It’s 14 years since Mariah Carey went on US television with her then husband and announced: “We are pregnant.” That phrase was already controversial. These days it’s only marginally less divisive than a literal C-section.
Critics see it as offensively twee and biologically illiterate: only one person is pregnant. But the plural has caught on. More couples now use it to describe their forthcoming arrival.
How you feel about the term “we are pregnant” will probably predict how you feel about the “manopause”. This is the idea that men also experience some kind of midlife transition, with serious mental and physical side-effects.
The singer Robbie Williams said last year, at the age of 49, that he had “got the manopause”: he had lost his hair and his testosterone, and “used up all of the natural good stuff”. This month Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the extravagantly maned 59-year-old interior designer who presented Changing Rooms, declared that he too had struggled with the change: “You do lose a lot of your juiciness.” And this is a man whose entire career was based on unsolicited makeovers.
If your eyes are rolling at this point, you’re not alone. Men have already muscled in on female preserves including hot yoga, women’s prisons and the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. Surely we can’t be claiming the actual menopause too?
The presenter and menopause campaigner Mariella Frostrup has decried “a land grab, a ludicrous and blatant appropriation of women’s midlife health problems” — pointing out the urgent issue is that women struggle to get their symptoms taken seriously.
Nonetheless, nearly a quarter of UK police forces have guidance for men undergoing the male menopause, or the andropause as it is often known, according to a BBC radio documentary, Menopause Matters. The outline has been known since the 1940s. Symptoms include tiredness and a large belly or man-boobs. Treatments now include testosterone replacement gels. The East Midlands Ambulance Service includes the andropause in the conditions for which staff can receive up to a year’s sick pay. Other adjustments include placing middle-aged males’ desks near windows where a breeze can relieve any hot flushes.
In the US, the pharma industry has responded by extending the vitamins-and-Viagra market. Testosterone supplements are booming. One company promises a “unique man-boosting formula . . . And, by the way, she’ll like it too.” (“Only one problem,” satirised a Saturday Night Live sketch. “You’ve turned into a full psycho.” In fact, a more serious problem is that some studies show an association between testosterone supplements and heart attacks and strokes.)
For the political right, the manopause presents a challenge. Should it be mocked, as the latest woke madness? Or should it be welcomed as an overdue focus on men’s issues?
After all, central to radical rightwing discourse is the idea that the elites discriminate in favour of women, while men are in fact being left behind in education, work and in health. (In the Covid period of March 2020 to December 2022, for example, men made up 61 per cent of the excess deaths in England and Wales.)
One thing is clear: if there is a male menopause, it is very different, and much less widespread, than the conventional one. After the age of 30 or so, men’s testosterone levels fall by roughly 1 per cent a year. This can affect energy levels, and lead to irritability and a lack of sex drive. But only a minority of men will experience problems — one expert puts the proportion who will benefit from treatment at 2 per cent.
The NHS advice describes the male menopause as “an unhelpful term” and misleading. But it goes on to say that psychological problems are generally caused by problems with work, relationships, money or the reality of ageing parents. “A ‘midlife crisis’ can also be responsible. This can happen when men think they have reached life’s halfway stage.”
In other words, men do have problems in middle age. Suicide rates are high. Given that a feeling of stagnation at work is often a cause of midlife slumps, I’m sceptical that time off work is an obvious solution. All the same, is it possible that the manopause is not a very common phenomenon, but still a potentially useful, slightly humorous shorthand?
Across the west, men and women are on diverging paths. The MeToo movement meant progress for many women, but confusion for many innocent young men. The blue-collar jobs that traditionally gave men status and earning power have declined.
Men and women are spending time in different media environments: young men gravitate to the manosphere, epitomised by podcaster Joe Rogan. They are voting for different political parties. They are also not having as many children as they would like. The latter point is partly because they underestimate the biological realities of ageing that affect women in particular but men too in their 40s.
We can try to address the social disconnect, by encouraging men to see issues like abortion through the eyes of the women they love. This approach did not work for Kamala Harris. Arguably it would be more effective for men to see themselves as, if not exactly in the same boat as women, then riding the same currents.
This was part of the point of “we are pregnant”: it emphasised the new child as a shared endeavour. Personally, I have doubts about whether the phrase, however charming it sounds in early pregnancy, actually survives the reality of child-bearing. (Does any mother, looking back, refer to the time when “we were in labour”?) Even so, the phrase’s rise has coincided with men taking at least some extra responsibility for childcare. Mariah Carey’s then husband clearly enjoyed the experience of being pregnant with twins so much that he went on to have 10 other children, albeit with other women.
The manopause is not yet a social phenomenon. I don’t know any middle-aged men who have used the term. There is obviously a risk that, if the term did become commonplace, men would wield it in the way that they currently wield man flu — as an excuse for hypochondria. There is also an opportunity that they would be more ready to recognise that midlife can be tough, and that fertility does decline for men too. Isn’t that the type of shared experience that a gender-divided society needs?
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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