Boys Don’t Cry

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Clarissa

February 24, 2014

Watching TV at the gym has become an important source of knowledge for me. Yesterday, for instance, I saw a commercial for a dating website. A middle-aged couple met at the website and got married in 2012. I don’t know if these were real people or actors, but that doesn’t matter much.

In the commercial, the woman tells how happy she is that they met, that her life was incomplete without him, that he is her second chance for happiness. She cries, her voice breaks. This entire time, the man sits by her side in complete silence with a stony look on his face. The camera is centered on the woman, and the man can only be described as hovering on the margins. I have no doubt that he is just as happy to have found her but there is no suggestion in the commercial that there is any possibility for him to make a sound or express his emotions in any way. It’s up to the woman to process his emotions for him and deliver them to an audience.

If you think about it, this simple commercial is terrifying. The man is locked in this prison of silence and stony self-control. He is a human being, he feels things, but there is no space for him to peer out of this dungeon. The woman, in the meanwhile, acts towards him as a mother does towards a 2-year-old, verbalizing what he feels and handling his emotions for him. This is a road to loneliness and frustration for both of them. And to a significantly earlier death for him.

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12 responses to “Boys Don’t Cry”

David Bellamy

February 24, 2014

This is certainly true. There is really strong indoctrination of boys not to express emotions, except for maybe anger, ever. People make fun of me for crying at movies, even really profound ones like Apollo 13. I cried nonstop throughout this movie the first time I saw it.

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Shakti

February 24, 2014

I find this part of the female role highly annoying.
I’m supposed to have my feelings — but only express the acceptable ones. (Men get to be angry, but not vulnerable. Women are supposed to be vulnerable but not angry.)
In addition:
I’m supposed to have feelings about the feelings people have about my feelings.
And I’m supposed to feel the feelings that men and boys aren’t supposed to feel as some kind of emotional translator, interpreter & dimmer switch, so people can label me “emotional” while displacing their feelings onto me.
I’m INTP and on the autism spectrum so it’s super difficult.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 24, 2014
  
  “And I’m supposed to feel the feelings that men and boys aren’t supposed to feel as some kind of emotional translator, interpreter & dimmer switch, so people can label me “emotional” while displacing their feelings onto me.
  I’m INTP and on the autism spectrum so it’s super difficult.”
  
  – Same here. Beautifully said.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    February 24, 2014
    
    I’ve given up on trying — and I did try hard for a couple of decades to “fit in”. But now I realize that I’ve probably passed the cross-off age where
    1. Others are going to target me viciously for not obeying gender norms
    2. Where there is still enough flexibility in my personality (or capability lof imagining extreme change) that would enable any kind of extreme change.
    
    Also, I’ve noticed that whenever I’ve trying to make the rational adjustment to what has been required of me, the best I have got is people labeling me “emotional” — which makes me incomprehensible to myself, since the adjustments I had tried to make were based on my perceptions of social necessity, not inward desire.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      February 24, 2014
      
      “I’ve given up on trying — and I did try hard for a couple of decades to “fit in”.”
      
      – Good! It is useless anyway. You hurt yourself when you try to castrate your existence in this way but the payout is minimal.
      
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      1. musteryou
        
        February 24, 2014
        
        Well I did not have a sense of the cultural landscape in the past, or rather, my understanding of it was entirely different from what it is now. So I thought people were making rational demands of me. Now I see they were just gaining a certain amount of sadistic pleasure in pointing out ways they thought I fell short of their own values and ideals. I was only vulnerable to their emotional blackmail because I was a confused migrant. Also there was an element of truth — I could not feel my own emotions very well. I tried very hard to be more emotionally aware, and I have achieved this, but I still do not effuse emotionality in the manner of a typical Western woman, nor would I wish to do so.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        February 24, 2014
        
        ” So I thought people were making rational demands of me. Now I see they were just gaining a certain amount of sadistic pleasure in pointing out ways they thought I fell short of their own values and ideals.”
        
        – And also, “improving” you means they don’t need to work on improving themselves.
        
        ” I was only vulnerable to their emotional blackmail because I was a confused migrant. ”
        
        – I know what you mean.
        
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        musteryou
        
        February 24, 2014
        
        I really, really did think people were more rational than they turned out to be, because they kept telling me I was “colonial” and I was in the wrong. So I thought they must be godlike and perfectly rational. They were taking on that demeanor in their constant reprimands.
        
        It turned out they were self-deluding cretins and I had been overly earnest and credulous regarding their postures and self-proclamations.
        
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musteryou

February 24, 2014

I call it Christianity. I’ve heard it said that the man is the “head” of the wife and the wife is the “heart” of the home. So they are both rubbishy, incomplete people, who given a chance will be inclined to destroy each other. The second half of this video has material relating to that issue.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 24, 2014
  
  What’s curious is that this was the same in our atheistic society with one difference: our men are also not allowed to express anger or negative emotions. Hence the staggering rates of alcoholism in our countries.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    February 24, 2014
    
    Prohibitions can be encoded in different ways. I’ve learned to recognise the Christian trope because I’ve had to do close and personal battle against it.
    
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Jones

February 26, 2014

Television in the United States is frightening enough — being pandered to by the likes of CNN and Fawkes Snooze is bad enough, but the adverts are in a completely different class of “what insipid bollocks did I just watch”?

I’m an INTJ and even I can’t manage the American Silent Stoic Stance that is supposedly the norm, at least if we’re meant to believe the adverts. I can, however, manage to render some INTJ Death Stare in the direction of the advertisers.

[calmly, coolly calculates the “segment type” of the advertisers so I can speak “voodoo words” at them in the manner of Max Barry’s “Lexicon” …]

“Oh, I’m sorry honey, you’re one of Ortega y Gasset’s ‘self-satisfied men’, you can’t have any feelings or display any in public because everyone’s supposed to believe you’re sitting on top of the world …”

“Tell me then, what does that make you?” 🙂

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