Edit2: It’s a subjective perception I’m talking about. Are you offended? Why?
What’s the matter, why can’t men deal with me being sensitive and emotional? Is it because they struggle with me reminding them of having, too, emotions?
Edit: Do men think I’m weak when I show emotions? If so, why?? Why do women see it as a sign of strength when men are vulnerable, but men don’t seem to get it? Are they/are we dumb??
This is what is commonly referred to as “toxic masculinity”. That’s the crux of what they’re talking about. It’s not just that men are taught to be dangerous to those around them, it’s that we’re also taught to be hard and lonely Islands that seek no support.
It’s no way to live and it crushes you over time.
Not quite, I have a group of male friends who are very comfortable with being emotional with each other and I still prefer opening to women because they are much more concerned and able to deal with it, lot of men still don’t know what to do with it.
You’re still describing the effects of toxic masculinity, just the 2nd order effects rather than the first.
Why do you think a lot of men don’t know what to do with it? Why do you think a lot of men aren’t concerned?
It’s not some innate aspect of being a woman: it’s a suppressed aspect of being a human that society has pressed out of men.
They aren’t as used to talk about emotions and relationships so it’s easier to go with someone that is.
It’s no assumptions just facts
Yes. And the reason for that is toxic masculinity. That’s the point they were making. They were explaining the why, not the what.
I mean sure but if you want to look more in depth it’s not just toxic masculinity, there’s also toxic femininity involved most men have been hurt by their previous partner who they opened up to and their partner then used it against them or even ridiculed them in front of an audience. Or women around them mocked them for being emotional and crying
What you’re describing is still toxic masculinity and has absolutely nothing to do with toxic femininity. Men that have been hurt by their previous partners or ridiculed for being emotional, is toxic masculinity. This is because men are discouraged from expressing their emotions or seeking support, reinforcing the harmful stereotype that vulnerability is a sign of weakness. Men get hurt by women doing this because of the toxic view many men and women carry about masculinity and male gender roles.
Toxic femininity on the other hand, is a societal expectation placed on women to conform to traditional gender roles and stereotypes, like being passive, nurturing, and submissive.
Nope
Examples of Toxic Femininity
To identify toxic femininity, you need to know what to look out for to ensure they are not falling victim to toxic femininity guise as friendship or niceness by some women. The telltale signs include:
Slut-shaming and body-shaming – women who slut-shame or body shame others are toxic Talking over other people and belittling others, especially fellow women Making fun of another female to get the attention of a man. Shaming men for being too soft or having feminine traits that do not live up to societal expectations of what a man is. Passive aggression behavior can include patronizing behavior, fake niceties, and smiley faces after a harsh text. Sabotaging and backstabbing behavior like lying for their benefit, offering misleading advice, manipulating situations, and mocking others for their decisions. Resentment, jealousy, and bitterness towards others, especially fellow women, for their popularity, looks, and achievements Negative competitiveness with other women through dominance or sexuality
As opposed to masculinity. Look at Gilgamesh, Achelies, even the godfather of stoicism Marcus Arilius. Historically peak alpha males never muffled their emotions.
Every (good guy) male character in LoTR, especially Aragorn. All great examples of genuine masculinity.
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In my experience, as a man, this simply doesn’t happen.
Men are rejected by both men and women when they’re emotionally vulnerable.
Source: failed to complete suicide in 2014. Lost 95% of my friends, including ones that were active in an org that supposedly worked to prevent suicide.
I hear you. I’m struggling with my mental health daily since I was 19, decades ago. 0 friends. I didn’t have many before but lost the few I had once I went through a crisis.
Lesson learned: bottle it all up, definitely don’t bring it up in, well, any circumstances at all, and you’re golden. Struggling/weak? Garbage that’s only fit to be disposed of.
And that is today in our very “educated and evolved” West. If things were even worse decades ago I don’t even want to know.
The therapist is basically the safest person to bring it up to
Same in my experience
Show emotion, get beat down and ridiculed
I don’t think anyone said anything to me directly; they just ghosted me. I’d almost rather have the verbal and emotional beat down so that you know what’s happening.
Grown ups try to control who they reveal particular emotions to.
Generally, individuals of any gender would only reveal their sensitive side to very very close friends.
If someone doesn’t respond well to your display of emotion, you may have misread your relationship with them.
I agree that socialization is a big part of this tendency, as other commenters are saying. However, having experienced living with a testosterone dominant body and an estrogen dominant body, I’ve found that it was much harder for me to process other people’s emotions on T. While I would care about people and what they were expressing, I often would feel overloaded by strong emotions. On E I don’t notice that as much, and have a lot more patience and capacity to emotionally engage with others.
I’m sure this stuff varies a lot from person to person, and there isn’t one single factor that determines how men and women would typically behave. But in my own life there’s a pretty big hormonal component to this
What emotions are we talking about?
I only want to deal with some of men’s emotions. Sometimes I wanna hang out people for fun and not as their therapist. I find women a lot more gentle to receive that stuff too. There’s a lot of psychology involved.
Hit me up, if you need a male friend! Always down for a “pen” pal
Sounds like you hang out with childish “men” (boys) and emotionally intelligent women.
There have been plenty of times in my life where showing emotions to women was the wrong move. On the other hand, the friend of mine that I consider the most emotionally mature is a man.
Loaded question. Full of judgement, too.
I don’t understand how people are upvoting this comment. Granted, this is online land, but OP made himself vulnerable asking this question which takes …emotional maturity. If you think it’s a loaded question of full of judgment then it’s on you to explain why that is so.
And yeah, it’s a bit loaded and a bit judgy, but it’s also brief and inclusive.
Fair enough, it’s a subjective perception that I asked about
The answer to your subjective perception question then is… it’s probably reinforced by the people you associate with.
When I was young, most of my friends were girls because the guys were all trying to prove how manly they were. It’s a thing of emotional maturity. The trouble is that many guys don’t emotionally mature until after they’ve left school, and by that point they’re surrounded by other emotionally stunted men in the workplace and unhealthy behaviours are reinforced.
But that’s a stereotype too and depends on what they’re doing in the workforce.
For me, it meant that I have fewer man friends than woman friends, but the relationships are stronger with the ones I do have.
Plenty of men can deal with this, and plenty of women can’t. It’s not helpful to see this as a gender thing, you’ll only feel more alienated. You might want to seek out some new social connections?
Ignoring strong correlations because “not all” is less helpful.
Most men, in western society, have issues with expressing emotions other than anger. I’m certain I could find studies as proof, but don’t we all already know this to be true?
We do. Isn’t there currently an epidemic of men having to deal with a slew of mental health issues, not knowing what to do/how to deal with it?
Yeah. That.
Yeah. Provide studies.
Here’s one that cites multiple others right in the intro.
I picked the first three results from your search and they don’t support your argument at all. They even call it out as a stereotype (which it is).
Male leaders received lower effectiveness ratings when expressing sadness compared to neutrality, while female leaders received lower ratings when expressing either sadness or anger.
So sadness for leaders is neither ok for women or men.
Design: Questionnaires were administered to 41 women and 41 men using a cross-sectional study design.
Rather small sample size and the conclusion was very cautiously worded … so no facts that support your theory.
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/135910703322370851
The analysis of emoticon (emotional icon) use in online newsgroups appears to reinforce the stereotype of the emotional female and the inexpressive male until further examination suggests otherwise. The most interesting finding of this study is illustrated by the pattern of change that develops for both genders when they move from a predominantly same gender newsgroup to a mixed-gender newsgroup. The changes that take place in emoticon use when moving from same-gender to mixed-gender newsgroups indicate that rather than the emotional expression of females being silenced or muted by male encoding of emoticons, males adopt the female standard of expressing more emotion. Furthermore, women have added dimensions including solidarity, support, assertion of positive feelings, and thanks, which were absent from the male-created definition of emoticons and their use.
No proof for your theory either.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/10949310050191809
I may come back and review some more of the literature, because it really is an interesting topic.
Your last citation there actually seems relevant to OP, since they’re asking about this difference in how they feel around other men vs in mixed groups.
It would be useful to know if there are indeed more studies like this that maybe show that the stereotype (which aren’t inherently wrong or negative) is too vague, and i would like to know the specifics, maybe the stereotype only holds in male-dominant spaces. Or (and I think I’ve read this) when males are primed to act more masculine.
You missed my point. I’m ignoring nothing, I’m suggesting OP seek out men who will be supportive, because they’re not hard to find.
I’m certain I could find studies as proof, but don’t we all already know this to be true?
I think one take might be that the cause might be based out of a fear of being perceived as being gay. I mean you have generations of men who faced everything from hanging, to chemical castration to prison sentences for being gay. Policing expression of things like any sign of physical signs of affection or “womanly” displays of emotional connection put men in physical danger. That generational trauma of emotional amputation for preservation of life doesn’t go away in a day.
Internally a lot of guys still have their guards up because that was the model of behaviour their fathers and male community members have because their Dads were like that so even if the underlying cause isn’t known the behaviour seems more “normal”. It’s what the people you saw as grown ups did and what they trained you to emulate to be like them. Under those circumstances everything else becomes the deviation because it feels counter to what you were taught or are mirroring. Fighting that feeling of oddness requires an act of conscious will. A lot of people still look at being gay or femme is a failure state. A weakness of moral character… because it is a rejection of internalized homophobia and misogyny and rejecting the notion that these things are deviant is seen as an endorsement. Compulsory straightness was and is a pretty facist system and all facist systems require a “failure state” to demonize. You don’t want to be the target of violence so you enact the violence asked of you to prove you aren’t one of the failures.
These systems self perpetuate by default.
Men don’t talk face to face; they talk shoulder to shoulder. Not sure why you expect everyone else to “confront their feelings” with you.
I’m honest, I don’t understand that analogy.
Yes, I think so. It’s been my experience that when you show a vulnerability or do something that causes people to confront a hidden little part of themselves, people who can’t deal with their repressed emotions around that thing tend to get resentful and sometimes react in really immature ways. Internally, they might think things like “You’re CRYING? But I don’t feel like I get to cry! I never get a chance to show my emotions! Why should YOU?” And then externally, what comes out of their mouth is wild shit like “pull yourself together” or “man up”. This also happens with other modes of self expression but I think in terms of emotion and masculinity it is particularly awful. Women are more likely to have experienced the harmful effects of strict gender roles, and generally want to make sure men feel supported in the face of that, because it (patriarchy) hurts us all.
Women are also often socialized to know how to react and how to help when people get upset, which can lead to some bleakly unfair family situations, but in contrast to men who might not have that skill set or that lifetime of practice with those types of social situations, they’re going to respond very differently. It is absolutely a skill to be able to cope with others’ feelings, and that skill is not taught to children evenly.
In my experience, this isn’t a gendered distinction - but rather just down to the individual person.
Some of my closest friends that are both men and women alike are friends I consider “letting my guard down” around. The same applies in the opposite direction, where I have friends (but generally more on the distant friend / acquaintance side) men and women alike that I have to be a bit more guarded around.
And while I can’t comment on this specifically because I of course don’t know you and as such have no frame of reference, from what I’ve experienced in the past and seen others go through, is that a lot of times it’s how you bring it up. If it seems more forceful, it’s going to have a higher chance to not land well with people (of any gender).
Edit: Another thing worthwhile to note, is that people have different ways of expressing emotional acceptance. For example, my grandfather would never turn me, or anyone away for expressing their emotions. But, he’s more of a silent listener, and doesn’t usually comment on it - but I know that he is still accepting of my emotions the few times that I bring it up. It’s very similar to the concept of love languages, if you’ve ever heard that. It’s very possible that the men in your life are more the silent listener type.
Obligatory “nOt ALl MeN”
I’m a dude and I’m fine with my guy friends showing emotion. Very few do. We’re socially taught it’s weird, but it’s not.
Get yourself a guy friend you can hug.
Yeah … you’re right 🙈
problem is though
Past sexual abuse makes it physically icky (I’m straight!!)
Yeah, that’s a concern. But these types of guys typically understand consent, so will respect that.
