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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2232 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do you know men who get "man flu"? Are you a guy who gets "man flu"? If you don't know what man flu is, my understanding is that it's the idea that men are lazier than women when they're sick. I heard this and wrote it off, like most gender war stuff. Men don't help around the house enough, women earn less than men for doing the same work. But I keep seeing guys defending the idea that viruses make them sicker than women.

This is completely anathema to me. My father would go years without taking a sick day. He would get sick every few years during his busiest work event of the year, when he'd be pulling 12-hour-plus days. Growing up, I don't recall ever hearing about anything being put off in our social circle because a man was sick. My mom, on the other hand, was down all the time with one thing or another.

My father-in-law is the same. In 2021, he clearly had COVID. His wife was in the bedroom for days; he was out shoveling snow, cooking, and then making everyone play cards with him.

The only time I take "medicine" is when I'm at work events pretending I'm not sick. Afrin and a constant supply of cough suppressants..

Men and women react differently to different types of pain. Men generally do better with external pain - bruises, lacerations, burns (I have no time to bleed is something almost any man has said in absolutely straight way at some point). Women cope better with internal - due to menstrual pain, prevalence of UTI and migraines - they are more used to their innards complaining. I get sick once per year, usually for 24 hours - thanks to the slavic genes and our secret cure - but they are absolutely miserable.

Meh. Putting on my armchair evolutionary biologist hat, I'd guess that women get drastically sick, lie down for a few days, get taken care of now and then by other women around the house/cave/tent/dwelling, and after a few days of aggressive immune response are back up to normal. Men range out to hunt for potentially days, get sick far from home, and can't afford to have a huge fever while abroad, so get low-key sick instead and try to fight the disease with the least escalation possible, even if it takes longer. That would also suit what I see between my wife and I. I have constant colds that take just about as long to get rid of as it takes me to line up the next one. My wife catches the flu, is completely down and out for a few days, and is then back up and running.

Ultimately I think it's all confirmation bias.

I'll admit to being that guy. I feel like I get sick less often than my wife, but my worst sicknesses on any given year are always worse than my wife's.

I'm pretty sure we are getting the same sicknesses just reacting differently to them. Sicknesses tend to burn through me fast and hard. I am very sick for a few days and then mostly back to normal. Whereas my wife is often just a little sick for a week or two. Just over the last two weeks with holidays and the spreading of germs everywhere I've had two mild fevers (101-103). She has had none. I have also had a light cough, she has a heavy nasty sounding cough. For two days I had one of the worst sore throats I can remember, literally was drooling to avoid swallowing. Its fine now. She has had a scratchy throat the whole two weeks.

Women have stronger immune systems. Testosterone has immunosuppressant effects. The difference isn't massive, at least in humans, but it's there.

For personal medical stuff? I use pure galenism until I'm at death's door. I might take an anti-emetic if I'm worried about dehydration, or an aspirin for a bad headache, but other than that, I don't do 'medicine' because I don't need it.

I won't typically leave the house when throwing up, but I do move around it. I won't call in if I feel safe to drive(which is at least 25% of my job), don't have a high fever, and haven't thrown up.

I'm close friends with a man whose internal biology seems to be made of paper and sugar, which is ironic because he's very athletic. He gets sick (often) and is completely out of commission for a week at least. He's liable to visit his doctor's office for a minor laceration or a sore throat.

Usually if I get sick, I'm out for the duration of the active phase for pretty much everything. The only exception is walking the dog, if necessary - dog's needs trump all. When I had covid, I was so fatigued I barely could make myself get up to go to the bathroom, but I still once a say dragged myself out of bed and dressed up and zombie-shuffled along the dog route because you've got to do what you've got to do. Usually it's no more than 2-3 days of this but when at it, I'm pretty much 100% useless. That also may be because my work involves using my brain, and when sick the brain is useless. But usually also the flu for me results in fatigue which makes me even more useless. That said, once the active phase has passed I am pretty much back to the normal schedule, even if I have cough and sneezing and other stuff (of course, trying to limit contact with other people while expectorations are continuing).

As for medicine, I usually do tried and true home remedies - a lot of hot tea with lemon, ginger & honey, plus vitamin C (it may be overdoing it as lemon already has a lot of it, but I never heard of anyone overdosing on vitamin C) - this year also adding zinc and quercetine, let's see if there's a difference. If I get lingering coughs - which I am prone to, unfortunately - menthol lozenges. Ah, and the chicken soup of course - while called "Jewish penicillin", unlike penicillin, it works for viral infections too.

I'm pretty sure that men get specifically respiratory diseases worse than women. Like how women get worse migraines/headaches. This article suggests that men with pneumonia are more likely to die than women with pneumonia, and mentions that it has something to do with the male immune system.

For some reason, my wife gets a lot more ill than I do from the same illness - when she catches my cold or flu, she is ill for longer and with worse symptoms. I think there is also an element of tolerance - I lived alone for many years prior to our marriage, whereas she never lived alone, so I am quite used to soldiering on when I'm sick as I had no alternative; when she is sick, she is instead used to going into full rest mode to recover.

I also wonder about the effect of overall physical wellness. My wife, while she has a healthy BMI, is not a consistent exerciser and has relatively poor strength and cardio; whereas I have always exercised regularly so I can hike, play tennis, etc. I have read anecdotally that this does influence immune response.

The fitness would apply to my parents. While my father has born with several physical maladies, he pushed through and was an athlete. He plays pick up basketball in his 70's. My mother not so much.

I think there is also an element of tolerance - I lived alone for many years prior to our marriage, whereas she never lived alone, so I am quite used to soldiering on when I'm sick as I had no alternative; when she is sick, she is instead used to going into full rest mode to recover.

This may explain the whole phenomenon.

Back when people lived on homesteads, it was expected that men worked outdoors (that is to say farm, hunt, repair the buildings etc), women did the household, and no one lived alone, there was no room for being ill. You pushed on as best you could or suffer a real shortage later.

A little later, when factory and office jobs came about and allowed you to call in sick sometimes, the men started doing so. But someone still needs to do the household tasks; there are tasks that can be delayed, but if no one cooks there's nothing to eat, and that is a pretty immediate concern.

And if the man has no experience cooking at all (which wasn't that weird - many people never lived alone and this was a "woman's task"), you can't expect him to instinctively know how to do it. You'd have to teach him and show him, all the while being ill. At that point it's probably still easier to do it yourself.

Nowadays it is expected that a man knows how to do the basic household tasks, at least in a pinch, just as women are expected to have "real" jobs. But two generations ago it really wasn't. So the ill woman still had to push on, while the ill man takes a day off work.

Two generations ago there were balogna sandwiches.

I beg people to actually talk to their grandparents and great-grands about how life changed in their lifetimes. Everyone in 1970 had wonderbread and lunchmeat at home all the time, and ate it regularly. Yeah nobody preferred it but it was how life was that sometimes you ate what you had available instead of what you wanted- remember this was a society as poor as Russia or Mexico is today.

Maybe I'm that guy? I try not to be a bitch about it, and probably call out sick a day every year or so, but I'm prone to being whiny about being sick in a way that I'm not about being, say, physically injured.

Like, I'm sick right now, have been since waking up with a sore throat on Tuesday, and things have been trending more worse than better over the last few days. It's not worth going to a doctor (stocking up on real sudafed and maybe some throat spray, on the other hand, is on the to-do list for tomorrow) over, and I'm not seriously ill, but this sucks and is a crappy way to spend my vacation. My throat/tonsils are sore as fuck, I'm still freezing under this blanket, and the super dry conditions (visiting family in the desert when I live in the humid South) plus nasal congestion are not a nice mix.

Oddly enough, I don't think I ever caught Covid in spite of having a roommate hospitalized with it in the pre-vaccine days. If I did it was a light enough case that I couldn't distinguish it from "generic flu-like illness that's over in a day or so", or a really bad hangover.

Women do actually have generally stronger immune responses than men. This paper I found interprets the difference through a evolutionary biology lens: males pursue a higher variance strategy compared to females, prioritizing competitive attributes like size/strength over more conservative survival traits like resistance to infection. Interestingly, there seems to be a concomitant downside: women are also more prone to autoimmune disorders than men.

So apparently, according to a random article I read a while back, testosterone does increase the severity of illness (I’m on my phone or I’d dig up the citation). For the record, no one in my family except my brother gets super sick (minus migraines, which everyone but my father and sister get).

It's not that men get sicker, but that when they do need to be taken care of or take a load off, the contrast is more stark. Let's say a husband and a wife are both under the weather 10 days in a year, with 2 being ugly. If the man takes those 2, and quietly shoulders the rest, while the wife, is at various levels still in commission for her remaining 8, one might misread the batting average.

My wife is open that she needs to lean on me more than I am allowed to lean on her because she's the woman (generally, not about being sick). (I agree!). She's self-possessed enough to recognize that gender dynamics aren't even. So the thing is that occassionally, a man gets knocked on his ass, and it looks like he's being a bitch.

As an aside, I cannot recall the last time I took a sick day at work, if perhaps ever. However, the person who took the most I ever met was a former male boss. Nice guy but extreme stereotype of a leftist. Used phrases like 'adulting'. So maybe it's also about the type of company the type of person who uses the phrase keeps?

As an aside, I cannot recall the last time I took a sick day at work, if perhaps ever.

Me neither. I basically never get sick.

Banking sick days is good in the event that I do come down with a sudden case of multipleinterviewswithadifferentcompanyitis that would take too much time beyond a “dentist” or “doctor’s appointment.”

The "no sick day" pride thing is confusing to me. My employer allows a certain number of sick days, why would I not take advantage of those for days when my productivity would be affected by being sick or my recovery would be impaired by working? Not to mention knock on effects of getting my co-workers sick.

There's no bonus for not using any sick days.

Where I work, maternity leave is taken out of sick time, and I've had two babies in the five years I've worked there. So when I've been pregnant, I've had to balance taking a sick day while being both sick and pregnant, vs getting to recover from having a baby. I do not like that policy. Fortunately, I don't get sick much.

How much maternity leave do you get?

Up to three months, unpaid after running out of sick time (but it demolishes sick time, so if I got sick after coming back, I'd just teach sick). I got one month, since I couldn't that much unpaid time off.

My unused sick days get paid at the end of the year, which serves as incentive to never use them. Consider, one week of work with one paid sick day. If I take the sick day, I get paid 4 days of work and 1 day of sick. If I work all 5 days, I get 5 days of pay, plus the 1 sick day paid out.

They also don't care if I'm actually sick. The sick days are there for me to use, when I want to use them, and there are policies surrounding that. But nobody will ever ask me for a doctor's note.

Fair, if you get them paid out then it's a different story. I haven't had such a situation myself.

Many employers have just a single pool of PTO, so days you take off for being sick come at the expense of days you could have taken off for fun.

Which country is this? In the US, I have never seen an employer who groups sick days and PTO. Of course, I'm in hi-tec where the standard of benefits is usually high. Not luxurious - like, I have a pretty decent benefit package now and it has just 5 sick days a year (there's also short-term disability but that's whole other story) - but still a separate benefit from PTO.

I’m American and my company uses a single pool of PTO. It’s a small startup-esque company, so maybe that plays a role? I will say that my friends in tech (I’m a mechanical engineer) have simultaneously better PTO policies and worse PTO cultures than anyone else I know. Plenty of allowed time off and they barely use it.

PTO cultures, especially in tech startups, are commonly abysmal. Or at least were when I was there. While it is understandable for early founding team, where working one's ass off can literally make one millions (if one's very lucky of course), unfortunately it gets transferred to the wider team where the benefits are much more limited. It takes explicit and conscious effort to counter this dynamics, and I only rarely have seen companies that do it, and explicitly encourage and normalize taking regular vacations and not being "always on call". While being young, childless and untethered, it may not be that big of a deal, but later in life it becomes a bigger deal.

A single pool of PTO would be a high side of average deal in the trades- the alternative is usually to have no paid sick time at all(vacation needing to be scheduled in advance, in one day increments, often counting the weekends in between vacation days as part of it).

very common these days in the US. Sick days are notoriously underutilized (see above discussion).

Strong agree, I have about ten months of sick leave at this point. Nice if I ever get a lingering illness whilst still employed but otherwise? EH!

This is the U.S. I work for a company that provides B2B IT services. I get 5 weeks of undifferentiated PTO per year and can roll over 1 week. Most of my work can be done from home, meaning I very infrequently need to take sick days, so this works out well for me IMO. The company has also been pretty lenient with letting people borrow from future PTO in the case of genuine medical necessity to avoid having to use FMLA leave.

I'm American, and I've known a lot of people with PTO that combines vacation and sick days. It may be a difference in state labor laws.

Could be, I have worked either in California or with companies that have significant California presence, and California requires sick days.

I really dislike the trend of companies playing around with sick and vacation days to force more work out of people - this and unlimited* vacation days are both horrible policies.

*if your supervisor approves them, which they coincidentally will not because more vacation makes them look bad to their supervisors.

"Unlimited" vacation is always a scam. I get why companies do it - e.g. tech workers, unfortunately, under-utilize vacations, and the culture, unfortunately, often encourages it - and with "unlimited" vacation you do not have any monetary liability left to cover. And it doesn't even take the supervisor to explicitly deny vacations - absence of defined benefit already creates an expectation that it's something additional to what you're normally owed, so if you're taking more of it, you're more "greedy" than then next guy who doesn't. If you have X days defined by contract, then you taking X days is normal. But if there's nothing in contract and you take X days and the other guy takes X/2 days then clearly the other guy is a better worker than you. That's not a healthy dynamics to be in.

This. "Unlimited" just means "at the supervisor's discretion", and I'd prefer at-will days off instead. At my current job, I have X weeks of vacation, and they ask us to book two weeks in advance. Some things I had happen were:

  1. On Monday, I learned about something for the coming Friday. I emailed the manager and explained that I wanted that time off, why I couldn't follow the regular procedures, and why it was valuable to me. (It was quickly approved with no issues)
  2. I had a normal vacation that I saw coming a month away. I filled out the request on the employee portal and was approved with no further scrutiny. (I told everyone what was happening via watercooler talk, of course. Community/interpersonal conversations are different than corporate/administrative ones.)
  3. I had an extra week, and they would prefer not to carry the days over to next year, so I took some more time off in December.

Under an "unlimited" scheme, I'd have to justify each day off (like scenario 1), and the reasoning for #3 is probably not strong enough to get approved without pushback.

I agree 100% about "unlimited" vacation, but the single pool doesn't bother me as much as an alternative to being either paid out for unused sick days or having to malinger to get use out of them.

Unless your company is unusually weird, you have to lie to take advantage of them though -- which you kind of should do anyways, but it's not great.

Why do you have to lie?

Most companies don't let you take sick days unless you are, like, sick?

Well yes, I'm not talking about lying about being sick. I don't max out my sick days but I'm also not a "no sick days ever" guy. That doesn't require lying.

I'm a "doesn't really get sick to the point that it would impair my work(ing from my home office)" guy, so I either need to lie about being sick to get some sick days or work ~5-10 days per year more than all the frail zoomers I work with. (who are probably also lying about being sick at times, in addition to just getting sick a lot for whatever reasons)

I haven't worked directly with zoomers but from what I can tell the real zoomer malingerer power move is mental health leave under the FMLA.

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