boys don’t cry

I’m infuriated by how our “enlightened” society acts towards men who show more than their two allowable emotions. Men are not supposed to show any strong feelings other than 1) angry, and 2) lustful. And possibly sometimes “happy.” Women have access to the full range, including joy, fear, hurt, kinship, etc. Men who display these emotions are somehow “weak” or “not real men.” This is especially true in music. Music made by guys apparently is supposed to be either screaming and angry, or “I want to have sex with my woman.” If you are scared or feel deeply hurt (or feel deeply about anything, for that matter), it had better be in connection to your woman, because anything else is just not acceptable.

And this Pisses Me Off.

This occurred to me (once again) the other day. I was reading a music review, which happened to be written by a man. The song he was reviewing was written and sung by a man, and it was about his fear and sadness after a certain life-changing event. And the reviewer totally ripped it apart. It just makes me think that the guy got uncomfortable listening to the song because it touched something in him that he didn’t know how to properly handle, so he handled it by destroying the song in his review.

I really don’t think I’m that far off base. I really don’t. I think that this sort of unconscious avoidance of “improper” emotions happens far too often. Guys aren’t taught that it’s OK to feel whatever you are actually feeling. In fact, they are taught that unless you are feeling something within a very narrowly defined range of emotions (like I described above), then you had damn well better stuff that feeling back to where it came from, ignore it, and turn your excess emotional energy from it into something else. And if you don’t, you aren’t a real man.

We need to teach boys that real men feel lots of different things, and they are all OK. It makes me think that, as a parent, no matter how well you instill this in your little boy, society will teach him differently and that IS going to have an effect on him. It makes me just not want to have kids.