As Hunt and her coauthors acknowledge, several qualitative studies do show that men commonly vocalize their reluctance to seek help from medical practitioners. However, as the researchers go on to point out, most of these studies are not comparative: they do not show that men are more reluctant than their female counterparts to seek help.23 Notwithstanding this lack of data, “there is still a dangerous (often implicit) tendency to assume that, if men employ a public reluctance to seek help as one important way of demonstrating their masculinity, then this must necessarily suggest that women
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