The next thing men do is provide their wives and girlfriends with a constant ticker of updates on their symptoms. Bedridden men are like the Snapchat app: the slightest change triggers an alert. Did our stomach just gurgle? Does our foot suddenly hurt, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that we just stubbed our toe on the way out of the bedroom? Get ready to hear about it like you’re supervising a study for the New England Journal of Medicine.

And then comes the doom and gloom, the cloying fear that Things Will Never Be the Same Again. If a man doesn’t recover from being sick within twenty-four hours, he concludes by default that he never will. One day he’ll be holding his first grandchild while still shivering from the same 100-degree fever. This is especially true in the age of Covid, when a small handful of people really haven’t gotten better — and genuine horror stories about them have proliferated across the internet. And while women are more likely to get Long Covid, surely men are more likely than women to demand that others think they have Long Covid.

In Male World, there’s no such thing as a gradual recovery. Fighting a virus is like building an Ikea table: if we can’t lick it in an afternoon, then there’s something wrong and we’re owed a refund. And it’s here that we arrive at one possible reason for why sick men are wusses: we’re creatures of action. We spend our days scrambling up the corporate ladder or slaying entire herds of deer with a bolt-action rifle or straining our arm to reach for another beer during the two-minute warning. To impede all this, to lay us low, runs contrary to how we’re hardwired.