies.

I acknowledge the intellectual contributions of Clare Bambra and
Debbi Stanistreet.

Reference
1     Stanistreet D, Bambra C, Scott-Samuel A. Is patriarchy the
source of men's higher mortality? Journal of Epidemiology and
Community Health, 2005, 59, 873-876


See also
http://www.menshealthforum.org.uk/userpage1.cfm?item_id=1771
for a survey on this issue.