As soon as I stepped off the elevator at the Cutler Center for Men earlier this summer, I was greeted by a smiling woman with short gray hair in an athletic half-zip top, standing in front of a sign that read, “Welcome Guys.” Past check-in, there were pool tables and foosball tables and two giant-screen televisions showing replays from the N.B.A. finals between the Thunder and the Pacers. A small cafe, decorated with vintage album covers and a classic arcade game, offered flavored water and coffee. At the far end, in what staff members referred to as a Zen corner, with a wall of living moss, nature scenes were displayed on a screen while soft, calming music drifted in. The entire waiting area, encased in glass, looked out over a football field where athletes were going through physical-therapy sessions.

The place was friendly and inviting, but every detail also served a more profound purpose. The Cutler Center is one of the few clinical spaces trying to tackle the stubborn problem of men’s lack of engagement with America’s health care system. The center, which opened its flagship location two years ago at University Hospitals outside Cleveland, has been designed in ways large and small to make men feel welcome — like they’re “a part of ‘Cheers,’” as Lee Ponsky, the chair of urology at University Hospitals and the center’s founder, puts it.

The idea of devoting any extra attention to men’s health can seem “counterintuitive,” Derek M. Griffith, a health-policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading expert on men’s health disparities, acknowledges. “Men are advantaged in so many areas of society. It’s natural to ask, ‘How much should we care that your health is still poor?’” After all, he adds, “we built our whole society with you in mind — so you had your shot there, dude, you won the lottery. And you want us to give you more? Come on.”

But this is exactly what Griffith, along with a growing group of doctors, researchers and advocates, thinks needs to happen. Right now, men in the United States, whether infants or elders, are more likely to die at younger ages than their female counterparts. Male life expectancy at birth is currently 75.8 years — 5.3 years less than it is for women. The gap between American men and women had mostly been narrowing gradually for the first decade of this century, then holding relatively steady, until the Covid-19 pandemic, when it widened sharply to 5.8 years, the largest difference since 1996. While living longer doesn’t guarantee that those extra years are healthy or meaningful, life expectancy remains a rough proxy for overall health.

Over the past several years, men have died at higher rates than women from 14 of the top 15 causes of death. The only exception has been Alzheimer’s disease — and that, at least to some extent, is because more women live long enough to develop it. Young men in particular are heavily affected by deaths of despair, like suicides and overdoses, which significantly lower overall male life expectancy. Native American and Black men have the shortest lives; across all racial groups, men die younger than women.

That disparity has many causes, one of which is that men simply don’t go to the doctor as often. The problem begins early: After pediatric care, young men largely disappear from medical settings until after serious issues arise. Women tend to see their gynecologists regularly; men have no clear equivalent. The Affordable Care Act covers only one preventive service specifically targeting men, while it lists 27 for women (some of which are related to pregnancy). HPV vaccination, for example, recommended for all adolescents, still feels mostly associated with girls, when HPV-related throat cancers are now more common in men than cervical cancers are in women.

And as men age, the disparity in engagement lingers, partly for clinical reasons. Compare the most common sex-specific malignancies, prostate cancer for men and breast cancer for women. The guidelines for breast cancer screening are straightforward: Women are advised to start receiving mammograms at age 40 — a convenient pathway to broader primary care. But the screening guidelines for prostate cancer are more nuanced. Men are told to have discussions with their doctors about P.S.A. testing rather than given a clear directive. This leaves men without an obvious incentive to seek regular primary care. And overworked primary-care doctors, so often constrained by having to limit appointments to 15 minutes, may not have time for such conversations anyway, says Eric Wallen, chair of urology at the Medical University of South Carolina. “So I think a lot of people are falling back on, ‘Well, that’s not really recommended.’” Compare that with an entire health movement that has arisen around breast-cancer awareness: How many Americans even know what color the ribbon is for prostate-cancer awareness? (It’s light blue.)

While the science of disease in men has been studied extensively, far less attention has gone to how they actually live and stay well.

In the past, what reliably brought men into doctors’ offices were problems of sexual performance. “I used to joke and say Viagra was the best thing to ever happen to the men’s health movement, because at the time, you had to look a doctor in the eye and tell him about why you’re there,” Mike Leventhal, director of the Tennessee chapter of Men’s Health Network, an advocacy organization, told me. Now, for-profit telehealth companies, like Hims and Ro, can provide those medications in many states through an exchange of text messages, enabling men to forego comprehensive health screenings. This worries Arthur Burnett, a urology professor at Johns Hopkins, because erectile dysfunction, for instance, can be the first sign of cardiovascular disease. “These services allow people to just quickly make requests that don’t necessarily allow a proper health work-up and may miss diagnoses,” Burnett says.

Without meaningful change, the health care system will keep meeting men only after they’re already sick — when treatment is harder, outcomes are worse and lives are more likely to be cut short. And that’s the situation now, before the next public-health crisis hits, as it inevitably will. During the pandemic, men died from Covid at a rate roughly 60 percent higher than women, and male life expectancy declined by three years.

But the problem runs deeper than medicine alone. Men today occupy a complicated place in society, when traditional ideas of masculinity are being both challenged and reinforced. How boys and men are taught to see themselves — and what they feel pressured to be — not only form their identity but also affect their health in ways that are powerful and often overlooked. While the science of disease in men has been studied extensively, far less attention has gone to how they actually live and stay well. As Griffith puts it, “We know a lot about male bodies, but we don’t know a lot about men’s health.”

By the time the man came into the E.R. where I work, the cancer had already spread throughout his body. He knew that colon cancer ran in his family, yet he didn’t get his first colonoscopy until almost a decade past the recommended time — until he decided he could no longer ignore the blood he had been seeing in his stool for a year. Work occupied his mind; besides, nothing really felt like something he couldn’t push through. After his diagnosis, surgery and chemotherapy temporarily suppressed the disease. He felt better, so he stopped seeing his doctors.

Five years later, new gastrointestinal symptoms appeared. He waited another six months before seeing someone about them — in the E.R., where I was his doctor. His wife did all the talking, while he remained silent, eyes lowered. I asked him: “Why did you wait so long? What changed today?” He didn’t answer.

“It’s only now,” his wife said matter-of-factly, “that he’s finally willing to see a doctor.”

“We know a lot about male bodies, but we don’t know a lot about men’s health.”

Derek M. Griffith

What’s remarkable about this situation is just how unremarkable it is. I’ve lost count of the number of men I’ve seen show up in the E.R. after having endured troubling symptoms for months or even years. And typically it has been a wife or daughter who pushed them to finally seek care — in the E.R., oftentimes, because they don’t have their own doctor. It’s rare that I encounter the reverse situation: a man encouraging a reluctant woman in his life to get care. In American households, women make roughly 80 percent of medical decisions. They’re also almost twice as likely as men to have received a checkup in the past year.

A common refrain I hear from men when I ask them about their medical history is, “I’m healthy.” Then they add, often proudly, “I haven’t been to the doctor in years.” Meanwhile, many of the diseases that men die from could be prevented, or at least managed as a chronic condition, if caught earlier, before symptoms appear. But this would require the health care system to figure out how to get men to show up and take a more active role in their own health.

The tragedy is that many of the diseases most likely to kill men are also the ones medicine already knows how to avert. While prostate cancer has become the face of men’s health issues, lung cancer, which is most often caused by smoking, actually takes nearly twice as many men’s lives. Men smoke more than women, and if they were to see primary-care doctors regularly, research suggests that their odds of quitting through counseling and medication could double. That alone might slash their lung-cancer risk in half within a decade. The payoff for their hearts comes even faster: Just one year after quitting smoking, the risk of heart disease — America’s leading killer — is almost halved. And men may have more at stake: Heart disease kills them at a substantially higher rate than women.

Smoking raises blood pressure, too — a dangerous equation when hypertension is already one of the most potent drivers of heart attacks and strokes. Half of adult men in the United States have hypertension, yet they are more likely than women to leave it untreated, even when they are given recommendations to take medication. Bringing blood pressure down by just 10 points lowers the risk of major cardiovascular events by 20 percent.

Diabetes, which is afflicting substantially more people in recent years but is currently more common in men, is yet another condition that fuels cardiovascular damage when left unchecked; it can also lead to kidney failure, blindness and amputations. Controlling blood sugar, though, can cut the risk of heart attacks by more than 15 percent and greatly reduce those other complications. The gains multiply when people with diabetes combine glucose control with comprehensive care, which might involve smoking cessation and the managing of blood pressure and cholesterol, giving them as much as eight extra years of life, according to one long-term study.

Of course, in addition to regular visits to the doctor, changes at home — better diets, more exercise, stress reduction — clearly matter too. But these are the kinds of things health care ought to help with as well. “We treat the health system as almost transactional,” Griffith says — men in particular wait until they feel sick, rather than regarding their doctor as a partner in staying healthy — “but in an ideal world, you want your doctor’s office to be one of the first places you go for information.” It’s supposed to be a trusted relationship, after all.

When men make it into the doctor’s office, their specific health needs may still go unmet. For example, they might not be assessed properly for depression, which can express itself differently in men — through anger, say, or substance use — but common screening questionnaires like the PHQ-9 ask about symptoms more typically experienced by women. Simon Rice, the Men’s Health Institute director at Movember, a global nonprofit group based in Australia that promotes men’s health, developed a specific depression-screening tool to better diagnose men, but it has not been widely adopted in American doctors’ offices even though men die of suicide at nearly four times the rate women do and are less likely to be diagnosed with depression. These differences, Griffith argues, point to how resources for men’s health have not kept pace with the reality of the risks they face.

Any push to direct more resources to men’s health, it should be noted, takes place while many feel women’s health is still neglected. JoAnn Manson, a preventive-medicine doctor at Harvard and a principal investigator for the Women’s Health Initiative, cautions that efforts to elevate men’s health shouldn’t come at the expense of women’s. “I don’t think it’s a simple ‘OK, men have shorter life expectancy, so let’s just switch all research and attention to men,’” she says. It wasn’t until 1993 that Congress mandated that the N.I.H. include women in clinical trials. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine still regard women’s health as underfunded, citing in a report issued this year the toll of conditions that primarily affect women and the limited understanding of how their distinct life stages alter disease. These persistent gaps in women’s health, along with newly restricted access to reproductive care, complicate efforts to advance men’s health.

Advocates for men’s health contend that women’s health already receives considerable institutional attention. “I honestly think the idea that the N.I.H. and C.D.C. are bulwarks of patriarchal medicine and health care is absolutely nonsensical,” Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan think tank, and author of “Of Boys and Men,” told me. Healthy People 2030, the national health objectives of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has four goals specifically targeting men; there are 30 for women. Today there are at least six federal offices for women’s health, while none exist for men. Representative Donald Payne Jr. of New Jersey recently introduced multiple bills to establish one for men’s health; before any of them could pass, he died of a heart attack.

The backbone of the Cutler Center is a dedicated support team known as Joes, eight staff members who serve as navigators. They deal with all the annoying aspects of health care: making appointments, scheduling tests. No dreaded phone trees here; patients can always reach a Joe directly, who also follows up after every appointment. What’s more, the Joes get involved in their patients’ lives beyond what might be considered direct medical needs.

The inaugural Joe, Joe Emery — the shared name is a coincidence — has handled requests from finding an honest real estate broker to drafting a first-time résumé. “The answer is never no,” he told me; instead, he has to “be a bulldog” in getting patients whatever they need. The Joes text reminders for occasions like Mother’s Day; the center popped up a flower shop in the waiting room for any men who forgot. Patients are encouraged to hang out at the center — stop by with their laptops or drop in to watch a Cleveland Browns game — even if they don’t have an appointment. These interactions keep the Joes closely engaged and nudge patients toward important health follow-ups: Here’s a great broker — and by the way, should we schedule that colonoscopy you’re due for?

When doctors are ready, a Joe or a medical assistant finds the patient without shouting his name to the entire waiting room. The center uses a “fashion check-in,” recording their outfits upon arrival and their location in the waiting room — a strategy borrowed from Apple after the Cutler staff made a behind-the-scenes visit to the tech company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Another tip they picked up there: Don’t let 15 minutes pass without updating your patients.

Appointments feel casual. One morning this summer, Lee Ponsky, the center’s executive director, wearing a blue plaid sport coat but no tie or white coat, chatted with a patient, a hardware-store owner, about the best summer grills. Then he riffed off another patient’s goofy joke about butts before he biopsied his prostate. Cutler’s medical director, Greg Hall, contrasts his earlier training — “keep a wall between patients” — with his current approach: “I’m best friends with everybody. That’s how they trust me to give them advice. You don’t trust the person, you’re not going to do what they say.”

The Cutler Center was made possible only because of a $15 million donation from one of Ponsky’s patients, which pays for the space as well as for some of its nonclinical staff members and programming. Any man can join. The center charges no membership fees and accepts insurance, including Medicaid. Nine specialties are offered, but primary care remains its bedrock. If Cutler members have primary care elsewhere, even outside the University Hospitals system, Ponsky is satisfied. (The Joes will help schedule outside appointments.) “As long as they’re going somewhere and we can track it,” Ponsky said. Then he added, “My C.E.O. would probably feel differently.”

One afternoon, during my visit, a new patient joined the center: Dennis Cullen, a thin man in a denim shirt and a black cap emblazoned with “US Army Vet” in gold letters, accompanied by his wife, Donna. Cullen, whose voice was gravelly from treatment for HPV-related throat cancer, was seeing Ponsky as a follow-up after having a mass on his kidney removed. During the appointment, it became clear that Cullen had no primary-care doctor and was relying on outdated prescription refills for his many chronic conditions. His previous doctors had moved or retired, leaving him without regular primary care for five or six years. Ponsky suggested he become a Cutler member.

Minutes later, one of the Joes, Sara O’Brien, sat down with the couple, to set up new doctor appointments for Cullen. She diligently mapped out convenient times and locations, ensuring they were as easy as possible for him. Donna mentioned wanting a new doctor herself, and true to the Joes’ spirit, O’Brien arranged that too. O’Brien entered her own phone number for each appointment so that she could field any questions. During the hour or so O’Brien spent with them, Cullen sat silently while his wife scribbled down the information, just as my patient with metastatic colon cancer had kept quiet as his wife did the talking. Eventually, though, Cullen put on his reading glasses and picked up a preventive-care handout. He scanned it, then remarked that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d had any of its recommended screenings. “I just fell through the cracks,” he said, shaking his head.

Later, at a Juneteenth community celebration, Cutler staff members recruited new patients — mostly through wives and girlfriends who approached their booth first. The outreach workers joked around with prospective members, all the while ensuring new signups were completed on-site and immediately entered into Cutler’s system for follow-up calls the next day. Jennifer Muehle, the program manager, roamed around, stopping at one point to chat with a local real estate broker who was offering classes. Taking her card, she said, “This would be good for the men.”

“Even for people who don’t buy into the concept of precarious manhood as much, we still live within a system where there are consequences for it.”

Joseph Vandello

Basic biology no doubt plays a role in the differences between male and female life expectancy. Having two X chromosomes, as women do, makes for a stronger immune system, because many immune-related genes are X-linked. Testosterone, which men produce in greater amounts, may also weaken immunity; this might partly explain why Covid seems to cause greater sickness in men. Women make much more estrogen, at least before menopause, which may help guard against conditions such as heart disease.

But biological differences alone don’t explain the wide divergence between male and female life expectancy. Nor does it mean that we should accept it, says Robert Califf, the F.D.A. commissioner under Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. “With modern medicine, biology is not destiny,” Califf argues. “You try to do something about it.”

To better grasp the challenges confronting men’s health, it helps to examine how society’s expectations around masculinity and manhood shape men’s psychology and how this, in turn, drives behaviors that affect their overall health. “Toxic masculinity” has become a catchall term for the words and actions of men, ranging from the profoundly destructive, like sexual assault and reckless driving, to the merely irritating: dumb pickup lines, flexing at the gym. But when researchers first began using the term, they meant something narrower and more specific: a culturally endorsed yet harmful set of masculine behaviors characterized by rigid, traditional male traits, such as dominance, aggression and sexual promiscuity. Men trapped in this man box, as it is sometimes called, are less likely to seek medical care and are more likely to engage in risky behaviors detrimental to their health, such as binge drinking or drug use. They’re also more likely to get into serious road accidents, become victims of violence and have thoughts of suicide, as work by Equimundo, a research and advocacy organization focused on boys and men, and numerous others have shown.

Even seemingly positive attributes associated with traditional masculinity, such as providing for one’s family — which 86 percent of American men see as the top definition of being a man, according to a 2025 report by Equimundo — can have negative health consequences. They may put work ahead of addressing medical concerns, especially in poorer households where steady employment may be scarce. Or they may take on dangerous jobs or work extreme hours.

But why do some men hold so tightly to these cultural notions about masculinity that lead them toward worse health? The answer may be traced to how fragile manhood itself can feel.

To capture this concept, two psychology professors at the University of South Florida, Jennifer Bosson and Joseph Vandello popularized the term “precarious manhood” in 2008. Building on ideas from David Gilmore’s seminal 1990 book, “Manhood in the Making,” they set out to better understand how insecurity around manhood shapes male behaviors, particularly those that can be unhealthy. People view manhood as a social status that must be earned and that can be lost, they found, while womanhood is seen as a permanent biological transition; there’s no female equivalent, for instance, for “man up” or “be a man.” This is why we can’t simply tell society to stop teaching boys toxic male behaviors without understanding the pressures they face, Bosson says. “Men get their manhood challenged in ways that women don’t,” she says. “If you ignore that part of it, then you’re ignoring important information.”

In a series of clever experiments, Bosson and Vandello and colleagues found that men who performed a traditionally feminine task — braiding hair on a mannequin — responded afterward with increased physical aggression. In one experiment, they punched a pad harder, and in another, they chose to do a more aggressive activity, like boxing, rather than solving brain teasers. By contrast, men who undertook a neutral task — braiding rope — showed less aggressive responses. Intriguingly, when men behaved aggressively after the more feminine activity, their anxiety seemed to lessen. (Participants were told the sessions would be recorded, to heighten any concerns about being judged.) In an earlier related experiment, men who were falsely told that their test scores indicated they were more feminine showed increased feelings of threat and anxiety — an effect not observed in women when they were told they were more masculine. Taken together, these studies suggest an implicit cultural script: When manhood feels precarious, men may rely on aggression to reaffirm their status.

Around the world, in countries where precarious manhood is felt more strongly, men tend to have higher rates of risky health behaviors and lower life expectancy. Where these beliefs are strongest among the 60-plus countries surveyed, male life expectancy is about 6.7 years shorter than in countries where they are weakest — even after controlling for wealth, gender equality and number of physicians. The United States ranks higher in precarious manhood beliefs than its peers like Spain, Germany and Finland; correspondingly, American men die younger. In a forthcoming paper, researchers including Bosson and Vandello found that the more strongly a country endorses precarious manhood, the more likely its men are to die from high-risk causes — drownings, accidents, homicides — and moderate-risk causes like lung cancer from smoking.

“The U.S., compared to other countries, has more rigid norms” for manhood, Griffith says. “It’s part of our national ethos.” Data shows that overall, men’s views on manhood are becoming more restrictive than they had been recently. Whereas a decade ago, Vandello thought American society might be shifting, with manhood seeming to become less precarious, the current political climate has reversed that trajectory. Researchers at New York University found that men with stronger precarious manhood psychology were more likely to support Trump and other Republicans. Some men on the political far right are “comically insecure in their own manhood,” Vandello told me. The Fox News host Jesse Watters has a set of rules for men, which include such advice as “don’t eat soup in public” and “don’t drink from a straw.”

“Even for people who don’t buy into the concept of precarious manhood as much, we still live within a system where there are consequences for it,” Vandello says. “It’s still this social thing.” These deep-seated anxieties about manhood now find new expression and amplification in modern digital spaces many men now inhabit. “The need to prove that you’re a real man, I don’t know that it’s changing in the West right now,” Bosson says. She points to the so-called manosphere — the constellation of male influencers promoting a narrow, traditional vision of masculinity — and says, “It might actually be getting worse.”

In a recent sketch, “Saturday Night Live” imagined a Joe Rogan-style podcast studio as a medical office, where the host, sporting a mullet like Theo Von, is a doctor and his sidekicks are medical assistants. They joke around with their guests, who are male patients, even dubbing the blood-pressure cuff a “bicep-measuring machine.” It’s a comfortable setting where men can “just, like, vibe,” one patient says. As the skit recognizes, podcasts in the manosphere seem to offer men a sense of being known, of belonging. They create the illusion of just a couple of guys hanging out in a living room, says Matthew Motta, a health-policy professor at Boston University. And they’re funny; many top manosphere influencers are former comedians. Whitney Phillips, a media professor at the University of Oregon, says that the manosphere’s allure reveals what many men likely feel is missing in their everyday lives: meaningful connections. “They’re flocking to these situations where they get to live podcast ‘Cheers,’” Phillips says — the same kind of comfortable familiarity that the Cutler Center for Men is also designed to evoke.

One Wednesday night in June, the Cutler Center hosted a casino-themed “Gentleman’s Night Out.” Early in the evening, men mostly milled around alone. One man arrived straight from his tech job. A young guy wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap stopped by after seeing the event on social media, despite receiving his medical care elsewhere. An older man in a gingham shirt told me he appreciated that this was “just for guys.” Then he pointed toward Hall, who was chatting with two younger men nearby, over sliders. “I like seeing my doctor out,” he said. “It’s another side that you see that makes you feel more comfortable.”

The men I met all seemed to be searching for some sort of male company, which one attendee in his 60s, dressed in a polo shirt patterned with palm trees and sailboats, put to me explicitly: “You women have all these things you go to. Men have nothing, and when we do go somewhere, we just stare out, bored.” As the event went on, a large group, including the guy in the Cardinals cap and the older men, came together. For a long time, they sat around the blackjack table, laughing and whooping loudly.

The Cutler Center hosts a steady stream of such events. It has held athletic contests and workout sessions on its football field and taught classes on how to be a grandfather, manage finances and even grooming. Some men have struck up friendships through these events and have gone on to hang out with one another outside the center. Quite a few have even asked for singles mixers, a suggestion the staff is now exploring.

Above all, Ponsky wants Cutler, which he calls a start-up, to produce measurable effects. “If we’re not moving the needle, then this is just fluff.” So far, the needle seems to be moving: Cutler members are nearly 40 percent more likely to have attended a scheduled doctor’s visit in the past year; 82 percent have a primary-care provider, compared with a national average closer to 70 percent. This might be translating into better health outcomes: Cutler members are 35 percent more likely to have well-controlled blood sugar. Perhaps most telling, men are starting to take charge of their own health. “I’ve noticed a shift,” O’Brien says. “When we first started, a lot of wives would call. Now more guys are calling themselves.” I thought of my patient with colon cancer. I’d tried phoning him after his E.R. visit, but only his wife’s number was listed in his medical chart. I spoke to her instead.

While there are other men’s health centers in the United States, few, if any, resemble the Cutler Center’s unique wide-ranging approach in a space distinctly designed for men. The experts I spoke to could not name any others quite like it. Some men’s health centers function mainly as one-stop shops, where men can access multiple providers in a single location. Others are specialized to deliver urological and sexual-health services. I also came across quite a few so-called men’s health centers that don’t seem to provide much medical care at all but instead offer penile enhancements and testosterone therapy for vitality.

Yet as ambitious and different as the Cutler Center is, its model probably can’t fix the broader men’s health crisis on its own, even if it is widely replicated elsewhere. Rural men, for starters, live far from major medical hubs, which is where these centers would most likely be built — if at all. A more fundamental dilemma, though, is that simply attracting men into the health care system is unlikely to be enough. Men’s health will never meaningfully improve if the efforts remain confined to medicine, Griffith told me. “We know that health care utilization is critical and important, but it’s not the primary determinant of whether somebody lives or dies,” Griffith says. “It’s the stuff that happens in their daily lives consistently, not just when they step inside the walls of a health care system.”

“When we first started, a lot of wives would call. Now more guys are calling themselves.”

Sara O’Brien

American men aren’t the only ones dying younger; the life-expectancy gap between men and women exists everywhere in the world. But what is different is that other countries have done much more on a national level to try to make progress in improving men’s health. A handful, including Ireland, Australia and Brazil, have developed national men’s health policies. Since Ireland introduced its strategy in 2008 — the world’s first — it has made considerable strides in male life expectancy, outpacing most European nations. One advance the country has made is at workplaces, getting employers in male-dominated industries, like farming and construction, on board with prioritizing men’s health. “When we started this 20 years ago, we were met with a lot of resistance,” Noel Richardson, a key architect of Ireland’s men’s health plan, told me. “There’s been quite a sea change. There’s a mainstreaming and a normalizing of health for men as something we should all aspire to.”

Australia’s national government has invested heavily in men’s sheds, which are community spaces intended specifically to reduce male loneliness, where men of all ages come together and do activities like woodworking. Men’s sheds have been found to have significant health benefits. But without comparable government backing, similar initiatives falter in the United States, says Mark Winston, chair of the U.S. Men’s Shed Association. “Nobody in the U.S. is truly investing in this,” he told me. There has even been pushback: One group of organizers was advised against calling their initiative a “men’s shed,” renaming it instead a “community shed.”

There are some early signs of a shift in American society: Recently Melinda French Gates rolled out a gender-equality funding initiative that included Reeves, of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Gary Barker, president and chief executive of Equimundo. Still, Reeves acknowledges that these efforts are, so far, rare. It will “take a while for society and institutions to expand the aperture through which they look at gender to include men,” he says.

At one point during my visit to the Cutler Center, I couldn’t help thinking, All of this just to get men to do what they should be doing anyway? But in the E.R., where I so often encounter patients after it’s already too late — in their final hour, even — the answer is plain. This month, I diagnosed a man with widespread nasopharyngeal cancer, after he quietly suffered for most of this year without letting anyone know. Not long before that, I treated a man for a major heart attack, whose medical chart until that point was completely blank. Others were carried in after an overdose or suicide attempt their families never saw coming. And more men are on their way.