Another thing. Action and independence is competence which is what is needed to be attractive to a woman. Tricky if your therapist is a woman, as most are.
Yeah, I have found that "therapy" is largely a complete waste of time. All that happens is that you end up getting lectured to about "male privilege" and "the patriarchy" by someone who sneers at your very existence. No thank you, I will stick with meditation and motorcycles.
These points emphasize why men so desperately need and rely upon close male friends to support them and play the role many therapists normally would play.
Excellent post, Tom. What it boils down to, as I see it, is that men's differences from women are seen as defects, and experts (including many women, of course) must fix them. Women get it right, just naturally; men have to work at it to be as good as women.
This is a great post Tom! I like how you describe the impact of testosterone AND the social pressures of society. They work in combination. Also, I appreciate you providing the different examples of emotional expression. More of this please. I would be interested in a piece that describes how male friends could support each other in these difficult moments, understanding the dynamics in this piece and reinforcing the need for connection in appropriate forms. …also, I like that you didn’t rail on feminism once in this post. :)
I believe testosterone may shape how men carry themselves in moments of strength, but it does not silence the human heart. It does not rob us of our capacity to feel.
From boyhood, we are told by our fathers and by society that men do not cry. Yet we all know this is a lie. We cry. We break. We suffer just as deeply as women do. We bleed inside from grief, heartbreak, betrayal. The difference is that we learn to hide it. We bury our pain beneath distraction whenever eyes are watching, as if vulnerability itself were shameful.
And still, there are moments when the mask slips. When we let someone we love see that we are wounded. Tragically, sometimes it is the wrong person, a girlfriend who mocks or in my case a wife who weaponised my weakness against me. When your vulnerability is met not with compassion but with ridicule, the lesson is seared into you: never again. The walls grow higher, the armour thicker, until even love struggles to get in.
It breaks my heart that this reluctance to be vulnerable has been twisted into the language of toxic masculinity, as if a man’s silence, his inner prison of pain, is proof that he is dangerous. As if the very suffering that isolates him becomes the justification to condemn him. And then, on the other side, we see a new label, “mankeeping”, mocking men for leaning on women when they dare to open up. Which is it then? Do we suffer in silence and get blamed, or speak our truth and get ridiculed?
Sometimes I feel like I cannot win, like society has closed every door. But I know this much: men do feel. We always have. And what we need is not ridicule, not labels, but the simple grace of being allowed to be human.
A lot of the men's movement is ultimately based around the belief that men are actually human. That there has to be a movement to enforce this belief is a pity in itself but it is vitally necessary.
Yes the whole "Patriarchy" thing seems to be based on the idea that males are in fact godlike in their power to absorb punishment and provide "support". This reaches its apogee in schoolboys being reported to the Police for sexism or other "isms" (as young as 6!) by their schools for jokes or things they've heard. Even if the utterance was objectionable somehow the fact simply educating or telling them the current social rules is ruled out. Seems to be because they are criminals, long before even the legal age of criminal responsibility. And of course even basic rights are attacked, even trial by Jury, as if males simply don't deserve the very basic of the rights once extended to to all. To deny men human rights confirms they can't be fully human.
Thank you for sharing this. It is indicative that "society" has expended so much effort in teaching males to control and manage feelings of all sorts. If it were really true that males had no or few feelings there would be no reason for the enormous efforts to produce the "silence" you describe. In a way the feminist inspired programmes against "toxic masculinity" are just the latest in a huge societal effort to keep men's emotional lives safely in a box. Historically in Europe the colour red (and "Pink) were male colours representing their powerful emotions, while blue and green were female colours representing the cooler female. I'm not saying they were right but its interesting how this "flipped" in the early 20th Century.
I heard about the pink and blue too, it is testament that people’s perceptions can be changed when society shifts. Perhaps one day men will feel safe to feel in public. That is until we go through a period of war perhaps, then off course men will be encouraged to man up again, no crying man will be effective on the battlefield.
Now this isn't science but in my childhood there appeared to be more tolerance of men's difficulties, maybe because of the shared experience of War. Certainly there were many more visibly disabled men in work than is the case now. Also there seemed to be tolerance of men who showed "shell shock" in a variety of ways. Locally one got to know of a neighbour who had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and screamed sometimes in the night and another neighbour who had bouts of anger and was "still shell shocked". Another chap shook all the time again put down to "shell shock". Certainly my father never talked much about his time in bomber command (he won the DFM) except with contemporaries who'd been in the forces. I got the impression there he shared feelings about the one's who "didn't make it" and the horrors of mass bombings. These days I wonder if the distance from these quite common experiences actually has helped to make them less tolerated than in the past. Or maybe the sad thing is that only in extreme circumstances with real horrors can we accept that men have deep feelings. It sometimes amazes me how often really young men, really late teenagers, are held to very high standards of stoicism and "manning up" rather than seen as little more than boys.
Also, I’m interested in more here: “When we stop expecting men to respond like women—and instead tune into how they do engage—we start to see that empathy is there. It just speaks a different language.”
What is that language? What does male empathy look like? How is it different from women’s empathy?
Answering this would fill a big gap in the disconnect.
Such an important question and one that few are asking. Groups of men will acknowledge another man's pain but won't perseverate on it. As I discuss in my small book The Way Men Heal, men will tend to use action as a means to show support. Often the action is shoulder to shoulder and involves minimal talking. Instead of using lots of words of support, the man will be more likely to simply put his hand on the other man's shoulder. The receiving man knows the importance and richness of this gesture. Admiration and respect are also key. Masculine support is an interesting topic and one that is sorely neglected.
It is indeed. It has always been puzzling that the fact that in all measures of anxiety, low level depression, eating disorders and so on. Females comfortably outnumber males. And the obvious question would be what are the things, innate or learned, that might be protective in terms of these mental health problems. Then maybe they could be taught to females for instance and reduce the prevalence. Yet in fact it seems the drift is; males must be missing out and should be encouraged to exibit the same higher levels of mental health problems! Many years ago a Psychiatrist I worked with opined that in the future we'd see a lot more such mental health problems because of the push to "talk about them", if that talking had the effect of confirming whatever the "issue" was and in effect making the person believe they really did have a major problem, rather than a transient set of feelings. I was reminded of this many years later when I had CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) here in the UK. The basis of CBT was that your emotional responses can trick you and the best "treatment" was to be active, get on with life, and manage your tricky moods and anxieties. In effect the "therapist" helping you sort out a healthy life. I imagine this worked best, or is most popular with male "patients", though I don't know the data.
Otherwise it seems my colleague seems to have been correct, the more therapy that goes on the more the population, females in particular, becomes mentally unwell!
I don't know. I have seen lots of men in their 60's and beyond make very good connections with very attractive young women. Especially if they have abundant resources..... ;>)
Absolutely right, Yvonne. Older men can always teach young people a lot. I am talking about an older man seeking therapy will find a fresh graduate woman difficult to connect with, her having little life experience.
This article makes me glad I’m not American. In Britain, you see a therapist when Social Services or a Probation Officer tells you to. We generally feel that therapists are a suspicious bunch with a college bred, quasi-legal understanding of human beings that is best avoided. Having read this article, I haven’t seen anything that would make me rethink that.
Great article. I am wondering your thoughts about how both men and women can learn from each other's natural strengths? For instance, in this essay you are writing about how men need a therapeutic model that is sculpted around their innate wiring (e.g., based largely on the influence of testosterone). Isn't it a good idea for men to grow in more "feminine" attributes, though? And likewise, for women to learn from men's innate strengths, such as taking action or assessing a situation before reacting or learning to pause the emotional response and train herself to be more level-headed. What do you think about both men and women leaning toward integration by acquiring the skills they aren't necessarily wired to possess but can still learn so that they can be in relationship with each other in a more harmonious way?
This is very insightful. I have read that therapists get very little training in sex, which seems insane considering how big of an issue it is. How much training do therapists get in gender? Are therapists trained at all to navigate the ways gender impacts emotional responses?
No. Men and women are so different in their responses to harm and to tragedy. Because I was brought up in a big, close family we realised from an early that we could not emote everywhere when tragedy struck otherwise we would all be crying forever so we deliberately, women and men and boys and girls, exercised control at funerals and sad events. When my husband died after 42 years of very happy marriage a neighbour walked up to me and said “ swell you don’t look very upset about your husband’s death”. People are different in their responses added should be aware of this. .
For decades now, feminists have been convincing society that women are better than men. Is there any wonder if this bias appears in the office of therapists? Are there questions why female-centric psychoanalysis fails men? News Flash: men won't grow or heal, by becoming women through therapeutic castration.
Another thing. Action and independence is competence which is what is needed to be attractive to a woman. Tricky if your therapist is a woman, as most are.
Yeah, I have found that "therapy" is largely a complete waste of time. All that happens is that you end up getting lectured to about "male privilege" and "the patriarchy" by someone who sneers at your very existence. No thank you, I will stick with meditation and motorcycles.
Meditation and motorcycles! Hell yes!
That’s a person you should fire immediately - then find a competent one
That was the second one lol
These points emphasize why men so desperately need and rely upon close male friends to support them and play the role many therapists normally would play.
Excellent post, Tom. What it boils down to, as I see it, is that men's differences from women are seen as defects, and experts (including many women, of course) must fix them. Women get it right, just naturally; men have to work at it to be as good as women.
This is a great post Tom! I like how you describe the impact of testosterone AND the social pressures of society. They work in combination. Also, I appreciate you providing the different examples of emotional expression. More of this please. I would be interested in a piece that describes how male friends could support each other in these difficult moments, understanding the dynamics in this piece and reinforcing the need for connection in appropriate forms. …also, I like that you didn’t rail on feminism once in this post. :)
This was a really good read. Very relevant in my life right now and I felt like something was wrong with me. Thankyou for this
I believe testosterone may shape how men carry themselves in moments of strength, but it does not silence the human heart. It does not rob us of our capacity to feel.
From boyhood, we are told by our fathers and by society that men do not cry. Yet we all know this is a lie. We cry. We break. We suffer just as deeply as women do. We bleed inside from grief, heartbreak, betrayal. The difference is that we learn to hide it. We bury our pain beneath distraction whenever eyes are watching, as if vulnerability itself were shameful.
And still, there are moments when the mask slips. When we let someone we love see that we are wounded. Tragically, sometimes it is the wrong person, a girlfriend who mocks or in my case a wife who weaponised my weakness against me. When your vulnerability is met not with compassion but with ridicule, the lesson is seared into you: never again. The walls grow higher, the armour thicker, until even love struggles to get in.
It breaks my heart that this reluctance to be vulnerable has been twisted into the language of toxic masculinity, as if a man’s silence, his inner prison of pain, is proof that he is dangerous. As if the very suffering that isolates him becomes the justification to condemn him. And then, on the other side, we see a new label, “mankeeping”, mocking men for leaning on women when they dare to open up. Which is it then? Do we suffer in silence and get blamed, or speak our truth and get ridiculed?
Sometimes I feel like I cannot win, like society has closed every door. But I know this much: men do feel. We always have. And what we need is not ridicule, not labels, but the simple grace of being allowed to be human.
A lot of the men's movement is ultimately based around the belief that men are actually human. That there has to be a movement to enforce this belief is a pity in itself but it is vitally necessary.
Yes the whole "Patriarchy" thing seems to be based on the idea that males are in fact godlike in their power to absorb punishment and provide "support". This reaches its apogee in schoolboys being reported to the Police for sexism or other "isms" (as young as 6!) by their schools for jokes or things they've heard. Even if the utterance was objectionable somehow the fact simply educating or telling them the current social rules is ruled out. Seems to be because they are criminals, long before even the legal age of criminal responsibility. And of course even basic rights are attacked, even trial by Jury, as if males simply don't deserve the very basic of the rights once extended to to all. To deny men human rights confirms they can't be fully human.
Thank you for sharing this. It is indicative that "society" has expended so much effort in teaching males to control and manage feelings of all sorts. If it were really true that males had no or few feelings there would be no reason for the enormous efforts to produce the "silence" you describe. In a way the feminist inspired programmes against "toxic masculinity" are just the latest in a huge societal effort to keep men's emotional lives safely in a box. Historically in Europe the colour red (and "Pink) were male colours representing their powerful emotions, while blue and green were female colours representing the cooler female. I'm not saying they were right but its interesting how this "flipped" in the early 20th Century.
I heard about the pink and blue too, it is testament that people’s perceptions can be changed when society shifts. Perhaps one day men will feel safe to feel in public. That is until we go through a period of war perhaps, then off course men will be encouraged to man up again, no crying man will be effective on the battlefield.
Now this isn't science but in my childhood there appeared to be more tolerance of men's difficulties, maybe because of the shared experience of War. Certainly there were many more visibly disabled men in work than is the case now. Also there seemed to be tolerance of men who showed "shell shock" in a variety of ways. Locally one got to know of a neighbour who had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and screamed sometimes in the night and another neighbour who had bouts of anger and was "still shell shocked". Another chap shook all the time again put down to "shell shock". Certainly my father never talked much about his time in bomber command (he won the DFM) except with contemporaries who'd been in the forces. I got the impression there he shared feelings about the one's who "didn't make it" and the horrors of mass bombings. These days I wonder if the distance from these quite common experiences actually has helped to make them less tolerated than in the past. Or maybe the sad thing is that only in extreme circumstances with real horrors can we accept that men have deep feelings. It sometimes amazes me how often really young men, really late teenagers, are held to very high standards of stoicism and "manning up" rather than seen as little more than boys.
Also, I’m interested in more here: “When we stop expecting men to respond like women—and instead tune into how they do engage—we start to see that empathy is there. It just speaks a different language.”
What is that language? What does male empathy look like? How is it different from women’s empathy?
Answering this would fill a big gap in the disconnect.
Such an important question and one that few are asking. Groups of men will acknowledge another man's pain but won't perseverate on it. As I discuss in my small book The Way Men Heal, men will tend to use action as a means to show support. Often the action is shoulder to shoulder and involves minimal talking. Instead of using lots of words of support, the man will be more likely to simply put his hand on the other man's shoulder. The receiving man knows the importance and richness of this gesture. Admiration and respect are also key. Masculine support is an interesting topic and one that is sorely neglected.
It is indeed. It has always been puzzling that the fact that in all measures of anxiety, low level depression, eating disorders and so on. Females comfortably outnumber males. And the obvious question would be what are the things, innate or learned, that might be protective in terms of these mental health problems. Then maybe they could be taught to females for instance and reduce the prevalence. Yet in fact it seems the drift is; males must be missing out and should be encouraged to exibit the same higher levels of mental health problems! Many years ago a Psychiatrist I worked with opined that in the future we'd see a lot more such mental health problems because of the push to "talk about them", if that talking had the effect of confirming whatever the "issue" was and in effect making the person believe they really did have a major problem, rather than a transient set of feelings. I was reminded of this many years later when I had CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) here in the UK. The basis of CBT was that your emotional responses can trick you and the best "treatment" was to be active, get on with life, and manage your tricky moods and anxieties. In effect the "therapist" helping you sort out a healthy life. I imagine this worked best, or is most popular with male "patients", though I don't know the data.
Otherwise it seems my colleague seems to have been correct, the more therapy that goes on the more the population, females in particular, becomes mentally unwell!
A man in his 60’s or greater cannot connect with a young woman! Or more so the other way around…
I don't know. I have seen lots of men in their 60's and beyond make very good connections with very attractive young women. Especially if they have abundant resources..... ;>)
LOL I mean on a purely professional level!
It works for me. But my therapist is very good.
Nonesense. I met many older men when I was younger, cousins, brothers, uncles that were helpful to me, protective and informative.
Absolutely right, Yvonne. Older men can always teach young people a lot. I am talking about an older man seeking therapy will find a fresh graduate woman difficult to connect with, her having little life experience.
Sorry Rachel. I replied in the sense of general social and familial contact.
This article makes me glad I’m not American. In Britain, you see a therapist when Social Services or a Probation Officer tells you to. We generally feel that therapists are a suspicious bunch with a college bred, quasi-legal understanding of human beings that is best avoided. Having read this article, I haven’t seen anything that would make me rethink that.
Great article. I am wondering your thoughts about how both men and women can learn from each other's natural strengths? For instance, in this essay you are writing about how men need a therapeutic model that is sculpted around their innate wiring (e.g., based largely on the influence of testosterone). Isn't it a good idea for men to grow in more "feminine" attributes, though? And likewise, for women to learn from men's innate strengths, such as taking action or assessing a situation before reacting or learning to pause the emotional response and train herself to be more level-headed. What do you think about both men and women leaning toward integration by acquiring the skills they aren't necessarily wired to possess but can still learn so that they can be in relationship with each other in a more harmonious way?
This is very insightful. I have read that therapists get very little training in sex, which seems insane considering how big of an issue it is. How much training do therapists get in gender? Are therapists trained at all to navigate the ways gender impacts emotional responses?
No. Men and women are so different in their responses to harm and to tragedy. Because I was brought up in a big, close family we realised from an early that we could not emote everywhere when tragedy struck otherwise we would all be crying forever so we deliberately, women and men and boys and girls, exercised control at funerals and sad events. When my husband died after 42 years of very happy marriage a neighbour walked up to me and said “ swell you don’t look very upset about your husband’s death”. People are different in their responses added should be aware of this. .
For decades now, feminists have been convincing society that women are better than men. Is there any wonder if this bias appears in the office of therapists? Are there questions why female-centric psychoanalysis fails men? News Flash: men won't grow or heal, by becoming women through therapeutic castration.
Men need stoicism.
Because men are the shock absorbers of the long house.
Expected to provide for a wife, children, and the state.
Men are expected to fend for themselves. As in veterans dying from exposure after their years of service when they struggle to adapt to civilian life.
Gynocentism is exacerbated by lack of brothers. And female capture of education and media.