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Men Are Highly Emotional, What Most of Them Lack is Emotional Intelligence
The problem with saying that men don't express their feelings
People who say that men aren't emotional have clearly never lived with a man whose bad mood seeped into every corner of the house, leaving everyone in the family on edge.
My dad is a good guy, but his bad moods conveyed with heavy, threatening silences, monosyllabic responses, and bursts of annoyance, had the power to make everyone else feel bad and slightly scared.
Despite this, my family often joked about how dad was the non-emotional, stoic man, forced to live with a coven of hysterical women — my mum, my two sisters, and me. Despite having empirical evidence to the contrary, we continued to maintain the myth that men do not feel or express their emotions.
The reality is that men's emotions are huge. They take up so much space in our homes and offices. In comments sections and public debates. Men's emotions create World Wars, black eyes, and tragically bad love songs.
I'm done pretending that men aren't emotional. So, how has this stereotype lasted for so long? and why is it so harmful?
A Successful Rebranding
The reason that men are considered less emotional is that they have successfully changed the narrative so that while crying is seen as a sign of feminine hysteria, anger is a sign of masculinity and strength.
As Claire Willet tweeted back in 2020:
"Honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the "more emotional" gender for like, EONS, because they've successfully rebranded anger as Not An Emotion."
This is one of those "oh wow" tweets, that makes you think, think twice, and keep on thinking as it dawns on you just how accurate it is.
Men 'aren't emotional', but they are the ones getting in fist fights in bars when someone looks at them funny.
Men 'aren't emotional', but they send death threats to women on the internet when they can't get a girlfriend.
Men 'aren't emotional', but they riot when their sports team loses a game.
Men 'aren't emotional', but when they murder their ex-wives and kids, the media describes it as a "crime of passion".
Anger has effectively become a proxy for all the other negative emotions men experience. They were taught not to cry but that it is okay to punch. The result is a less safe world.
Emotions without Intelligence
So clearly men don't lack emotions. What they often don't have is the self-awareness to know what they are feeling and why.
Negativity takes the form of a grey cloud of rage and grumpiness because many men are unable to look inside themselves and understand what is going on.
The emotional intelligence of girls is developed from a young age. Caregivers ask us if we are sad, scared, or happy, and we gain the ability to recognise what is going on in our minds. We are told not to hurt people's feelings, so we learn to empathise and think of how others might be experiencing an interaction. This is less common for boys, who are encouraged not to display fear or sadness and often are not expected to be considerate of others. They are told that men don't feel, and so they dismiss their feelings and never get acquainted with their own moods.
This leaves men with many emotions — they are humans, after all, with complex minds and life experiences — but little emotional intelligence with which to handle them.
Reliance on the Emotional Labor of Women
Men might struggle to name and recognise their emotions, but that doesn't mean they don't want to talk about them. In my experience, guys talk to their female friends extensively about their problems, their relationships, their families, and so on.
Men rely on their female friends to take care of their emotions. They unconsciously divide the world into three categories: men, whom they respect too much and are ashamed to show their emotions too. Women who they want to f*ck, whom they are trying to impress, and in front of whom they mask their real feelings. And the other women, whose function in society must be to nurture and mother them and to listen ad nauseam to their rants.
It is particularly exhausting to hear that "men don't talk about emotions" after you have listened to hours of this, given advice, and got no emotional support in return. In guy-girl friendships, emotional support often goes one way.
#NotAllMen or How Everything Has to Be About Them
Another reason that men think they don't have emotions is that their worldview has long been defined as the default. We have read so many books and watched so many films written by men. Our politics, businesses and news media are dominated by them. We see the men's perspective all the time.
Men are very used to their feelings being taken into account — so used to it, in fact, that there is a troubling tendency for them to make everything about themselves.
When women all around the world spoke up about being harassed, groped, and assaulted, some men's reaction was to get offended and post the hashtag #NotAllMen. This was hard proof that they considered their own emotions to be more real and valid than those of women.
Change, please …
The idea that men don't have feelings is a very common stereotype and one that is harmful to men, women, and society as a whole. It pushes men to channel their emotions into anger and violence instead of ugly crying and therapy. It is used to dismiss women's opinions, maintaining the fallacy of men's minds being more rational and ours being more emotional. It masks realities, like the emotional labour performed by women, the prime caretakers of men's emotions.
What men really lack is emotional intelligence, and the only way that can change is a societal shift toward educating our boys, and teaching them self-awareness and empathy.
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