Y'know I’m not sure that those “I love the way men love” posts are really much different than someone admiring a goldfish struggling to survive even 5% of its expected lifetime in a tiny glass bowl.
Sounds like some juicy discourse. Elaborate.
I did a bit already in the notes but I guess I can probably find more to say than
We taught this thing that it’s not allowed to show emotion without punishment, so it has to tangle itself into subtle contradictions to give love and receive affection!
Basically I see a lot of these posts where some taciturn father or uncle or grandfather who never shares much with his family is revealed to be secretly listening to all of his daughter’s soccer games on the radio, or making sure his grandkids’ cars are functioning, or keeping some heirloom or love letters from a long-lost lover who died tragically before he married the woman he had kids with, or something like that.
And this is always presented as something endearing, but I think it’s actually rather upsetting! It’s a bit like those news stories about how, e.g. “This whole town pitched in to make sure this fifth-grader could afford the surgery he needed to live” where the real tragedy is that the problem existed in the first place. Children (and adults) should be able to access the medical care they need without a whole town coming together to pity them, and men should have ways to show the love that they have for others that doesn’t have to be discovered by whoever goes through their estate after the funeral.
I think this is a form of trauma, where men are “socialized” in a way that punishes them for showing genuine emotion, and so they learn not to do that, but they still feel those emotions and want to express them, and so they struggle to find an outlet for them that won’t result in them being ostracized or dehumanized by the very people that they feel those emotions for. Which results in doing things that no one else ever really notices unless they look very closely.
And I’m saying this all as someone on the outside looking in, I never felt personally felt this way growing up because I didn’t care about these punishments, who cares if people don’t see me as a man (I didn’t want them to) or if they think I’m a faggot (I am, after all…). But there’s no reason that showing emotion needs to be tied to either of these things, and it plainly looks like other people are suffering as a result, so we should figure out how to make this not be the case.
I feel somewhat obligated after venting this much to tie this up with some nice conclusion about what people should do about this, but unfortunately I don’t really have one. I think a lot of this sort of damage is hard to undo, and probably at a certain point it starts to be more self-inflicted. Maybe I just wish people would approach the matter with a little more gravity than “Isn’t this cute”? idk.