I participated in men's work, not specifically the ManKind Project but a closely related organization. I personally found it helpful doing weekly check-ins and having people holding me accountable to my goals.
Unfortunately, the stigma regarding men sharing feelings is prevalent in western society, and it's not only the men causing it. When I told several female friends about the work they did, their response was: "Are they gay?"
Our society will always value men who are confident, this is so much deeper to me than being scared to share your feelings because “it’s gay”. Women are attracted to confidence, employers reward confidence, hiring managers are impressed by confidence. Vulnerability and weakness are just not rewarded for men or women, but especially for men.
Confidence and vulnerability aren't opposites. The confidence that comes from going through vulnerability and coming out stronger is worth more than the facade style of confidence, which covers unprocessed weakness.
I want to push back on your assertion that vulnerability is inherently equivalent to weakness. Our society currently says it is, but I could equally imagine a future in which being vulnerable and honest about your feelings is seen as a feat of strength and courage -- because it DOES take a lot of courage, and even confidence, to be open and honest about your feelings.
I don’t really believe this. I know some people who I value less specifically because they are overly confident relative to their abilities. I expect them to play social bluffs to play up what they know how to do (or pretend to know things they don’t), manipulate people if they can awe them and try to intercept credit for their work without giving much of their own effort, etc. They basically just cause a huge amount of trouble and damage the productivity of those around them. Meanwhile I know people of roughly comparable ability who I have a pretty good opinion of.
If someone keeps confidently asserting that 1+1=3 and then tries to act like he’s my superior, my conclusion is generally that he’s just a moron or is deluding himself.
I had a typo above and wrote 1+1=2 but I’ve had the same situation: someone who is of normal competence keeps repeating things pretty much everyone in the room knows over and over and thinks he’s leading you forward.
Most people believe that vulnerability is a weakness and a disadvantage but this is demonstrably untrue. Showing vulnerability is a way to develop rapport and connection with other people. Here is a great example using Jennifer Lawrence who is particularly good at this:
There are definitely caveats to this. It has to be done a certain way. It works better when you already have some status. And I'd absolutely agree that society lets women express more vulnerability than men. In a hypermasculine environment like a group of socially clueless 20something males at a tech company, you will probably want to show vulnerability less often.
But with the general population and normal people, it's really fine and even good to show some vulnerability, just do it in the right context.
I've found that depends on which generation you're interacting with. Millenials seem far more able to say "I love you" to people that they love outside of their immediate biological family. It's not just the women, either. Men are able to express their feelings to other men in a non-romantic way. Absent is the toxic homophobia that has so colored previous generations.
Hell, their recognition of non-binary genders, preferred pronouns, and a singular 'they' pronoun, speaks volumes as to how much ideas around gender and masculinity has changed. Not that long ago, the idea that a person's gender didn't fit neatly into one of two boxes was unthinkinable.
Maybe you would be surprised to learn that previous generations were also quite free with their love. They just expressed it differently and of course, having grown older, now understand that not everyone who says "I love you" is being emotionally transparent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you were around for any previous generations. Perhaps you will understand when you get older and watch the next generation talk about how everything we (every previous generation) have done and are doing is a broken, shitty mess, and how they have it all figured out. This is how every generation plays out.
Openness has gone down over time imho. Too many unbroachable subjects and kneejerkers. I somehow observed life and came to the opposite conclusion as you did. Curious. Whats a big world we live in.
Before people had a firm idea of homosexuality, men did show affection for other men as well.
It went like this: it is ok to hold hands with a man (because no one will think you are gay/because no one thinks anyone is gay) -> it is not ok to hold hands (because people will think you are gay) -> it is ok to hold hands (because it would not be a problem if you were gay)
When I told several female friends about the work they did, their response was: "Are they gay?"
It's funny. From the days of chivalry all the way to the modern patriarchy, men's behaviours have been conditioned by one overriding factor: what will impress women? I don't see that evaporating overnight. Men suppress the emotions for the simple reason that women have demonstrated a preference for men that do that, and this is simply an example of that being made explicit. You could say "this is how the patriarchy harms men!". But it wasn't men who chose it to be this way.
12th or 13th century chivalrous poetry from South of France was still full of feelings and what have you, and a little earlier the Arthur-related stories were not void of feelings either. I personally blame the “Protestant ethic”, for lack of a better name, which started culturally imposing itself starting with the mid-1600s in England and present-day Netherlands (in the early 1600s a guy like Shakespeare was still not afraid to share his feelings in his Sonnets).
When you say "male emotions," I feel a bit unsure which emotions you mean. Sadness? Anger? Confusion? Pride? I'm not sure if there is a culture, indigenous or not, that values the expression of all emotions, and if it does, not sure if the people in the culture walk the talk, so to say. I take it back, I think many religions seem to value the expression of most emotions, especially Buddhism, at least in theory, and yet I don't know how many people achieve that in practice. I keep trying and it really really challenges me lol.
I’ve been in Bali recently, and although it’s still a very patriarchal society, I’ve had a distinct sense that masculinity is more fluid than in — say — Thailand, which might feel like it should be similar. There are Balinese guys with flowers in their hair, and I’ve seen none of the aggression that occasionally raises its head in Thailand.
You can have emotionless warriors or you can have emotional pacifists. You might even have emotional warriors, but emotionless pacifists is a hard sell.
If the State monopolizes violence to the point that we can’t hash things out with our fists, and there’s no room in our society to emotionally vent, then what’s left? It’s not like violence disappeared from society, it just takes different forms when suppressed.
To your point, that same stigma about LGBT guys being weak, feminine, and emotional is one of the many factors that stops a lot of people from coming out too.
Yeah, I'm glad you pointed out that it's not just us men pressuring each other to speak/feel in certain ways. I think so many of us reinforce the emotional code on men and on each other. I'm guilty of doing it as well.
While a woman may have told me "don't cry (or be sad)," "don't be a baby (or express helplessness)," "don't be lazy (or feel too relaxed)," or "stop being so jealous," I have also told people "don't worry," "relax (or don't feel stressed)," "chill out (don't be angry)," and others.
I try as much as I can to let people feel whatever they are feeling, annnnnd I'm still human and project a lot of my cultural expectations on others and myself. Really grateful to have this space on HN for this conversation and to further the conversation :-D
There's a part in Brene Browns "Daring Greatly" where a guy says that his wife and daughter would rather he die on his horse than to fall off. Brown comes back with a very impractical response to the effect of "well then they have work to do too".
I have few male friends I can share feelings with and most of the females I've dealt with just don't want this while wishing for men to be more sensible.
One thing I find fascinating about humans is that we are so compulsively cultural that we will actively propagate cultural practices that are harmful even to ourselves. When you are young, you absorb whatever culture is around you completely uncritically, and then you immediately turn around and start broadcasting to the next generation.
Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but it's really hard to uproot a norm or more once it's settled in, even if it's one that causes you personal pain.
> Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but it's really hard to uproot a norm or more once it's settled in, even if it's one that causes you personal pain.
Terence McKenna lectured on this at length. Here are some apropos quotations:
"As a global civilization, we can no longer afford the luxury of an unconscious mind. When you can pull down the fusion processes that light the stars on the cities of your enemies, when you can sequence DNA, when you can map the heart of the atom, then it is entirely inappropriate to have an unconscious mind, because the power that is given onto you is a kind of god-like Promethean power. So how can we switch on the lights on our animal nature…? I think it is very simple: we have to de-condition ourselves from culture. We are sick, we require medical intervention… into what is a galloping, cancerous state of neurosis - the growth and spread of ego. Ego is like a calcareous growth in the psyche of human beings, and if it is not treated, it creates the kind of society that we have. A society based on hierarchy, male dominance, accumulation of physical goods,suppression of the weak by the strong… This is why the psychedelics are so socially sensitive, because they dissolve de-conditioning. Every culture is a scam. Every culture is a lie. A shell game, run by weasels, for the amusement of rubes. If you do not want to be a weasel or a rube, then you need to inform yourself of how the shell game works, and what lies beyond the carnival midway of civilized values. And the way to do that is to go back to the plants, to the original gnosis."
"Culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with closure, to force closure. That is why cultural trips are so bizarre; why they don't make sense to anybody but the Witoto, or the Guaraní, or the Americans, or the Japanese. If you are not inside a culture, it seems crazy. Cultures do not make sense because they are not trying to make sense. What they are trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human being, who is living in the light of closure, a more manipulable, a more malleable, a lesser thing… The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That is the honest position given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body,in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various means of closure that are around,psychedelics do that. That is why they are so politically controversial and potent, because more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake, they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning."
Culture has a political element. Creating a new culture or building an authority over one would be as difficult as any political movement. Subcultures are usually built around selling a product where there's plenty of incentive to put the effort in to make it happen.
I think the young execute on a unique position to see the culture of their elders and actively choose to fill spots where it could be improved for their own benefit and drop customs that are no longer worth it.
> Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but it's really hard to uproot a norm or more once it's settled in, even if it's one that causes you personal pain.
I don’t know if I believe this in general. Certainly we are happy to utterly change our lifestyles whenever a convenient new technology comes about. How much have smart phones or social media changed us culturally in the spans of a couple decades? If culture can change quickly over convenience, surely actual pain would drive it to change even faster. It seems that those “hard to change” cultural aspects are actually _useful_ in some way, and therefore they survive.
I'm a little confused, who are the they you are referring to? People are hired on to perform tasks in return for remuneration and feelings should be reserved for outside the job. Getting emotionally involved with ones co-workers is a recipe for disaster. If you're ever invited to a workshop on diversity, don't go. James Damore and Professor Alessandro Strumia would know why.
I'm a man who has focused on and has been building tools to get better at expressing my emotions since 2012, including an app called iFeelio, in which I answered the question "how do I feel" over 4,000 times across 4 years and a class called Emotional Self-Defense, which I've run in the US, Europe, and Africa. I have realized and re-realized many things along the way.
One thing I've seen is that each culture seems to have rules about which emotions one is allowed to express and not allowed to express, based on the specific contexts. We often say that men aren't allowed to express our emotions, but I don't think that's the case. We men (in the US) are often allowed to express anger, confidence, feelings of triumph, horniness (maybe), calmness, and maybe even excitement. We're often not allowed to express tenderness, sadness, confusion, uncertainty, fury, etc. And funny enough, when watching our favorite sports team, we're pretty much allowed to express all of the emotions above and more. On the other hand, in the workplace, we're not allowed to really express much at all.
Women may have a different list, as well as people from the Midwest or California, those born in the 60s, digital natives, engineers, or really any different culture or sub-culture.
That being said, I'm glad to see programs like MKP and Evryman providing the place, and moreover, the permission, to express all of the emotions. (Save a Warrior is one I recommend for military vets—I was a witness on one of the programs and it really helped to open my heart and the hearts of the other guys.)
I'd love to chat with anyone on here about this, either in the comments or on Twitter, Telegram, keybase, or whatever people on HN use these days. Check my HN profile for those usernames.
Thanks for your comment, it's cool of you to share your journey with us. Unfortunately iFeelio on Android doesn't seem to work well anymore, if at all... :-(
Edit: Moodflow seems like it could be good so I'll try that. Just in case this helps others.
Yeah, ironically using the app, I realized that coding made me quite frustrated and then my hard drive failed in 2015 or something and I lost the most current version of the apps on both Android and iOS :-/
That being said, I have been thinking about how to get it fixed and even develop v2.0, possibly through open-sourcing it. Do you think you or someone else you know might be interested in that?
In the meantime, the magic sauce is really nothing too complicated...I used a note app on Android before developing iFeelio and it worked pretty good.
I would open up the note pad, type down the date, time, 1-3 comma-separated words for emotion, and then 1-2 short sentences about how I was feeling. Similar to an I-statement from NVC.
An example would be:
2019-09-28...01:09...grateful, tired...just checked HN and saw that a few people replied to my comments, and it's also 1am so maybe I should go to bed soon.
I made the app mostly because I wanted to enter the date/time automatically, password protect it, and create some ways for me to sort/filter/search previous entries.
You'll have to keep running it over the next 4-8 years to filter out the short term cultural changes. The expression of sadness will likely ramp up from it's locked up baseline now to 2024.
Whats wrong with stoicism. Feelings are fleeting in general didn't lead me to positive places. I think we should put a high value on people that can handle their own problems.
I've participated in some of this work and agree that having feeling-sharing be the top line item is misleading. Feelings are involved, but the core of it is to face what one has been avoiding, in order to become stronger and grow. There's plenty of room for stoicism in that.
The way to overcome pain is to acknowledge and include it instead of denying it. The difference is huge, and most of us need help to get there—personally contactful help, not idea help. I found it pretty liberating to be able to get such help from other men, in a group no less. The point is not to become a gushy feeling-sharer or a sensitive new-age male. It is to no longer be governed by unconscious feelings and the wounds of early experience.
The organizations that practice this work are not super clear about that distinction, which I suspect limits their appeal to many men. I went because of a friend I respect, who in turn went because of a friend he respects. Had either of us only read an article like this, I doubt we'd have been interested. Its subtle ironizing, which approaches belittling ("chastened menfolk", "There, there"), would have turned me off. The photos would have turned me off too, and I've sat in a lot of workshops (though usually with few men and many women).
Edit: an interesting thing to me was the gap between practice and theory. Even though there were parts of the theory behind that work which I didn't necessarily find appealing, I met quite a few men there who struck me as having a kind of integrated masculinity (maybe not the best phrase, but it's hard to find words for these qualities). They seemed strong and open at the same time. I found myself admiring them and wanting to be more like that myself. None of this had much to do with expressing feelings or being emotional; I would use the word presence instead. They maybe even seemed a bit less emotional than most men I meet—more able to take in what is happening without being reactive.
So I would say the theory doesn't work as well as the practice. You barely ever get that! usually it's the other way around.
This is stoicism though. To process things instead of holding them inside, bottling them up, or putting them off such that they salt our enjoyment of life. However there's a social component of this feelings-sharing which is the subtext of the parent comment. Not all issues need to be shared, and in fact it's a kind of emotional vampirism to prioritize sharing emotional context without focusing on the explicit purpose of sharing to process and confront the issue.
>The way to overcome pain is to acknowledge and include it instead of denying it.
Publicly? It's one thing to be denial, it's another to acknowledge it to yourself but still elect not to engage in a public display of this. The strongest men I've ever met were not in denial of their emotional state but didn't need to engage in public displays like those listed in the article.
I agree. I find that the healthiest people in my life don't seem to be the types prone to endless rumination.
I think this is where meditation (and stoicism) deviates from some types of psychotherapy and most support groups. Meditation teaches you to look at feelings dispassionately, which helps you lessen their power. This is very different than treating each emotion as if it is "correct" and in need of resolution via lots of introspection.
I thought that the way "introspection" is supposed to work was as a way of asking oneself: "wait, why am I feeling this emotion in the first place? Where does it bottom out, so to say?" Because that in turn tells you what strings to pull at in order to "resolve" the emotion in a comprehensive way. While this cannot be done without regarding the emotion as at least putatively "correct", I'd say that it's far from incompatible with a Stoicism-inspired approach, properly understood.
>I find that the healthiest people in my life don't seem to be the types prone to endless rumination.
Rumination is unhealthy. And believe it or not, one of the antidotes to it is being able to communicate ones feelings effectively. In my experience, more expressive people tend not to suffer ruminating thoughts.
Seneca said in his third letter to Lucilius, "Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself." I have one friend with whom I'll speak this boldly--some men have no-one. (I also think more women are in this position than society may assume)
I find that the extent to which men (and to a lesser extent, women) have this support varies between secular and religious (or at least Christian) communities. Christianity (as I’ve experienced it, anyway) promotes sharing feelings—for example, many churches have some notion of small groups or community groups in which (among many other things) people share things they struggle with and are supported and prayed for by others.
Stoicism is not about suppressing feelings though, it is about realizing that the ones you have are inconsequential and should not control you. But while you are trying to rein them in, the solution is not to simply bear them in silence. If you have someone who can help you on the path to equanimity, you should feel free to share feelings with them.
Its fine to be stoic and self-reliant, the problem is that occasionally even a stoic man needs to voice concerns, and he is then looked down upon by his peers for doing so. This is why having an unbiased, third-party therapist to just listen can be so healthy.
I grew up west coast, spent a lot of time with people who I could "share my problems" with. It taught me to be pathetic when I'm down, to really reach for it. I don't like who I was when that was an effective means of attention.
I really wish the response would have been "You're having a hard time coping with the harshness of reality and acting immature, do your best to get it together soon."
>I think we should put a high value on people that can handle their own problems.
Try as I might, I have no idea what this has to do with feelings. Are you making an assumption that people who acknowledge or express their feelings are not handling problems?
And of course, as others have pointed out, stoicism doesn't suggest not pondering over feelings.
There's a subtle line between repressing and ruminating.
This may be colored by my experience of mental illness, but generally I've learned/grown more from pondering and sorting out feelings in the past rather than right now. It's easy to fall into a trap of "worshipping your pain" (or your hypomanic euphoria for that matter).
OTOH I'm very appreciative of the dispassionate attitude encouraged by stoicism and meditation, etc. -- but that kind of wisdom is acquired with work, like building muscle. "You should lift heavy things!" is both an interesting aspirational model and dangerous advice if it isn't culturally obvious that you can get hurt lifting heavy things while not in shape.
(Edit: stoicism/meditation etc. are more or less like "second-order repression": as you acknowledge your fingertips or your breath, you acknowledge that you have feelings in order to theoretically understand them (locus of control/illusion of self). The danger is that letting go of first-order repression, you can let yourself have feelings about your feelings -- feeling good about feeling miserable would be the common type.)
IMO, not being suicidal is far more being in denial than the other way around. Or, in the very least, thinking that life is some gift. It totally could be, but not like this.
I generally take "[h]andling your own problems" to mean taking responsibility for your own problems.
I'm seeing a lot of agreement in this thread, though. Healthy, deep relationships with family and close friends are important to keep you grounded, and therapy can help everyone. Many seemingly desirable positions of status that men and women strive for involve incredible amounts of stress, and people naturally have differing levels of stress tolerance, so at some point self-knowledge becomes very valuable. Having good people around you is a great way to build that self-knowledge.
Are you going to work? Are you reasonably content? Then you are handling your problems.
Some people really seem to want men to be very emotional and assume something is wrong if they don't appear to be showing strong emotions. Often, they're just fine, and there's no there there.
If you keep picking at them, you'll probably generate some emotions, however.
> "Handling your own problems" a lot of the time means "making other people responsible for my emotional well being."
This is new to me. Making other people responsible for my emotional well-being is being dependent on other people for our own happiness. Stoicism does not suggest that you do this, on the contrary.
Stoicism as a personal philosophy or cultural norm? For the former, I’d say nothing. But for the later I think it’s unfortunate. There are many ways to live a life and many philosophies. Stoicism may work for you, but maybe the next guy needs a good cry without getting harassed for it.
Sharing your feelings doesn't really mean breaking down crying when anything remotely bad happens to you in life. It can just be talking frankly and openly about challenges you face in your life. Is that at odds with being stoic?
Not at all. I'd say the motivation for talking things through lies on a spectrum between brainstorming and bitching, and people have a need for both, just be aware of which one you're doing. A complaint can be stoic.
Indeed. For me, being stoic is the only way. Crying about problems does nothing so why do anything at all? We all have the power to choose to be the best person we can be given our circumstances. That is what I try to do every day.
For me, men who need to share their feelings are weak. This is what women do. But we can't all be women. Men need to learn to enjoy their advantages: superior strength, speed, and resilience, but accept that problems won't just go away if you cry about them. Either solve the problem or accept it and don't give it another precious moment's thought.
I think we're starting to hit a critical moment with this.
As men we have an unbelievable amount of expectation on our reactions, communication, behavior, past behavior, and others behavior. (Their friends and their partners)
On top of all of this: Men spaces have been mostly eliminated.
Same goes for virtually any space that used to be male-only. It's become socially unacceptable (and often illegal) to exclude females from anything, while it's still perfectly OK to exclude males.
That's mostly it being a victim of its own success; here in Canada, Scouts long held a better reputation than Guides. Something fundamentally different about how the organizations and parental leadership approached the kids, I suspect.
Its not illegal to have a private club with membership rules that exclude women. There are still several golf clubs that do so. In fact in the US its not even illegal to openly discriminate in hiring as long as the business has less 14 employees. In California that number goes down to 5 employees and local laws may be stricter still.
I understand the feeling but I think this is too zero-sum. You know who has the most positive reactions by far to men doing healing work in men-only circles? Their wives/girlfriends. Not because the men somehow become more 'feminine' or lose power, but usually because they get something that they badly needed and were stuck about for a long time.
As a group men are our own worse enemy. We aren't fearful of or controlled by women. It is other men that choose to align themselves closer to women's beliefs at the active detriment of healthy male attitudes and behaviours that force other men to fall in line.
Men aren't obligated or motivated to open up men only social groups until other men start to take issue with them (and usually for their own self interest).
Gentlemen clubs, country clubs, bars (although I don't think it should have been single gender), other than this.. I can't name many of the other ones. They were mostly gone by the time I became an adult.
Anyways, I have heard of discrimination that men have faced when trying to create "safe"/support groups that were men only.
However, MAN spaces are everywhere, Japan especially is having great success creating spaces that are exclusively occupied by a single man for weeks, and sometimes years at a time.
Having gone through this retreat (the NWTA) with the MKP, I can easily point to it as the most legitimate and profound event I've had/attended in my life. Its important to take in context, I'm in my mid 30s, and was emotionally ready for the messages and teachings. Doing the work in a safe space was nothing short of life changing. In my work life, personal life, and love life. And most of all for my own quality of life.
For anyone who is actually interested, I would recommend the book Iron John, by Robert Bly (https://www.amazon.com/Iron-John-Book-about-Men/dp/030682426...). The first chapter is usually assigned reading before attending the NWTA, but when read with an open mind I found the entire book to be profound. Profound isnt the best word, but I experienced the content as if I personally was being spoken to through the pages; my problems, my struggles and my victories. Spoken to with support, compassion and understanding. I re-read it every year.
Beyond sharing that however, seeing how much vitriolic hyperbole is being thrown around within 2h of posting, I dont feel it productive to share anymore. You might say that the vulnerability it requires of a man to speak to other men (and women!) who are openly hostile (and often deliberately misunderstanding) about this topic can be nothing short of herculean.
I participated in a Bly-based "New Warrior Training" and men's group in the mid 80s. It helped me work through a seriously damaged childhood. And generally to be emotionally present, with more range than manic/angry/depressed. I also did lots of est/Landmark work, complemented it well, and helped me learn to be more stoic.
They have! I went through it in 2017, and the unfolding and cascade of realizations and perspective shifts have not only flipped my life (for the best), but also instilled permanent changes in how i participate in communities, interact with people, and support the ones I care about.
When you think of the typical archetype for men learning to cope with emotion, it's generally by overcoming personal hardship or difficult challenges through perseverance. But we see where this fails in situations where you have no control such as in a warzone, as there is no real way to overcome. Maybe addressing emotions directly, after the fact as it were, culturally signifies that the individual failed to overcome the situation from which the pain originated, and since there is a huge association in Western culture between masculinity and self competence, the stigma is now against an individual's entire masculinity.
Am I the only one who sees men sharing their feelings all the time? To me it seems like men simply process things differently than women, so women and the feminized psychiatry field don't recognize it's happening.
We live in an age where men are being villainized at every turn, and this is just another way men are being told they don't measure up... because they aren't sharing in a way that women recognize. With all due deference to my trans friends, men are not simply women with penises.
> because they aren't sharing in a way that women recognize
Agreed. The conspiracy theory part of me wonders if this is a natural way of challenging and verifying perceived strength, thus the trope of a wife accusing the husband of not talking about his feelings enough.
Not to say that's the only time it happens (I've asked my wife basically just this), but I think part of being human is to want a stable, emotional foundation so to speak. And once we've tested and verified a leader/friend/family member who appears to be strong in ways we are not we then rely on them to help us in that regard.
Every social issue has islands where it's nonexistent, islands where it's bad, and islands in-between. Groups alleging unfair treatment are usually both right and wrong depending on where you look, for example there are places where everybody is racist and places where nobody is. By analogy, a person lucky enough to live somewhere that nobody was racist would probably not see any point for affirmative action. Does the NYT have a birds-eye view that can see every island? No, absolutely not, their articles are all written by individual people with normal human-sized social networks. But stories like these can provide some insight as to what other people's lives are like.
Men aren't sharing feelings in a way I understand most of the time, and I'm one of them. I could never get my friends to truly open up unless it was a one on one conversation.
That's not how men process things. Men process things by trying to eliminate perceived unnecessary information and take action. Women are more inclined to want to sit down and discuss all the details of whatever is going on, many of those details the man would not perceive as useful.
This is the age old men vs women problem where women feel like men don't want to talk about problems/feelings and men feel like women just want to blabber on without ever solving anything.
As a man, I agree sharing emotions is important. Too many males in society don't have someone to cry with or listen to their problems.
On the other hand, I do worry about "emotional masturbation". Simply put, sometimes we indulge ourselves in sadness/fear/anger because it makes us feel something and feeling something is better/more exhilarating/exciting than feeling nothing at all.
For example, I have some insecurities. Sometimes I feel like talking about them may be pro-actively bad because I am indulging myself and making my insecurities occupy more mental space/brain power.
Talking about emotions is just one part of it. Society in general needs to be better educated and equipped with mental health tools. Things like cognitive behavioural therapy, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, transactional analysis are all ways to understand and deal with our emotions.
It's no good just blurting out whatever it is you're feeling and like you say, turn it into a masturbatory indulgence, but we should still promote talking about out feelings because suppressing them is no better than having an emotional wank.
This might be one of the issues of our times: men unable to talk about their feelings, unable to maybe even care about themselves because we learned we shouldn’t and we are afraid how we are seen if we do.
Sometimes beeing strong means to become vulnerable.
Yet the needs exist, are often projected onto others (partners, co-workers, kids, whole countries, etc) and then action is taken to try to get /them/ to meet needs that one doesn't even know they have. At best, this tends to be frustrating, at worst...well we can all look up the stats on violence perpetuated by people raised as men in the West versus people not raised as men.
It is a legitimate question. I feel that way, because as a society we are in a state of transformation right now.
By pure rational thought many young men have accepted to treat women like equal human beeings, just as many women have understood that the traditional division of gender roles might not fit all social encounters.
The issue is, that understanding and doing are two seperate things and switching between the old and the new paradigma when it fits us seems to be common place.
So many men end up getting the worst of both worlds: they are not the strong leader of the family any more, but they were still raised in a way to hide their feelings, just like many women are expected to be strong while they might not always have been raised in that way.
The thing we aim for as a society here is defintly worth it (I could experience for myself how amazing a relationship of equals between man and woman can be), but there are many people who struggle with this and it leads to all kind of societal side effects like depression, suicide, drug abuse and violence.
To be fair in times when the man had to be strong this was also a problem, because there are always people who simply don’t fit the role society wants them to take and if you force them into it bad things happen.
Communicating your own feelings is important for mental health. Anyone who struggles with this: get help. Write letters to a person that you never send — writing will help you to think and reflect.
I know it sounds unlikely, and it may even be unbelievable, but I suspect there could be men with emotions posting comments on Hacker News. Not me of course, that would be ridiculous.
I don't think it is about appearance. It is about dialogue and communication. If you want to really talk about things that affect you and your life, these things will quite often be topics you struggle to openly speak about.
I talk about topics that are so hard to talk about that people lie to themselves about it. Things that you don't want to be real are things you try to hide and emotions that don't fit your role in society are part of this.
Becoming vulnerable is the price you have to pay to talk about these kind of topics. And if it happens that you look weak as a side effect you have to pull through it. But this is not about looks, this is about beeing able to interface with the world around you and exposing your true self is the price you have to pay for meaningful conversation.
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Unfortunately, the stigma regarding men sharing feelings is prevalent in western society, and it's not only the men causing it. When I told several female friends about the work they did, their response was: "Are they gay?"
If someone keeps confidently asserting that 1+1=3 and then tries to act like he’s my superior, my conclusion is generally that he’s just a moron or is deluding himself.
I had a typo above and wrote 1+1=2 but I’ve had the same situation: someone who is of normal competence keeps repeating things pretty much everyone in the room knows over and over and thinks he’s leading you forward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btud-zsdmk4
There are definitely caveats to this. It has to be done a certain way. It works better when you already have some status. And I'd absolutely agree that society lets women express more vulnerability than men. In a hypermasculine environment like a group of socially clueless 20something males at a tech company, you will probably want to show vulnerability less often.
But with the general population and normal people, it's really fine and even good to show some vulnerability, just do it in the right context.
Hell, their recognition of non-binary genders, preferred pronouns, and a singular 'they' pronoun, speaks volumes as to how much ideas around gender and masculinity has changed. Not that long ago, the idea that a person's gender didn't fit neatly into one of two boxes was unthinkinable.
It went like this: it is ok to hold hands with a man (because no one will think you are gay/because no one thinks anyone is gay) -> it is not ok to hold hands (because people will think you are gay) -> it is ok to hold hands (because it would not be a problem if you were gay)
and the last step is still ongoing...
It's funny. From the days of chivalry all the way to the modern patriarchy, men's behaviours have been conditioned by one overriding factor: what will impress women? I don't see that evaporating overnight. Men suppress the emotions for the simple reason that women have demonstrated a preference for men that do that, and this is simply an example of that being made explicit. You could say "this is how the patriarchy harms men!". But it wasn't men who chose it to be this way.
EDIT added 'modern'.
As I think about Asia and Africa, I’m drawing a blank on this. But I’d be happy to be shown wrong.
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If the State monopolizes violence to the point that we can’t hash things out with our fists, and there’s no room in our society to emotionally vent, then what’s left? It’s not like violence disappeared from society, it just takes different forms when suppressed.
The LGBT members that don't have those characteristics you would never know they were LGBT.
While a woman may have told me "don't cry (or be sad)," "don't be a baby (or express helplessness)," "don't be lazy (or feel too relaxed)," or "stop being so jealous," I have also told people "don't worry," "relax (or don't feel stressed)," "chill out (don't be angry)," and others.
I try as much as I can to let people feel whatever they are feeling, annnnnd I'm still human and project a lot of my cultural expectations on others and myself. Really grateful to have this space on HN for this conversation and to further the conversation :-D
The polite response is something like: "I hear that as shaming, and it offends me."
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I have few male friends I can share feelings with and most of the females I've dealt with just don't want this while wishing for men to be more sensible.
One thing I find fascinating about humans is that we are so compulsively cultural that we will actively propagate cultural practices that are harmful even to ourselves. When you are young, you absorb whatever culture is around you completely uncritically, and then you immediately turn around and start broadcasting to the next generation.
Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but it's really hard to uproot a norm or more once it's settled in, even if it's one that causes you personal pain.
Terence McKenna lectured on this at length. Here are some apropos quotations:
"As a global civilization, we can no longer afford the luxury of an unconscious mind. When you can pull down the fusion processes that light the stars on the cities of your enemies, when you can sequence DNA, when you can map the heart of the atom, then it is entirely inappropriate to have an unconscious mind, because the power that is given onto you is a kind of god-like Promethean power. So how can we switch on the lights on our animal nature…? I think it is very simple: we have to de-condition ourselves from culture. We are sick, we require medical intervention… into what is a galloping, cancerous state of neurosis - the growth and spread of ego. Ego is like a calcareous growth in the psyche of human beings, and if it is not treated, it creates the kind of society that we have. A society based on hierarchy, male dominance, accumulation of physical goods,suppression of the weak by the strong… This is why the psychedelics are so socially sensitive, because they dissolve de-conditioning. Every culture is a scam. Every culture is a lie. A shell game, run by weasels, for the amusement of rubes. If you do not want to be a weasel or a rube, then you need to inform yourself of how the shell game works, and what lies beyond the carnival midway of civilized values. And the way to do that is to go back to the plants, to the original gnosis."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IO7pHD3X9M
"Culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with closure, to force closure. That is why cultural trips are so bizarre; why they don't make sense to anybody but the Witoto, or the Guaraní, or the Americans, or the Japanese. If you are not inside a culture, it seems crazy. Cultures do not make sense because they are not trying to make sense. What they are trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human being, who is living in the light of closure, a more manipulable, a more malleable, a lesser thing… The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That is the honest position given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body,in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various means of closure that are around,psychedelics do that. That is why they are so politically controversial and potent, because more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake, they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oydTqnrXCGY
I think the young execute on a unique position to see the culture of their elders and actively choose to fill spots where it could be improved for their own benefit and drop customs that are no longer worth it.
I don’t know if I believe this in general. Certainly we are happy to utterly change our lifestyles whenever a convenient new technology comes about. How much have smart phones or social media changed us culturally in the spans of a couple decades? If culture can change quickly over convenience, surely actual pain would drive it to change even faster. It seems that those “hard to change” cultural aspects are actually _useful_ in some way, and therefore they survive.
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I'm a little confused, who are the they you are referring to? People are hired on to perform tasks in return for remuneration and feelings should be reserved for outside the job. Getting emotionally involved with ones co-workers is a recipe for disaster. If you're ever invited to a workshop on diversity, don't go. James Damore and Professor Alessandro Strumia would know why.
I'm a man who has focused on and has been building tools to get better at expressing my emotions since 2012, including an app called iFeelio, in which I answered the question "how do I feel" over 4,000 times across 4 years and a class called Emotional Self-Defense, which I've run in the US, Europe, and Africa. I have realized and re-realized many things along the way.
One thing I've seen is that each culture seems to have rules about which emotions one is allowed to express and not allowed to express, based on the specific contexts. We often say that men aren't allowed to express our emotions, but I don't think that's the case. We men (in the US) are often allowed to express anger, confidence, feelings of triumph, horniness (maybe), calmness, and maybe even excitement. We're often not allowed to express tenderness, sadness, confusion, uncertainty, fury, etc. And funny enough, when watching our favorite sports team, we're pretty much allowed to express all of the emotions above and more. On the other hand, in the workplace, we're not allowed to really express much at all.
Women may have a different list, as well as people from the Midwest or California, those born in the 60s, digital natives, engineers, or really any different culture or sub-culture.
That being said, I'm glad to see programs like MKP and Evryman providing the place, and moreover, the permission, to express all of the emotions. (Save a Warrior is one I recommend for military vets—I was a witness on one of the programs and it really helped to open my heart and the hearts of the other guys.)
I'd love to chat with anyone on here about this, either in the comments or on Twitter, Telegram, keybase, or whatever people on HN use these days. Check my HN profile for those usernames.
Edit: Moodflow seems like it could be good so I'll try that. Just in case this helps others.
That being said, I have been thinking about how to get it fixed and even develop v2.0, possibly through open-sourcing it. Do you think you or someone else you know might be interested in that?
In the meantime, the magic sauce is really nothing too complicated...I used a note app on Android before developing iFeelio and it worked pretty good.
I would open up the note pad, type down the date, time, 1-3 comma-separated words for emotion, and then 1-2 short sentences about how I was feeling. Similar to an I-statement from NVC.
An example would be:
2019-09-28...01:09...grateful, tired...just checked HN and saw that a few people replied to my comments, and it's also 1am so maybe I should go to bed soon.
I made the app mostly because I wanted to enter the date/time automatically, password protect it, and create some ways for me to sort/filter/search previous entries.
The way to overcome pain is to acknowledge and include it instead of denying it. The difference is huge, and most of us need help to get there—personally contactful help, not idea help. I found it pretty liberating to be able to get such help from other men, in a group no less. The point is not to become a gushy feeling-sharer or a sensitive new-age male. It is to no longer be governed by unconscious feelings and the wounds of early experience.
The organizations that practice this work are not super clear about that distinction, which I suspect limits their appeal to many men. I went because of a friend I respect, who in turn went because of a friend he respects. Had either of us only read an article like this, I doubt we'd have been interested. Its subtle ironizing, which approaches belittling ("chastened menfolk", "There, there"), would have turned me off. The photos would have turned me off too, and I've sat in a lot of workshops (though usually with few men and many women).
Edit: an interesting thing to me was the gap between practice and theory. Even though there were parts of the theory behind that work which I didn't necessarily find appealing, I met quite a few men there who struck me as having a kind of integrated masculinity (maybe not the best phrase, but it's hard to find words for these qualities). They seemed strong and open at the same time. I found myself admiring them and wanting to be more like that myself. None of this had much to do with expressing feelings or being emotional; I would use the word presence instead. They maybe even seemed a bit less emotional than most men I meet—more able to take in what is happening without being reactive.
So I would say the theory doesn't work as well as the practice. You barely ever get that! usually it's the other way around.
Publicly? It's one thing to be denial, it's another to acknowledge it to yourself but still elect not to engage in a public display of this. The strongest men I've ever met were not in denial of their emotional state but didn't need to engage in public displays like those listed in the article.
I think this is where meditation (and stoicism) deviates from some types of psychotherapy and most support groups. Meditation teaches you to look at feelings dispassionately, which helps you lessen their power. This is very different than treating each emotion as if it is "correct" and in need of resolution via lots of introspection.
Rumination is unhealthy. And believe it or not, one of the antidotes to it is being able to communicate ones feelings effectively. In my experience, more expressive people tend not to suffer ruminating thoughts.
I grew up west coast, spent a lot of time with people who I could "share my problems" with. It taught me to be pathetic when I'm down, to really reach for it. I don't like who I was when that was an effective means of attention.
I really wish the response would have been "You're having a hard time coping with the harshness of reality and acting immature, do your best to get it together soon."
Try as I might, I have no idea what this has to do with feelings. Are you making an assumption that people who acknowledge or express their feelings are not handling problems?
And of course, as others have pointed out, stoicism doesn't suggest not pondering over feelings.
This may be colored by my experience of mental illness, but generally I've learned/grown more from pondering and sorting out feelings in the past rather than right now. It's easy to fall into a trap of "worshipping your pain" (or your hypomanic euphoria for that matter).
OTOH I'm very appreciative of the dispassionate attitude encouraged by stoicism and meditation, etc. -- but that kind of wisdom is acquired with work, like building muscle. "You should lift heavy things!" is both an interesting aspirational model and dangerous advice if it isn't culturally obvious that you can get hurt lifting heavy things while not in shape.
(Edit: stoicism/meditation etc. are more or less like "second-order repression": as you acknowledge your fingertips or your breath, you acknowledge that you have feelings in order to theoretically understand them (locus of control/illusion of self). The danger is that letting go of first-order repression, you can let yourself have feelings about your feelings -- feeling good about feeling miserable would be the common type.)
I like to think of my self as happy Sisyphus enjoying pushing the rock up the hill. Thinking about the futility of the effort is by definition futile.
"Handling your own problems" a lot of the time means "making other people responsible for my emotional well being."
I do love stoicism though and I think meditation and stoicism are excellent paths to understanding yourself and managing your internal state.
I'm seeing a lot of agreement in this thread, though. Healthy, deep relationships with family and close friends are important to keep you grounded, and therapy can help everyone. Many seemingly desirable positions of status that men and women strive for involve incredible amounts of stress, and people naturally have differing levels of stress tolerance, so at some point self-knowledge becomes very valuable. Having good people around you is a great way to build that self-knowledge.
Some people really seem to want men to be very emotional and assume something is wrong if they don't appear to be showing strong emotions. Often, they're just fine, and there's no there there.
If you keep picking at them, you'll probably generate some emotions, however.
This is new to me. Making other people responsible for my emotional well-being is being dependent on other people for our own happiness. Stoicism does not suggest that you do this, on the contrary.
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For me, men who need to share their feelings are weak. This is what women do. But we can't all be women. Men need to learn to enjoy their advantages: superior strength, speed, and resilience, but accept that problems won't just go away if you cry about them. Either solve the problem or accept it and don't give it another precious moment's thought.
As men we have an unbelievable amount of expectation on our reactions, communication, behavior, past behavior, and others behavior. (Their friends and their partners)
On top of all of this: Men spaces have been mostly eliminated.
An organization that was once called "Boy Scouts" is no longer catered only to young boys. And yet the Girl Scouts remain female only.
Dead Comment
I mean sure it's illegal to exclude women but there are plenty of things they're just not going to show up to.
Want to be around only men? Go to a BSD meet up. (or join most channels on freenode.)
(note I'm not saying any of this is good, but there are plenty of places that are pretty exclusively attended by bales.)
Any minimally functional group eventually lead to opportunities.
The outgroup (women in this case) want to access those opportunities. Any push back against that will be labeled as misogynistic or ridiculed.
Men have no other choices than to open up the group and let it become just another open space for everyone.
What is surprising is how some groups: 1) just lay down and accept this unilateral loss... 2) even when it is never reciprocated.
Men aren't obligated or motivated to open up men only social groups until other men start to take issue with them (and usually for their own self interest).
Anyways, I have heard of discrimination that men have faced when trying to create "safe"/support groups that were men only.
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For anyone who is actually interested, I would recommend the book Iron John, by Robert Bly (https://www.amazon.com/Iron-John-Book-about-Men/dp/030682426...). The first chapter is usually assigned reading before attending the NWTA, but when read with an open mind I found the entire book to be profound. Profound isnt the best word, but I experienced the content as if I personally was being spoken to through the pages; my problems, my struggles and my victories. Spoken to with support, compassion and understanding. I re-read it every year.
Beyond sharing that however, seeing how much vitriolic hyperbole is being thrown around within 2h of posting, I dont feel it productive to share anymore. You might say that the vulnerability it requires of a man to speak to other men (and women!) who are openly hostile (and often deliberately misunderstanding) about this topic can be nothing short of herculean.
We live in an age where men are being villainized at every turn, and this is just another way men are being told they don't measure up... because they aren't sharing in a way that women recognize. With all due deference to my trans friends, men are not simply women with penises.
Agreed. The conspiracy theory part of me wonders if this is a natural way of challenging and verifying perceived strength, thus the trope of a wife accusing the husband of not talking about his feelings enough.
Not to say that's the only time it happens (I've asked my wife basically just this), but I think part of being human is to want a stable, emotional foundation so to speak. And once we've tested and verified a leader/friend/family member who appears to be strong in ways we are not we then rely on them to help us in that regard.
This is the age old men vs women problem where women feel like men don't want to talk about problems/feelings and men feel like women just want to blabber on without ever solving anything.
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On the other hand, I do worry about "emotional masturbation". Simply put, sometimes we indulge ourselves in sadness/fear/anger because it makes us feel something and feeling something is better/more exhilarating/exciting than feeling nothing at all.
For example, I have some insecurities. Sometimes I feel like talking about them may be pro-actively bad because I am indulging myself and making my insecurities occupy more mental space/brain power.
It's no good just blurting out whatever it is you're feeling and like you say, turn it into a masturbatory indulgence, but we should still promote talking about out feelings because suppressing them is no better than having an emotional wank.
Sometimes beeing strong means to become vulnerable.
For instance -
Feelings: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/feelings-inventory
Needs: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory
--
Yet the needs exist, are often projected onto others (partners, co-workers, kids, whole countries, etc) and then action is taken to try to get /them/ to meet needs that one doesn't even know they have. At best, this tends to be frustrating, at worst...well we can all look up the stats on violence perpetuated by people raised as men in the West versus people not raised as men.
By pure rational thought many young men have accepted to treat women like equal human beeings, just as many women have understood that the traditional division of gender roles might not fit all social encounters.
The issue is, that understanding and doing are two seperate things and switching between the old and the new paradigma when it fits us seems to be common place.
So many men end up getting the worst of both worlds: they are not the strong leader of the family any more, but they were still raised in a way to hide their feelings, just like many women are expected to be strong while they might not always have been raised in that way.
The thing we aim for as a society here is defintly worth it (I could experience for myself how amazing a relationship of equals between man and woman can be), but there are many people who struggle with this and it leads to all kind of societal side effects like depression, suicide, drug abuse and violence.
To be fair in times when the man had to be strong this was also a problem, because there are always people who simply don’t fit the role society wants them to take and if you force them into it bad things happen.
Communicating your own feelings is important for mental health. Anyone who struggles with this: get help. Write letters to a person that you never send — writing will help you to think and reflect.
This is true so long as you appear vulnerable, not weak.
I talk about topics that are so hard to talk about that people lie to themselves about it. Things that you don't want to be real are things you try to hide and emotions that don't fit your role in society are part of this.
Becoming vulnerable is the price you have to pay to talk about these kind of topics. And if it happens that you look weak as a side effect you have to pull through it. But this is not about looks, this is about beeing able to interface with the world around you and exposing your true self is the price you have to pay for meaningful conversation.
Give examples of vulnerability that is not also weakness.