A new report has found that men are 10 times likelier than women to deny their own physical disability and do dumb things while injured. The report found a consistently large gender gap across a number of disability-related measures, including the time it takes to acknowledge physical injury or disability, the time it takes to seek medical care following this acknowledgement and the willingness to exert oneself through strenuous labor despite obvious health risks.
In one prominent hypothetical, women said they would try to remain horizontal if they suspected they had broken both of their legs, while men said they would walk everywhere on injured legs and decide later whether they were broken or not. The report’s authors are attributing this to a cognitive bias called the testosterone distortion, which leads men to disregard reality and believe they have an infinite pain threshold. Social scientists are speculating on how the testosterone distortion may contribute to other health disparities, such as a five-year global mortality gap between men and women, the fact that men are likelier to both commit and die from gun violence and the fact that injury or death after challenging a bear to a fight is only experienced by men.
Possible interventions include dismantling the idea that manhood is wholly contingent upon physical aptitude. Anti-stupid-death-and-injury advocates (ASDIs) are calling for men in the disabled community to speak up and promote male role models who live openly and responsibly with pain, a skill that has long been neglected in abled men. ASDIs are also challenging popular portrayals of men that may contribute to the testosterone distortion. Some examples of their work include showing the long-term effects of war trauma on men’s minds and bodies, calling on movie creators to portray superheroes who are less invincible and pointing out that MLB star Curt Schilling, who was famous for the valor of playing through pain, now spends his days on Truth Social posting fake information about Hamas infiltrating college campuses. Men can do better than this, they say.