According to Socrates, only a woman who has given birth without anaesthetic can understand the suffering of a man with a cold.
Indeed, the common cold—a disease so ferocious it causes mild congestion and the occasional sneeze—has laid waste to countless men’s plans to take out the trash or go to work.
Childbirth, by contrast, is merely an inconvenient biological footnote, barely worth mentioning beside the cataclysmic ache of a sore throat.
So let us raise a lukewarm mug of chamomile tea in solemn tribute to the man-flu martyr, whose suffering eclipses all known measures of pain, and whose bravery in the face of sniffles will echo through the annals of time.