Male ignorance of female issues is nothing new, but poor education around fertility is catching up with us, writes Phoebe Arslanagic-Little
Are some women unable to use a coil because they have “tight fallopian tubes”? This was a genuine question a male friend asked me, leaving me both insensible with laughter and concerned about his ignorance of even the most rudimentary facts of female biology.
The conversation arose after new research found that almost half of teenagers are fearful about having children in the future and many say they are dissatisfied with the low quality of fertility education they receive in school. One female student complained that while they had covered safe sex and periods, they were “barely scratching the surface of things people need to know about”.
Inspired by this work, I embarked on an investigation into the state of reproductive and fertility knowledge among my friends. I found that it is men who are letting the side down, particularly when it comes to female health and biology.
To my shock, of 10 men asked, only three knew that women who use the pill for contraception must take it every day. “Once… a month perhaps?” queried an urbane friend with a PhD and a job in the civil service. The same man was astounded to learn that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. “WOW!” he exclaimed with delight, “really?” As special as it was to share in his wonder at the miraculous ingenuity of nature, I couldn’t help thinking this was something he should already know. Other men were suspiciously vague and evasive on the questions of why periods happen and what the menopause is.
The comedy value (and sheer horror) of the idea of tight fallopian tubes aside, the results of my informal inquiry were worrying. Women make up half of the population (51 per cent in fact), and it is surely useful and important for our male friends, family members and partners to understand how our bodies work. It’s surely not too much of a stretch to suggest that these low levels of awareness are contributing to declining birth rates.
Many argue a general lack of knowledge about women’s bodies extends into the medical field, leading to worse health outcomes for women. In 2019, the largest study of its kind found that it takes British women with endometriosis – an extremely painful condition that can cause infertility – an average of seven and a half years to be diagnosed. That’s despite the fact that around 10 per ten of women of reproductive age suffer from it.
But less tangibly, the knowledge gap between men and women on these fundamental matters of health and physical functioning makes me think uneasily of the gender values gaps that are opening all over the world. In South Korea, men and women have diverged sharply in their ideas, with young men growing more conservative and young women more progressive. For young Koreans, ‘femi’, short for feminist, has become an insult that also implies poor mental health. We are not South Korea, but in the UK and also the US, women are increasingly more likely than men to have progressive politics.
The anthropologist Alice Evans points to cross-gender friendships as protective against these widening values gaps because they foster empathy between men and women, and work to prevent a zero-sum mentality between the sexes. Perhaps, in sharing with male friends our bored irritation at having to take a pill at the exact same time every day for years on end, or our dread at the painful prospect of having a coil inserted, we participate in this noble project of increased mutual understanding and sympathy. No doubt there is very much that men may in turn tell us, of which many women may be ignorant.
In the meantime, with my informal inquiry formally closed, I’m hoping that my male friends might start agreeing to go for a drink with me again.