Thursday, April 21, 2011

Gender and Emotions

One way in which the patriarchy acts to the detriment of men is by robbing them of the right and the capacity to express their emotions verbally. From early childhood, girls observe their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and their female friends discuss openly and clearly what they feel and why they feel it. This is how we acquire the extremely important skill of verbalizing our emotions. Later on in life, we emulate our mothers' and aunts' example and create our own networks of emotional support. We learn to build a core group of people whom we can always turn to, call on the phone, email, and say, "I'm feeling really sad today, can we talk?"

Boys, on the other hand, are schooled to conceal their emotions as much as possible. "Boys don't cry,"  they are told from an early age. So in order not to jeopardize their gender identity, they learn to repress the emotions they experience. Sadness, grief, depression, loneliness - these emotions often don't get verbalized in many men's lives. They are taught to hold it all in, never show what they really feel because that would be unmanly. Few things are as bad for one's psychological and physical health as this stiff-upper-lipping through negative emotions.

At the same time, women who find it more difficult to verbalize what they feel also find themselves castigated by the patriarchal vision of gender. Women who lack the capacity of being as openly emotional as the patriarchal standard expects every woman to be are branded as unfeminine. 

This gender disparity in how well men and women can express themselves emotionally makes it more difficult for people in heterosexual relationships to get along and understand each other. This, of course, is one of the goals of the patriarchal system which is bent on turning gender relations into a constant war between men and women whom it positions to be so different as to come from different planets. Patriarchal media try to convince us that these differences in the ease with which men and women verbalize their feelings have to do with how differently our brains are "wired." This popular belief has been rejected by actual science more times than one can count. Still, many people choose to uphold it because their only alternative would consist of realizing how much they are being hurt on a daily basis by the patriarchal view of gender. Since that would simultaneously imply a rejection of the advantages that the patriarchy offers to both men and women who comply with its basic norms, many people are not prepared to do so and prefer to soothe themselves with platitudes about different "wiring" of their brains according to their gender.

11 comments:

Pagan Topologist said...

I seem to remember a possible biological factor here, which probably has nothing to do with gender, except in terms of social role assignments. There was some research several years ago which seemed to show that the brain regions which are used to verbally express emotions are exactly the brain regions needed to visualize things in three dimensions. If this brain region is organized to do one of these, it will be deficient in the other. The organization is determined by how one is educated, no doubt. Since some human activities require spatial visualization, it seems unwise to stifle this capability in children. The present system of teaching girls to express their feelings, but not boys, is I suspect almost the entire explanation for why females, statistically speaking, do not often become mechanical engineers, mathematicians, etc. Boys' being taught to think spatially has a similar but opposite effect.

Clarissa said...

This is very interesting. However, when I look at my own family, I observe the following: my mother and my aunt are mathematicians and they are brilliant at verbalizing emotions. My father is a philologist who failed the same course in calculus 7 times in a row in college and he cannot verbalize emotions worth a damn.

Lindsay said...

It might be different for people in Russian-speaking cultures, but I would like to point out one area in which girls are taught to repress their emotions: anger.

Other than that, I totally agree with what you've written, and I do think --- even with repression of girls' anger taken into account --- that boys/men get the worse end of this particular gender norm.

(I hadn't heard of PT's thing about brain regions before, and I'm a somewhat-more-than-casual follower of brain research ... I would point out that 1) brain imaging research is in its infancy, and we're still not entirely sure what the images are actually telling us, and 2) lots of brain regions are involved in more than one function.)

Clarissa said...

Lindsay, you are 100% right. I was writing completely from the perspective of my own culture where female rage is perfectly acceptable. I grew up with women who were perfectly comfortable with expressing their rage and men who were terrified of doing so.

You see, everybody, I am not as Americanized as has been suggested. :-)

Pagan Topologist said...

I posted another comment here earlier. Blogspot must have eaten it.

What fields of mathematics do your mother and aunt work in. Not all branches of math require a great ability to visualize in three dimensions, though some do.

Clarissa said...

That's really weird. I checked the Spam box and your message isn't there. I hope that Blogspot doesn't do this often.

They were schoolteachers in high school. My mother started out as one of the first people in what was then programming.

Pagan Topologist said...

Computer programming? That requires very good organizational, symbolic and language skills but rarely, if ever, spatial visualization skills. If you mean some other kind of programming, I don't know.

Xtra said...

I find in America,if a person of color shows anger(espically if black) it is taken by others as badly as if they actually physically hit them. I find the darker skinned the person the more this happens. I find within the black community between black men and women the women are harshly shamed for showing any emotion besides joy. Men on the other hand are called corny or feminine if they smile too much.

Politicalguineapig said...

I know you guy are going to hate this, but the guys have it right. I hate the way women are required to perform emotion; it's just another way of training women to be victims. I hate people who cry in public. If they're male, they're usually faking it, if they're female they're just going to attract predators.

Clarissa said...

I have no idea what you mean by the phrase "women are required to perform emotions". Required by whom? Where?

If you read the post you are responding to, you will notice that what is being discussed is not public emotional outbursts (which are considered unacceptable by the Anglo-Saxon culture irrespective of your gender) but the way people process their emotions privately.

Pagan Topologist said...

I have cried uncontrollably at movies in public. Notably, Apollo 13.