IT'S NEW, it's now, it's the burning issue of the day: it's the health and wellbeing of men. Men's health, we are told, has for too long been a poor relation and it's time the medical establishment gave it due, nay overdue, attention.
Last week more than 350 people attended a free "Well Man" seminar in Dublin's Blackrock Clinic which covered topics like prostate disease, problems of the scrotum and testes male infertility, impotence and the male menopause.
The organisers of the event were astounded at the audience it attracted. "People came up from the country and from all over Dublin," says Rachel McNeill, liaison sister at Blackrock. "We were surprised and pleased at the huge interest in this subject of men's health. There's a great desire for information."
And no shortage, now that the health promoters have cottoned on. You can't turn on television these days without coming across prostates or testicles or sperm counts or erect ions, not to mention problems of male ego and identity.
On BBC we've had The Men's War, A Bad Time To Be A Man, The Male Survival Guide, Women On Men and The Trouble With Men. Channel Four is currently running Tony Parsons's rant Equal But Different, and RTE recently tackled the taboo of male rape. Publishing houses are churning out books on men's health and happiness and academia's hottest topic is masculinity.
So what's going on? What is the source of this spotlight on men's health? And why is it happening now?
At one level it's money. For the past 20 odd years, every part and particle of the female body has been pathologised, from puberty to menopause and beyond, and very lucrative it has been too. But the bubble had to burst. Fascinating and multi faceted and all as it is, there had to be a limit to the amount of probing the body - and mind - of a woman could sustain. To multi million pound medi businesses, men now represent a potentially huge and largely untapped market.
At another level, the men's health movement represents the latest attempt to get men to be more open and communicative. Because traditional male reluctance to discuss the workings of their bodies - particularly their reproductive organs - is proving fatal for some. Many men die each year of conditions that could have been prevented if they had been more open to identifying and investigating their symptoms.
For example, the World Health Organisation estimates that 80 per cent of men reach the stage of life where they need treatment for prostate problems, and one in three finds he needs an operation to deal with prostate disease. Despite this, few men know where their prostate gland is, what it does or the symptoms that occur when it starts to go wrong.
"Men tend to be more stoical about their health than women," says Prof David Powell, endocrinologist and one of the speakers at the "Well Man" event.
"They don't go to the doctor as early or as often, they know less about their own biology, they are more inclined to ignore symptoms." It is hoped that the new focus on men's health will change this.
INTERESTINGLY, women are showing a far greater interest in the opposite sex's biology than might be expected. While most men view the internal organs of the female body as a mysterious no go area, women show great interest in the workings of the male. One third of the audience at the "Well Man" event was female, according to Rachel McNeill. Publishers and TV executives producing information on men's health also acknowledge that women form a significant part of their audience.
For example, more than half the purchasers of the UK magazine, Men's Health, are women.
At yet another level, the recent surge of interest in issues around men's health has a wider resonance. As Susan Sontag pointed out decades ago, illness is a metaphor. It is likely that our sudden preoccupation with the health and wellbeing of the male has less to do with disease in men's bodies than with unease about their wider position in society.
SO IT'S no coincidence that the central focus of attention has been the arena of sexual health infertility, impotence, penile conditions, problems with the scrotum and testes, prostate disease. Such illnesses are seen by men not simply as deficiencies in their reproductive organs but as central to their sense of sexual identity.
"Women tend to be matter of fact about disorders of the reproductive organs," says David Powell, "but men tend to view a problem with their reproductive apparatus as striking to the heart of their virility."
A concern with virility - that traditional measurement of manliness - is unsurprising in a world where old certainties around masculinity are falling away. This is reflected in ways in which male biological problems are discussed in language which accords them much wider significance than the physical.
So we have, for example, stories about falling sperm counts reflecting society's wider worries about masculinity in general. Take Lawrence Wright's recent New Yorker article which describes sperm as being damaged and depressed: "The ranks of the average army of sperm are increasingly filled with damaged and unmotivated individuals," sounding uncommonly like the communities of alienated young men causing concern for many of our social commentators.
Many of these commentators want to go back to the days when men were men and everybody knew his or her place. Their analysis is given a biological spin by writers like Robin Baker whose recent book. Sperm Wars, describes the "battles" waged by "magnificent, sleek athletic" sperm in Homeric terms.
This type of biological reductionism gets us precisely nowhere and represents nothing more than another version of arguments by Tony Parsons, or Wayne Farrell, or any other of the mob of male commentators currently invading our screens, who think that this rotten equality business has gone too far and that men need to get their testosterone in gear to get things back in balance.
THE TRUTH is that while concepts of masculinity are indeed in flux, the focus of power in our society is still overwhelmingly male. And because the traditional symbol of that power in Western culture has been the phallus, failings of male reproductive capabilities often elicit smiles along with sympathy.
Take the punning titles the BBC chose for its documentaries on impotence No Hard Feelings - and male infertility Shooting Blanks. As TV critic A.A. Gill put it: "Can you imagine anyone ever making a documentary on, say, breast cancer, and calling it Cup of Sorrows, or Shelf Life or The Big C, Nipples and Me.
On the one hand we recognise that male conditions like prostate cancer are every bit as serious and deserving of attention as female conditions like breast cancer. On the other, we find it hard to take seriously this latest incarnation of men as the sidelined, overlooked sex, victims of their biology.
The confusion of the biological and the cultural, of physical symptoms and societal malaise, is profoundly unhelpful. It detracts from the most important finding of the men's health trend - that some potentially fatal conditions and illnesses could be arrested if only men had the information and the inclination to investigate their own bodies.
And it furthers the myth of emasculation, that a rise in female advancement or a fall in sperm count is enough to unmake a man.
This myth - whether explained in terms of social conditions or medical realities must be challenged because, somewhat ironically, it is itself a worrying source of potential health problems for men.
Recent research shows that the men now suffering most from stress and mental illness are those who find it most difficult to adapt to their changing roles in today's society. Helping them to cope means focusing not just on men's health as it has been so far defined, but on what it actually means to be a man today.
Now that really would be something new.