The 50something man has a PR problem

James Davis studied social psychology as a student before life reporting on the behavioural science of the dancefloor beckoned when he served as clubs editor for dance music magazine Ministry in the late-1990s.

Corporate roles included working in media business development for News International and MTV Networks followed, before taking the plunge to set up wellness retreat 38 Degrees North in Ibiza in 2011. 

Davis has since qualified as a personal trainer in NLP, hormone health and nutrition, and he’s a menopause practitioner certified by the International Menopause Society too. 

He co-hosts The Midlife Mentors podcast with his wife Claire, while his new book The Midlife Male Handbook is out now…

We started Midlife Mentors because gen X midlifers are different to any generation before. The type of people coming to our wellness retreats in Spain were interested in making physical changes to their health through exercise, but also had bigger questions too. They were saying things like, ‘I don’t know if my life’s got any meaning’ or ‘It’s just the beginning of the end, isn’t it?’

Gen X are interested in self-development, but they still want to party. They came of age in the 1990s after the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall – a positive time when it felt anything was possible. Today, gen X-ers have had to rein it for a while because they’ve been raising kids, but now they’re suddenly like, ‘Oh, I can go out if I want to!’ Of course, they want to look after their mental, emotional and physical wellbeing, but they also want to go out and have a good time too.

When I was a kid growing up, people in their 40s and 50s had blue-rinse hairdos or sat around in cardigans and slippers. If you look at today’s 50-plus generation, they’re being active, into sport, going clubbing.

Getting divorced in my early 40s really rocked my confidence. In 2014 I was living in Ibiza working on 38 Degrees North, when my [then] wife said to me, out of the blue, ‘I’m out, I want to divorce.’ We’d been together 17 years. It was difficult: I was in a foreign country trying to hold it together while still running a business and having to show up and smile every day. But I was falling apart inside. I was like, ‘Who wants me now? I’m on the scrapheap’. Fortunately, I eventually asked for help – and got some therapy.

I hit my own midlife slump a few years ago. 2020 was set to be 38 Degrees North’s most successful year: we’d sold out 85% of places. Then the world shut down. We went from living in Ibiza to a studio flat in Camden. Although we pivoted to a thriving online business, I started feeling flat and struggling to motivate myself. I started to research this lethargy, which is where the idea for my book The Midlife Male Handbook came from.

The 50something man has a PR problem. This is an age when they start to lose muscle mass, store more body fat and produce less testosterone. At the same time, their confidence is dropping and they have trouble concentrating. The suicide rate for 50-54 year-old males is the highest of any age group. Yet, nobody in the media or on TV is really talking about it.

I got some vitriolic responses from journalists when I pitched ideas around some of the problems midlife men are having. One journalist told me, ‘The menopause is ours. Don’t try to co-opt it’. Another said, ‘You men have had it good for so long – who cares?’ 

The term ‘male menopause’ is wrong. The word menopause is about the cessation of the menstrual cycle, which men clearly don’t have. 

There’s a business benefit for supporting midlife men undergoing symptoms of the ‘andropause’. These men won’t be performing at their optimal best. As a business, you should be supporting them to get the best performance from them.

The media needs to treat the challenges men go through in midlife more sensitively. When the Daily Mail reports on ‘Barry’, who hits 55, buys a new sports car and picks up a 25-year-old girlfriend, it’s mocked. People snigger and it feels a bit ‘sad’. However, when a woman does the same thing, it’s celebrated as empowering. There needs to be more balance.

A 22-year-old today has less testosterone than a 70-year-old did 50 years ago. 

We need to be reaching out to blue-collar men more about these issues. When I give corporations speeches on men’s health, it tends to be white-collar workers who have the time to attend them. 

Ageism is the last ‘ism’ we need to tackle. Anecdotally, I’m hearing a lot about the 50+ demographic struggling to find new roles because employers perceive them as being so old that they can’t learn new skills or that their tech isn’t up to scratch. All their knowledge is being lost – and because AI is replacing entry-level jobs – there’s a lack of new people coming in to learn from them. Acknowledging ageism exists would be a great start…

• James Davis’s new book The Midlife Male Handbook: A man’s guide to thriving through andropause is out now. Find out more about The Midlife Mentors podcast and coaching.

Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist, editor, content strategist and brand consultant.

Further reading

Will the PR industry adopt new menopause guidance?
What PRs can learn from the ASA’s report on age representation
Surviving and thriving as an over-50s PR