boys don't cry

One of the reasons I identify as feminist is purely selfish. In my line of work, you often come across reasons why being socialized with Western male values is tremendously impoverishing. For example, this week I was lecturing about how men both give and receive less self-disclosure – we live in a relatively disconnected social world. Last week, I was lecturing about how men are worse at both sending and interpreting non-verbal messages – in a way, we’re taught to ignore the social world. One of the biggest ways I feel impoverished is the disconnection from my own emotions I feel I’ve been taught to have.

This isn’t just a gender issue, it’s also a family one. I remember a few years ago, I was with my sister and her daughter who was about 2 at the time. My niece fell down, and there was that silent moment before you expected tears to flow. I forget exactly what my sister said, but she basically talked her out of crying – maybe it was something about being “tough.” I totally understand why my sister did that, she didn’t want to deal with the distress of my niece crying. But I was struck by how I was watching someone be socialized to ignore their own feelings, to keep their expression of distress to themselves. It’s not a bad metaphor for the way my parents taught us to deal with our emotions.

So now I don’t cry. I don’t want to say I can’t, I do sometimes. I did the other day when I was watching a documentary about a Hindu woman in India who wanted to marry a Muslim man and was barred from doing so by her family. She went to her dad for the first time in six years to tell him she wanted to get married, and despite everything, he broke down and embraced her. It was beautiful. Sadly, he “got himself together” over the next few weeks, and eventually decided not to attend the wedding. But just seeing raw humanity break through social roles was too beautiful.

But that’s other people’s lives. My own life doesn’t draw many tears. It also leads me to wonder about my own emotional honesty in domains like my writing. I strongly admire people like midnightarrow for their pure, unashamed honesty about things like sexuality. I lecture in sexuality, but that’s intellectualized and removed. I wish I had the guts to just spill it, but I don’t. Not now, at least.

So I dunno. I guess my main point here, at least on the feminism thing I started with, is that men are very threatened by feminism often without thinking about how liberating it could be for us. It’s very frustrating not to cry, to have nothing but anger to turn to in times of distress. Because sometimes the only person you have to turn that anger on is yourself.