Do men and women need different podcasts?

Do men and women need different podcasts? The notion goes against the unisex, every-sex, what-is-sex-anyway culture we have come to inhabit. Yet this week we find, on the BBC no less, a podcast dedicated to men’s problems and one satirising women’s problems. Some would say the pushback has begun.

Geoff Norcott’s Working Men’s Club is a recorded stand-up comedy act performed to a studio audience in Leeds. Norcott describes it as a place ‘to discuss proper bloke stuff’, by which he means beer, sport and masturbation (cue laughter), but much more than that, men’s physical, mental and emotional health (initial silence). He jibes at the male habit of squashing feelings and ignoring signs to visit the doctor. He makes a serious point, listens for the quiet, then makes an intentionally unsubtle effort to sweeten the pill with some laddish banter.

It’s clever to play to a stereotypically tough crowd and to play up the toughness of that crowd. The audience certainly enjoyed Norcott’s gag about Leeds being a place ‘where sharing your mental health problems means sighing just before downing your pint’. Here, men are offered ‘a sort of safe space’ in which to explore ‘the actual experience of being male’. They’ll never bite, I thought on hearing these words at the start of the first episode. I soon realised I was wrong.

Some members of the studio audience readily admitted to hiding behind bravado. ‘I think I could take on the Sun’, says one chap, self-knowingly, about why he is among the 70 per cent of men who fail to use sunscreen regularly. (Norcott proposes rebranding it ‘Sun Bastard’ or ‘Radiation Armour’.) It is clear that, beneath the skin, many of these men feel just as uneasy as Norcott says.