From “boner bubbaloo” adverts to the women and girls in his life whose pain was overlooked, Mvume Ndimba questions why medicine appears far quicker to improve men’s comfort than to take women’s health seriously.
Every decade can be catalogued by the big dividing point of the time. In the 2000s, everything was “Xtreme!”, colours were bright, electric guitars were everywhere and hair was spikey and gelled up (if you had the follicular fortitude for such adventurous plumage).
The 2010s colours were present but things shifted from semi-formal clubwear to youthful playful outfits, colour-blocking was the thing and the dreadful black-boy mohawk was the ’do to do.
The 2020s sadly have been pretty much categorised by one word, “war”. Literal and figurative, the 2020s have been all about fighting, we’re fighting racism, the coronavirus, “wokeness” or just each other. And the thing that radicalised me in this decade is the ever present, never-ending gender war nonsense.
The exhausting gender war
Since the pandemic, we’ve heard all about how women must do this, men must do that, women are this while men are like that. It’s exhausting watching people profit from low self-esteem individuals searching for support and love from strangers on the internet who claim to have the solution to all their problems in love and finance. I can’t speak with too much confidence about what the women’s side of this mess sounds like, but i can confirm that the men’s side is basically “waaahhh, women are too masculine, be a traditional wife and make babies, don’t leave kitchen or have a job, but bring something to the table or you’re a gold digging expletive”.
I never paid much attention to these people because every single argument they make about society being worse or things going bad is easily countered by facts and actual lived experience.
Nobody is giving your job to an immigrant, there is no job to begin with. Women aren’t being forced into positions of power, you’re just not as good at what you do as you think, and nobody is forcing a gay agenda on you either, buddy… that’s not a real thing.
Boner bubbaloo and medical priorities
But what is a real thing, are the advertisements you see on these men’s manly men podcasts. One in particular that bothered me was for a product I won’t mention by name (since they’re not paying us), but lets call it… boner bubbaloo. Boner bubbaloo is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a “performance enhancing” chewable tablet that helps men perform in the bedroom while minimizing the side-effects of more traditional tablets that do the same thing.
I heard a few ad reads from a few different places and didn’t give it too much thought, erectile dysfunction is something that impacts a lot of men, makes sense that there would be a market and options for the discerning gentleman who seeks to please his woman.
A few weeks passed and I was again scrolling through the internet when I heard someone say that “if men didn’t need toilet paper, it wouldn’t be freely given in public toilets” and that changed something in me.
When women’s health becomes an afterthought
So, for context, I have 2 close friends who are currently experiencing menopause. One has the means and resources to seek out specialists and medical professionals to help alleviate symptoms and reduce discomfort, one does not. One is on hormone replacement therapy, the other is not. And yet from my perspective as an outside observer, I’m watching both my friends suffer at the hands of biology, or rather not biology, more medical research priorities.
I’ve seen men who’ve been bald my entire life regain their hairlines overnight, short men become taller, men who never worked out suddenly popping up with 6 packs and now… tasty chewable gummies to cure erectile dysfunction.
There is no cure for endometriosis but you bet you can buy your girlfriend a new set of boobs and butt if you have the means. Period pains are still a thing but you can buy a brand new set of his and hers teeth that make you both look like versions of Jim Carey’s “The Mask” when you smile. The overarching reality is that for the most part, women’s health is a joke, an oxymoron. Medical research that helps women and women exclusively doesn’t exist. The only advancements made in women’s health were done so with the comfort of men in mind.
When women’s symptoms are dismissed
I think of my sister, a person I grew up with my whole life. She had always been slower than me, which is to be expected, I am a specimen of athleticism after all, but no matter how hard she worked she was always out of breathe, every time she saw a doctor they told her to lose weight or exercise but nothing helped, she was always short of breath, struggling to keep up with her peers, even her teachers at school would call her lazy instead of actually checking to see what was going on with her… Long story short, she’s had asthma her whole life and nobody cared to actually check for it until she was in her 30s.
I have a friend who had been struggling with blinding migraines, she tried to tough it out but when she couldn’t manage it anymore and went to the doctor to get checked out, the figured an x-ray of her stomach would reveal the answer… obviously it didn’t, but it seems like there’s a common theme of not really caring when women’s health matters are concerned. Like the health and wellbeing of women is an after-thought. The donors for these researchers don’t really care much for women’s health until it begins affecting men.
I heard about a thing called a “husband stitch” and came to realise that the only reason the cesarean section procedure exists is to avoid vaginal birth for fear of “stretching her”, I am almost certain the mortality rate of new mothers only went down because fathers didn’t want to raise their children on their own.
Even when women decide they don’t want more (or any kids) a doctor will stop you from getting your “tubes tied” in case you wanted to have more kids, but let a man decide he wants a vasectomy and it gets done on the spot (well, you have to prep, but whatever).
Who carries the burden of contraception?
Contraception even is an absolute farce, as women have the choice of either inserting a literal foreign object inside them, taking injections that completely mess with their hormones to the point that they will sometimes go a little crazy if the dose is too strong, or stick a literal implant in their arm that somehow shuts down their body’s ability to reproduce, and all men have is a condom, and even then we have 101 brands to choose from. You would think the focus on contraception would be to reduce the sperm’s ability to fertilize a woman’s egg, instead of literally changing a woman’s body chemistry to shut down her ability to reproduce temporarily, but maybe I’m a little slow.
I say all this to say that women’s health is an absolute joke and through no fault of the woman. Whoever that queen was that said that thing about the toilet paper was absolutely correct, and to add to what she said, if men were able to carry and deliver babies, childbirth would either be painless or completely outsourced to incubation-bots by now.
The gender war we should be talking about
I don’t have some big, cool message to wrap this story up. No special piece of insight to show the bright side of the situation, no amazing idea to solve the issue. I just saw something that made me mad, and I don’t really know what to do about it besides rant.
I guess, maybe the real gender war has nothing to do with values or opportunities for earning wealth, maybe it’s just about people treating one another like they’re something other than themselves, treating other people like their lives are so easy when the reality is, there is no easy life, just varying degrees of body-horror that we all navigate in our own time.
When it happens to your own child
I look at my daughters and see how they interact with little boys their age, there’s no difference in how they treat boys or girls, they see themselves as just being kids talking to and playing with other kids, but even they’re not immune from this treatment from medical professionals.
About three years ago, my oldest had been complaining about abdominal pain. When we saw the first doctor, she was diagnosed with a viral infection and given antibiotics and pain medicine, when the pain wouldn’t stop, mom took her to another doctor to get a second opinion and got more of the same. It wasn’t until almost a week later when the pain was so intense, big buddy wasn’t able to sleep that mom decided the hospital was the only place to go… turns out her appendix was ruptured the whole time…
I don’t know if the same thing would’ve happened if my daughter were a boy, or if she were white maybe they wouldn’t have underestimated her pain as much? I can’t know for sure, but I’ve heard enough horror stories from women and men of all ages, races and nationalities complaining about the exact same treatment, and it hurts to see.
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