As a young man grows up in this world there are important things he must be aware of. There are standards and expectations that are ingrained into the brains of men in this culture from a young age. I write in order to pass on knowledge that I wish I had acquired years before I did. As boys and men in this country, it is expected of us to act and appear a certain way or we might face great humiliation. We are taught be tough, manly and better than the rest of the guys. One of the requirements of masculinity that I find is a big problem is how we are expected to act as though we don’t feel any emotions. Hiding your emotions deep below the surface is not the way to deal with them and it can lead to aggression and violence. It is necessary to feel and express emotions rather than suppressing them and pretending that they don’t exist.
As a man in this society I can attest to the pressure that there is to suppress my feelings. All my life I have felt that it has been a social norm that girls talk about their problems and guys express them through anger. It’s just the way it is. And it’s not “cool” in the eyes of fellow males to act like a girl. Every male influence has taught this whether it’s family, a famous athlete, or a movie star. I can remember one day in the third grade that I thought I would impress my sister and her friend by acting angry. I thought that I was going to be cool and look just like the baseball coaches and players on TV. During a pickup baseball game after school, I got called out at first base just as my older sister and friend came to pick me up. Not because I felt it was necessary, but purely in order to act like my idols on TV I began screaming and arguing with the opposing team that called me out. It was what I believed to be the proper way to handle the situation. Clearly, males have this idea of violent expression of emotions ingrained in their brains from a young age. In later years I played football in high school. The coaches and fellow players would ridicule anybody complaining of pain or missing a practice. The insults would consist of anything from, cry-baby, sissy, and pansy, to pussy, bitch, or faggot. These insults conditioned the players to keep their mouths shut and not complain about anything out of fear. It is the worst thing for a guy to get humiliated by his peers so it’s better to just suck it up. I can clearly remember the fear of saying something wrong in front of the team who were my best friends. This sense of fear helped to train me to keep what I felt to myself.
Men in this society have unwritten rules and expectations that they generally follow whether consciously or not. In his essay, “Bros Before Hos”: The Guy Code, Michael Kimmel discusses the exact unwritten rules that most males follow on a daily basis. Of these rules, number 1 is: “No Sissy Stuff! Being a man means not being a sissy, not being perceived as weak, effeminate, or gay” (609). American society tends to believe that anybody that expresses emotion is being effeminate or weak. Even worse, a man could be viewed by his peers as homosexual. Kimmel explains the great fear that men have of being viewed as gay, “[h]omophobia- the fear that people might misperceive you as gay- is the animating fear of American guys’ masculinity. It’s [...] what drives the fear that other guys will see you as weak, unmanly, frightened” (613). Fear is the basis for internalizing ones emotions. This means that expressing ones emotions can make them feel very vulnerable. The truth is is that everybody has similar feelings at some point or another, they just deal with them in different ways. Some can easily express that they feel sad or hurt, but these people are usually viewed as girly. Therefore, if a man wants to be a man, he can’t show that he has these feelings. We have a great fear of being judged negatively by our male peers and this is a large problem for the expression of emotions in our patriarchal society. Kimmel says, “[o]ur peers are a kind of ‘gender police,‘ always waiting for us to screw up” (612). Guys aren’t scared of what girls think but rather what other guys think. They are the critics that matter because they have the power to judge and humiliate. Emotional suppression can have huge negative effects in many aspects of a persons well-being along with the well being of their surroundings.
There is lots of research and evidence showing the negative effects of repressed emotion. People who force their feelings inside as opposed to talking about them are far more likely to be aggressive. According to Dr. Rick Nauhert, studies done at University of Texas at Austin tested peoples‘ aggression after suppressing emotions found that, “[t]he research reinforces scientists‘ understanding of ‘ego depletion effect,‘ which suggests people who must keep their emotions bottled up- not reacting to a difficult boss at work, for example- are more likely to act aggressive afterwards”. This has massive implications when thinking about the amount of men there are in this country that follow a cultural rulebook telling them that they can’t show how they feel and that they have to keep it all inside. The boys and men grow up not knowing how to express internal problems which can result in unexpected explosions of anger and violence. Think about the amount of violence in this country and the amount of these offenders that are men. According to the Bureau of Justice, men account for 88% percent of the violence in the United States. That’s almost 9 out of every ten violent offenders. We need to change the unwritten guy code and make it acceptable and safe for all people to express their emotions.
Women are often the victims of the male violence in our country. Men are angry and often release this anger in an aggressive way in some form of domestic violence. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) says that 85% of victims of domestic violence are women and that one in every four women in the U.S. has experienced domestic violence in her lifetime. According to these statistics, women don’t have a safe place in the U.S. Men have a very difficult time talking about how they are feeling, repeatedly internalizing how they feel but not saying anything after disputes. Once this builds up they don’t productively get rid of this built up stress but rather, it will be expressed through a violent or aggressive outburst which is often taken out on his intimate partner. Thomas Scheff explains situations like this as the “Silence/Violence Pattern”. He defines this as “Meeting threats with either silence or violence” and explains that, “this pattern seems to occur much more frequently in men than in women”. Although there may be a problem, the man often won’t talk about it, instead reacting with “silence” over and over until finally losing control and reacting with a form of “violence”.
It is important to teach our youth that it is good to talk about feelings and emotions. We need to erase the stigma attached to men expressing their emotions. The unwritten “guy code” has taught males in this society to not be weak by suppressing emotions because that is something girly or effeminate. The truth is that this practice of emotional suppression leads to violence and aggression that must be stopped. Everybody in the world, even the manliest men, feel emotions such as sadness, frustration, anger, and grief. Young males need to be raised knowing that they can talk about how they feel without fear of being shamed by their male peers and superiors.
