December 11, 2012
John Robertson
New Brighton Middle School
250 Washburn Avenue
Capitola, CA 95010
Dear John,
As a young man grows up in this United States there are important things he must be aware of. Many societal standards and beliefs begin to be ingrained into the brains of boys in this culture from a young age. As a middle school boy you face the daily challenges of meeting the expectations of your peers whether it’s in class, on the basketball court, or in the lunch room. 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, we are expected 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. A big problem I find in the male-dominated United States society is the expectation of men to act and feel as though they have no emotions. Instead of hiding emotions deep below the surface which can lead to aggression and violence, men must feel and express their feelings.
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. That’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 me this whether it’s family, a famous athlete, or a movie star. I can vividly remember one day in the third grade that I thought I would impress my sister and her friend by acting like my favorite athletes do on TV. I thought that I was going to be cool and look just like the baseball coaches and players that I watch and look up to. 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 mimic my idols on TV, I began screaming and arguing with the opposing team that called me out. I believed this was the proper way to handle the situation. Clearly, young males have this idea of violent expression of emotions fixed into their minds. 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 clearly remember the fear of saying something wrong in front of the guys on the team who were also 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 perceive any man that expresses his emotion as 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. Men have a great fear of being judged negatively by their male peers and this is a large problem for the expression of emotions in our 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. Nobody wants to be judged negatively by others and expressing ones emotions can make them feel very vulnerable to that negative judgement. The truth 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 if a guy does this, he is usually viewed as girly. Therefore, if a man wants to be a man, he can’t show that he has these feelings. He must keep it all bottled up inside in order to maintain his masculine integrity.
There is extensive 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 that 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 ratio of male to female violent offenders the U.S. 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. The inability to express their feelings in a productive manner creates situations where men act violently. Aside from the violence, Kimmel claims that boys are “more prone to depression, suicidal behavior, [...] drop out of school and are diagnosed as emotionally disturbed four times more often as girls, get into fights twice as often, and are six times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)” (617). Many negative consequences exist due to suppression of emotions. There is obviously a necessity to change the unwritten guy code and make it acceptable and safe for all people to express their emotions without judgement.
Of the male violence in the U.S.,women are often the victims. Men have suppressed emotions and often release them in a violent and 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 difficult time talking about how they feel, repeatedly internalizing their feelings but not saying anything after disputes or a hard day at work. 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, sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara 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”. If men felt comfortable discussing what they felt instead of expressing it violently, domestic violence and male violence in general would be diminished.
It is important for young men in this culture to know that it is good to talk about feelings and emotions. There is a stigma attached to men expressing their emotions that needs to be erased. 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.
Sincerely,
Daniel Eden
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