The neo-liberal ideologies that point to individual responsibility for risks increasingly influence countries of the global North. The anti-ageing industry reflects this dictate and encourages middle-aged people to use their products and services to manage their ageing. However, given the negative connotations attached to the term ‘anti-ageing’, which is usually seen to focus on aesthetics and thus be a woman's concern, men may be likely to disavow being involved in such activities. The article uses interview data collected from men aged 42–70 from Finland and the United States of America to explore whether and how men adhere to the call to manage their ageing when such anti-ageing activities are seen to be potentially feminising. We find that these men reflected neo-liberalism in the sense that they felt that, although ageing cannot be prevented, it can be controlled. Also while they generally rejected anti-ageing products and services that they judged to affect aesthetics, they reported that they use those that they define as promoting health and performance instead. For them, masculinity is the instrumental focus on performance to the exclusion of beauty or attractiveness. Masculine anti-ageing bodily strategies must also be ‘natural’, involving hard work rather than the use of products, which they regard as never having been scientifically proven to enhance performance. Thus, in talk of their anti-ageing, men distance themselves from women.

We have studied the rate of oxygen diffusion through Sr2AlTaO6 (SAT), a buffer and dielectric layer used in high critical temperature superconducting (HTSC) structures. An epitaxial bilayer film of SAT on YBa2Cu3O7-δ (YBCO) was deposited onto an (001) oriented single crystal LaAlO3 substrate using the pulsed laser deposition technique. The rate of oxygen diffusion through the bilayer was investigated over the temperature range 415 to 675 °C by post deposition annealing individual sections of the bilayer in 1/3 atm of 18O enriched molecular oxygen gas. Secondary ion mass spectroscopy was used to depth profile 18O and 16O in each sample. Oxygen diffusion coefficients for SAT at 418, 510, 570 and 673 °C were determined to be roughly (0.93, 6.31, 26.6 and 75.3) × 10−16 cm2 s−1, respectively. Since these diffusion rates can limit oxygen intake into underlying YBCO films, SAT may be an inappropriate choice as a dielectric candidate for use in an HTSC multilayer device technology and will at best require development of suitable post annealing schemes to oxygenate underlying YBCO layers.