This episode features a passage from All the Talk About Masculinity: We’re Sidestepping Emotions, by Tom Gentry. It was published March 24, 2023, on Substack.
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Until, on a societal level, men make peace with their emotions, we will continue to be plagued by men who are either hyper or hypo-masculine.
Be it in bookstores, on podcasts, on social media, or someplace else, everywhere I look, I see people trying to help men. Some of them infuriate me. Some of them inspire me. None of them are talking about emotions. Be it healthy or toxic, they are talking about masculinity. They may refer to emotional intelligence. They may encourage men to talk about their feelings. They may even create spaces where men can do that. They emphasize that we need to be emotionally grounded, emotionally balanced, but no one is talking about how to do it.
There is an army out there, both men and women, coaches, therapists, even retired bartenders, who men pay to teach them how to be masculine – to teach them how to be men. I don’t see any of them teaching men how to reconcile their relationships with their emotions while living in a patriarchal society that tells men they are not emotional, and that, from boyhood, systematically desensitizes them from their emotions. I’ve watched way too many boys and men take their own lives or destroy themselves some other way, year after year, decade after decade, all because, as a society, we don’t want to deal with emotions. We don’t want to talk about our feelings.
So, Just a Thought. Maybe take a look at how you respond to your own emotions. And, ask yourself how that affects your relationships with others.
-Tom Gentry
© Copyright 2023, Tom Gentry; Music: Worky Worky by Andy G. Cohen, edited for use. Used with permission from the artist under a Creative Commons license. Cover photo by Sam Barber on Unsplash.