Stibbe / MASCULINITY IN MEN’S HEALTH MAGAZINE Health and the Social Construction of Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine

Although health has not traditionally been a male concern, the past few years have seen the gradual development of a shared concept of men’s health within the public domain. Among the leading participants in the construction of this concept is Men’s Health maga-zine. In this article, six issues of Men’s Health (June-December 2000) are critically ana-lyzed to reveal the ideological assumptions on which the discourse of the magazine is based. Evidence is presented that suggests that Men’s Health magazine, while giving abundant health advice, does so in a way that reproduces a type of hegemonic masculinity associated not with health but with a variety of negative health behaviors. Key words: men’s health; critical discourse analysis; social construction; masculinity; magazines Men, it seems, are doing something wrong. For most of this century, life expectancy has been consistently lower for men than for women (Furber 1999, 91). Males have “higher mortality than females for total mortality and for most causes of death in contemporary developed countries ” (Waldron 2000, 150). In the United States, “men die more than six years younger tha