Time for a Male Revolution

Today's Jump Point is an article by Charlie Glickman about men's emotions and how we subvert their emotional expression through shame and coddling.

I am all for men being more than the boxed in, emotionally repressed, work-a-holic, steadfast soldier hyper sexual beings. Admittedly, women think of themselves as emotional gate keepers. How it can be expressed, when is the right time, what I will hear and interpret and what I won't.

The media doesn't help either. Men are often shown as incompetent bumbling fathers, old fat beer swilling football junkies. Sometimes it's the gun toting hero or the psychotic bad guy, the Alpha Male asshole or the weak beta who wails about being friend-zoned. None of those images would sound appealing to me if I were a man trying to find my place in the world.

But I see behavior in women that makes me cringe when I hear it. "Girl, I don't see how you put up with silence? If he doesn't talk I make him." or "How could you let him run around like that don't you have control of your man?"

I run the emotional ball a lot around here, I often instigate emotional check-ins. I want more feedback voluntarily. I ask most of the questions and work out what they are feeling until I can repeat it and they say "Yep that sums it up." I have heard a lot of men say: I don't know how I feel about this. That's ok, we explore it.

Prof and Mad Science have their emotional hangups like anyone but getting them to communicate them beyond what appears pragmatic can be tricky. It isn't my job to make them do it but it is information that makes them whole people. Men are not sextoys or ATMs they are people with feelings, ideas, dreams, things that go way beyond the cardboard cutouts we often see as "manly behavior."

During the women's lib movement's beginnings, it was about being allowed to redefine what being a woman meant to the individual woman and changing the idea that a woman wasn't just a sperm catching, house keeping, baby machine that was owned by a man. Maybe it's time we give men credit as human beings and allow them the range of experience we have had to make happen.

They shouldn't be fighting us, dear feminists, they want what we want. A chance to discover and explore what it means to be human without all the restrictive roles that society has placed on them. This is about men redefining manliness for themselves and changing the socially acceptable norms.

The more we say, boys will be boys, or men should be this way, not that way, the more disservice we do them. So remember when you wave your flag think about ways you apply the stereotypes to the men around you. What assumptions about their intentions do you make? Are you automatically presuming them guilty of being anti-you? Must we criminalize every man based on those that behave badly?