That Whole Emotion… Thing…
This being human thing is messy, messy business.
And for those of us wandering around as emotional human beings who just happen to be wrapped in that curious skin identified as “male” or “man”, well…
It’s a curious cultural path we tread.
We modern – post-modern, really – folk are funny when it comes to emotions.
We like to slap labels on emotions – you know the routine – good or bad, positive or negative, good lookin’ or butt-ugly – we love the idea of being able to pick and choose the stuff we want to feel and the stuff we don’t…
We also enjoy voting on the validity of emotions, pitting them, in grudge-match style, against logic, rationality and cognition.
Then there’s the oft-spouted notion – hell, it’s more like a rule – that emotions, due to their non-linearity and inherent messiness, must surely belong on the feminine side of the masculine/feminine divide, because the full emotional spectrum (and access to it) just has to get filed someplace…
Therefore emotions are…
Less manly…?
Quick pause here: Y’all know I could write a book on this topic, so I’ll do my best to keep this to a readable length.
A very short history of men and emotions: With the possible exceptions of “happy” and “angry”, emotions get booted off Man Island. From the time we male people are hatched, we’re sold things like “big boys don’t cry” and “man up” and “don’t be a girl”, to name but a blessed few choice nuggets…
(By the way, I doubt I’m the only one who’s witnessed parents of 3 or 4 year-olds dishing out the “big boys don’t cry” trope. While I do not claim to be an expert on when the human male developmental phase called “big boy” occurs, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t kick in at 3 or 4 – or even 5 or 6 – years of age.)
Apart from perpetuating cultural myths about emotions in general – stories, for instance, like “you don’t want to go there! If you let yourself wallow in your disappointment you’ll be there forever and never come out!” – there’s also a whole class of emotional propaganda aimed at boys…
This stuff is particularly insidious in that it sets up a “feminine/girlish bad, masculine/boyish good” and “be anything – but never be anything like a girl” – dichotomy that cannot help but drive boys toward a distorted sense of androcentric superiority while sowing more than a few seeds of misogyny…
Why hello chauvinism… I pretended not to see you coming! Can I get you a cigar?
Were the distortions and seeds not problematic enough, the hoops boys are encouraged to jump through to avoid all but a narrow band of emotional experience and expression also result in marginalizing their capacity for connection, empathy and, of course, vulnerability and genuine, deep intimacy.
Not exactly a formula for long-term relationship success, to say nothing of caring leadership…
Or simply being able to establish meaningful friendships. (It’s no mystery why male loneliness and a whopping mess of attendant psychological pathologies are at epidemic levels – and that was all going on pre-Covid…)
While all of this is hugely important, the empathy piece is just a big friggin’ elephant.
Why?
Because empathy opens the door to felt experience that humanizes those who could otherwise become potential targets of disallowed emotional pain.
Call me silly, but in my world it’s a whole lot harder to oppress, abuse, ostracize or otherwise hurt people when I practice putting myself in their shoes and make it a point to engage in open-hearted empathy…
The challenge for many men?
Empathy becomes a maddeningly tall order when – having been fed a steady developmental diet of nonsense about emotions – men have first to clear a hurdle that says allowing themselves to feel is girly, feminine, less-than – or in any other way reliant upon surrendering their hard-won, stoic man-card.
On the one hand, I get it. The very idea of feeling is terrifying when decades of shut-down and denial have been the norm…
But c’mon already…
The man-card itself is a house of cards built on lies, and half-truths (for instance, most emotions, when fully allowed, tend to come and go in minutes) and there’s so much buried pain and longing, so many suffering inner-children, so many angry inner-adolescents just below the hardened exteriors most of us were encouraged to develop.
Scary as it may seem, however, the alternative is ugly at best…
Because, no kidding, lives are at stake…
And the toughest, most resilient – most trustworthy – men I know are every bit as disciplined in their feeling, in their empathy, as they are in their thinking – they do both with depth and curiosity – and a wildly courageous dedication to getting it wrong on the conscious, endless path to getting it right.
This being human, it’s messy…