Like men are able to get away with never expressing of requesting help with their feelings because women are trained from a very young age to observe men, watch for signs of emotional need and environmental stressors, and deal with them without being asked. It’s why women worry constantly about emasculating the men in their lives but men never worry about “effeminating” the women in their lives.
Men are “stoic” only because they don’t have to communicate in order to get their emotional needs met.
i….
…….have never read something that explains my family dynamic so well
This describes the past several MILLENNIA, including why so many men only really communicate with their bros.
Let me tell you about an assignment I give: All the Feels. (Which, btw, “feels” is a geekboy way of trying to communicate feelings without actually doing so in order to maintain their “masculinity.”)
I ask students to explain to me how their favorite song makes them feel. This means the thesis is really simple: This song makes me feel X, with X being a real emotion you can name. The paper then explains how and why.
And about half of my male-identifying students fail it outright. (About 1/5 of my female ones do too–but for different reasons.) They fail it because they cannot name the feeling they are having and thus have no thesis. Often, in conferences with me and in peer review with female-identifying classmates, they are able to finally pinpoint an emotion (”it touches me” is not an emotion), but often then they cannot talk about why the song is actually making them feel that. It’s a mess of words on the page that end up meaning nothing.
The assignment reveals two things: 1) Male-identifying folks feel uncomfortable discussing emotions even when forced to by class requirements–and this discomfort appears in their ability to give names to their emotions. And 2) all students have difficulty talking about why they are feeling the way they are feeling. While my female-identifying students could name emotions, they weren’t sure WHY they were feeling them (after all–women are just, like, emotional, right? There’s no rational reason to explain, right?). My male-identifying students, with some rare exceptions, barely can say THAT they’re feeling anything.
And music–man, music is all about emotion. Tones, rhythms, patterns, words: their job is to make you feel something with the artist, to identify with them and their lives. If you can’t feel with music, you are less likely to be able to have compassion and empathy.
Now, it’s one thing if you’re not neurotypical–that’s just who you are and I’ve talked with those students separately about this assignment (guess what: they do BETTER on the assignment because they have to actively think about emotions anyway). But if you’re neurotypical and cannot process emotions because you’ve been socialized that way due to gender, then we’ve got a problem as a culture. Recognizing your own emotions is step 1 to recognizing others’ feelings and being sensitive to those. If you can’t get past step 1 for fear of emasculation…well.
We’re in trouble, and the papers get worse every time I assign them. I’m worried.
You know this is really interesting. But I don’t think that all of this is because of sexism historically. I think that this whole store with the mail and emotional female or more emotionally responsive email has more to do with Hunter gatherers then it does to do with society. You think about it in the hunter gatherer days men would be the protectors in the hunters. It wouldn’t be good for them to be very fearful and expressing emotion like that while they’re leading their group and fighting an enemy. Animals two are more receptive and perceptive of human emotions, like a dog can sense your motions when you’re extremely anxious or fearful they respond to that. So it becomes extremely important for the menu were fighting these animals or fighting other groups to block away any fear or emotions that they might have that could affect the outcome of the fight. Women are the miniaturist they took care of the children and they have to be receptive to the emotions that the children could fully express. It’s also necessary for them to be receptive to the men’s emotions without making the men having t compromise they’re status as a hunter (either among his comrades or between him and the animal). When you look at it in this context that this whole relationship makes a lot of sense. It’s very difficult to get out of the things that your species has become adapted to for millennia.
It’s true, we don’t really need this system anymore. There isn’t so much a constant danger or fight that’s going on between us and the animals that we have to hunt or other clans that we have to fight against for territory. That occurs in the military but in society at large it’s not really something that happens. So when we look at these traits that we have inherited from years ago, we automatically assume sexism, that the men have to be stoic for the sake of masculinity, and the women have to be emotional and receptive to the men’s emotions because the men don’t or can’t do it for themselves. Since, over the years, the reason why men are stoic and women are more emotional and receptive to emotion has faded, we’re still stuck in their pattern without real reason anymore. Know if you think about it the necessity of being stoic or at least not expressing fear is something that is not really divided between being male and female, it’s more divided between being the deader and the subordinate (like with parents and children, or commanders and their subordinates).
This is incredibly incredibly false:
1. The men hunter/women caretakers gatherers thing is like 19th century thought and varied wildly from culture to culture.
2. No, most animals are not attuned to human emotions, dogs are because they’ve lived and cooperated with us for millennia
3. Honestly this is the laziest, most thoughtless, most intellectually lazy thing I have ever read, your views about hunter gatherer societies are sexist and badly researched and I am too sick and too tired to properly source this
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 