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As a woman speaking from personal experience, I know that we sometimes talk a man’s ear off about all the things we downright despise about womanhood. The pressure to look forever young, to take oral contraceptives, our unjust menstrual cramps, yeast infections, and the fact that regardless of the cutting-edge technology available on the market, we still must be the ones to push a watermelon out of the most sensitive part of our body. We complain about these things a lot, and rightly so, but I did want to give the opposite sex a space to be heard, too, as there are many pressures on men as well.
Boys and men are taught from a young age that displaying any sort of emotion is deemed unmasculine. The male archetype is meant to be self-reliant and almost heroic. We see and hear these messages conveyed endlessly in the books we read and the films we watch. Within the impenetrable demeanor of the valiant male character as he rescues his damsel in distress or the stoic expressions and bulging biceps of male action figures. If these examples sound trite to you, that’s because they are. These characters represent a tried and true formula that will continuously be recycled in the media if we don’t start speaking up.
Men have emotions, too, and there’s no reason why they should have to stifle them. If you’ve ever read a post of mine in the past, you’ll know that I’m a huge advocate for good old honest emotions, no matter how bleak. Let them pour out of you like a monsoon. Why? Because keeping our pain in is like trying to suppress a yawn. It will just keep coming back. Only, it might return bigger and more extreme. Emotions never fully disappear. They simply await their next outlet.
I am not going to pretend to understand what it is like to be a man, but given that most of my readers on here are actually people who identify as male, I wanted to take some time to give these readers permission to feel the weight of it all. Every expectation, every responsibility, every societal pressure that feels like it will break you in half. Feel it to your core. Cry if you need to. Shout out your window. And let that shit go. Owning your emotions is far better than letting them own you. Repress them, and you will never be the one in the driver’s seat. Allow them to course through you and you’ll have the freedom to release them in no time.
I’d like to think that we’re headed in a direction that is in support of men freely expressing themselves, so long as they aren’t harming others of course, but sometimes the change can be slow. If it helps, I can offer a surprising female perspective on the topic. The more women I speak to, from ages twenty to fifty-five, I hear that they feel an immense sexual attraction toward men who are honest and upfront about the way they feel. This includes feelings of sadness, fear, disappointment, confusion, and, yes, even vulnerability – the exact opposite of how we typically portray masculinity in most spaces.
Although I can’t promise that I’ve polled every woman in the world, as I know every culture is vastly different, this speaks volumes about what many women do find attractive in a partner. Perhaps the pressure isn’t as high as we thought. Maybe boys and men can cry if they want to, too. And we might even like them more for it.
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Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
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