Men’s emotional conditioning is real. So is their responsibility to unlearn it without turning women into unpaid therapists, trauma sponges, or customer service representatives for male disappointment
Women have their own patriarchal/social conditioning/skills issues to grapple with.
They are also told that if they defy their social conditioning that they can never be partnered, never be valued, never be happy.
It’s what social conditioning is! It’s lies about who you are, and what you are for, what you’re capable of, and what your opportunities are.
Because women have fought so hard for their own progress, we now have a multitude of voices describing what women can be. Some of women’s social conditioning has been seriously eroded. It took centuries. But most women in the US are not raised to believe women can’t exist in the public sphere. Hoorah! Nobody held our hands and murmured encouraging words during those centuries. No one offered us the liberation from that conditioning.
They still don’t. The fight isn’t over, and our social conditioning is still used against us. To trap us and keep us in our cages. But some of us legitimately freer of our social conditioning than those who came before. Perhaps you’ve seen that freedom and felt jealous. If so, know that it was hard won. Know that women built it for themselves from wisdom we carried inside ourselves the whole time. Just as the wisdom to fight patriarchy exists, hidden under the shit, in men too.
For any men who are ready to embark on the journey of introspection, who are ready to do their homework, I will say: It is so worth it. No, you don’t get a cookie, or ready access to the woman who’s rejected you. You get something better - yourself. The capacity to be empowered by your own integrity. An expanded imagination about what’s possible for you and possible for society. So worth it.
Not only didn't men not hold our foremothers' hands, they beat them, institutionalized them, jailed them, called them crazy, hysterical, depraved, evil, witches, and killed many.
If they don't like the cage either, they need to help us break it. And quit whining about their privileged position. They're only changing because we are independent enough to be able to deny large numbers of men the access they FEEL (they're very comfortable expressing that feeling!) entitled to.
Beautifully said. Men have much to gain from learning how to regulate their own emotions and to be self sufficient. They would have better relationships with everyone, not just a romantic partner.
It’s so true. I see my adult son who gets to experience a range of emotions and the richness of life that can bring. He is my proof of concept. My husband broke free of his chains years ago as a teenager. His father who fortunately lived a good distance away tried to enforce all the male norms and was incensed that any son of his preferred reading to hunting. Together we raised a man who is awesome and yet still was dipped into the patriarchy somewhat because it’s a juggernaut. I know several other cycle breakers. It’s going to matter.
I am finally in therapy after years of “I don’t need therapy, I am rational and I can just rationalize my feelings and stick them in a box and NOT open the box” which was something I learned from my family in many ways. Especially growing up low income, you do what you have to do, you get along. Therapy and feelings are for people with money and free time, hah.
This recently lead to a conversation with my parents about our families avoidant way of dealing with conflict. My dad said “I think you came by naturally, it was how I was raised and I’m sorry.” God, I nearly cried. He told me once that his goal in life was to be nothing like his father and I think he thinks he failed on this point. But the fact that he owned up is still progress.
Also the other day in a facetime call he actually said “I love you” to me, instead of offering to send money or a care package. Ugh, I’m crying.
Part of the patriarchal conditioning includes a system of being where feelings aren’t real, and no one worthwhile is vulnerable enough to care.
Women end up being stuck in the patriarchal double bind of being supposed to do all the caring, while none of the caring is valued. And men aren’t allowed to care at all.
Part of overthrowing patriarchy is acknowledging the way you want care to matter to you. Own the way you want to express it and receive it. With reciprocity, not avoidance.
Glad your dad is babystepping his way into that. It’s not easy.
Both my sons were brought up knowing they could feel all the emotions and that was ok. The day my eldest got married I wrote him a letter saying not to take his wife for granted and not to wait for her to ask him to do anything but to think ahead. It seems to have worked.
Thank you. I know he isn’t perfect, but who is? He has a stepdaughter and he does a lot of the parenting for her, so his wife can work knowing her daughter is in safe hands. He is settled and happy, his wife is happy as is her daughter, and that’s all I ever wanted for him and whoever he loves.
And those relationships are generational. Men who learn to regulate their emotions and be self sufficient raise children to do the same. Just as patriarchy is generational.
It's so interesting that you mention introspection. I think that's the missing link in our culture overall. Mental scrolling rather than truly examining ourselves and how we affect one another.
'Grown men are responsible for doing their own damn homework' A wonderfully succinct summary.Thank you for another really interesting post, it helps with the homework.
I honestly don’t know how you do it. My blood was boiling after his first comment. But the final, “If you knew anything about…then you should know…inserts unsubstantiated claim here.” Oh right,mask slipped, cue mainsplaing example.
I’ve spent my whole life working with children as a babysitter when I was young to teaching preschool, elementary school, and High school history. Boys are just as wonderful as girls until we ruin their empathy and tell them to shove everything down and be a man with all that implies. As a teacher and parent I will absolutely do this work with boys and girls but not the adult men. Every woman lives with an inheritance of fear and it is high time men help break the pattern.
Expecting grace from women who don’t know you is strange because grace is by definition unearned and given freely, not owed. Individual women in our lives may give us grace, and we may give it to them as well, because no one is perfect. But to demand it amounts to taking women’s kindness for granted.
The thing the really bothers me about these reactions to being told that it’s a skill, is the assumption that I was born with the skill simply by virtue of being female. HA! Does anyone understand how many decades it takes if you’re a woman? I often marveled that my 3 brothers, who grew up in the same domestic violence situation I did, seemed to be able to avoid all the years spent in the fetal position sobbing because some emotional land mines from the past just exploded. I spent my young adulthood trying to avoid the work, which didn’t work. I had to learn the skills, too.
EXACTLY. Do these dudes think I'm having a great time in therapy? That self-examination and improvement is easy for women? It's not. I called my sister sobbing and hyperventilating at 3am a couple of weeks ago. I've got enough on my plate without holding their hands too.
Plus, as you surely know, we couldn't do the work for them if we wanted to. It just doesn't work that way. I was scared, too. I felt out of control, too. It was all too much for me to bear... too. So, there's an essay in that for me. Thanks.
White incel men think unlearning sexism is too hard, and that they should be able to verbally harass anyone talking about it.
That’s why they’ll be left behind.
In his comments on other posts he said women can’t imagine the pain men hold. Women have it easy they’re just born and they don’t have to do anything. How do you even try to speak to someone who is so ignorant?
With that kind of mentality, he and all of his friends are lost causes.
I know so many great men that these freaks in the comments just don’t seem to understand something really important here: We don’t need you. We do not need to educate you, or to listen to you. You can get with the times or not.
This idea that patriarchy is a cage really resonated with me.
As a young man, I was savvy enough to realize that it had been methodically built by the men in my family, while at the same time recognizing that my father did the best he could to provide me a few tools to escape.
But in "recognizing the cage" versus "demanding women become the zookeepers", you've put your finger on the question of responsibility in a powerful way.
Man has epiphany, realizes he needs to work on self. Reads feminists, pops off in the comments about whatever, receives criticism instead of the praise he expected. Takes the criticism as justification to quit the work he started on himself, not realizing he had taken for granted the help and encouragement of strange women just because he asked.
This is awesome and certainly deserves much more attention from me than I can give on first blush as it is long and it's late here. Thank for sharing so much of your time and wisdom. I will be spending much more time on this excellent post.
Dear Professor Meredith. I love your work, and found this article very interesting. As a girl, I absorbed, by osmosis I think, that almost everyone was more important than me. I had a few relationships in which I did most of the heavy lifting and was heartbroken when they ended. Looking back, though, it was a blessing. I got married when I was 25, to a good man. However, I always wondered why he had so much more free time than I did, and that his needs pretty much always came first. I remember one Christmas Eve. He’d been out with his work mates for a Christmas do. I’d been up a lot of the night with our youngest son, but when he staggered in at about 6 in the morning he went straight to bed and slept for the whole day. I was furious. But did I say anything? No, I did not. I just accepted it and carried on. He had many good qualities which was why I stayed. Plus, I suffered with depression and I know I wasn’t that easy to live with either. He died in 2011 and I still miss him every day.
Just a couple of days ago, I was talking with my hairdresser. She told me she had split up with her husband. He had left her in the centre of Birmingham (UK’s second largest city) on her own, in the evening. Her phone had run out of battery but she somehow made it home. That was the last straw, so she told him it was over. He is still in the house, doesn’t see what he did wrong, and is being difficult. Her question was “When are you going to grow up?” It makes me wonder why I didn’t see that incident with my husband as a deal breaker, or at least a conversation about how it had affected me and why I was so upset. But I always loved him.
Anyway, I didn’t intend to write an essay. Thank you for reading ❤️
The loving them is the hardest part sometimes. Because their behavior is annoying, it’s childish, but they aren’t BAD people. They just never learned better and then they continue to not learn better. And you end up feeling like it should have been your responsibility to fix them, to draw that line, to make them grow up.
Which, with a partner, it’s absolutely an option if you know to demand it (many don’t, as you pointed out, it’s just kind of the way things are and you don’t recognize for years and years that it was harmful) or they refuse to realize it’s a problem because society and media have made them think it’s fine and changing would be hard.
I’m glad he was good in so many ways and you loved him. I do wish you’d been able to have all that with someone who was carrying an equal load with you.
Bless you, thank you. I actually didn’t realise how much he did until he was no longer here to do it. But, yes, I am very conflicted about how much time, effort and emotionally draining it was to keep everybody happy. I see you have said you are in therapy. I might need to do the same to process all of this.
I am remarried now, to a man who does most of the heavy lifting in our relationship. I have several health conditions, so he does most of the housework, the shopping, the cooking and works full time. Again. He isn’t perfect, and there are things he says that have me raising my eyebrows 🤨 but we love each other and it isn’t a deal breaker.
Wow! Thank you. I struggle with the boundaries and feeling responsible for my partners growth. I am awed and impressed by your responses to the arguments and by keeping to the point. Teach me, sensei!
Women have their own patriarchal/social conditioning/skills issues to grapple with.
They are also told that if they defy their social conditioning that they can never be partnered, never be valued, never be happy.
It’s what social conditioning is! It’s lies about who you are, and what you are for, what you’re capable of, and what your opportunities are.
Because women have fought so hard for their own progress, we now have a multitude of voices describing what women can be. Some of women’s social conditioning has been seriously eroded. It took centuries. But most women in the US are not raised to believe women can’t exist in the public sphere. Hoorah! Nobody held our hands and murmured encouraging words during those centuries. No one offered us the liberation from that conditioning.
They still don’t. The fight isn’t over, and our social conditioning is still used against us. To trap us and keep us in our cages. But some of us legitimately freer of our social conditioning than those who came before. Perhaps you’ve seen that freedom and felt jealous. If so, know that it was hard won. Know that women built it for themselves from wisdom we carried inside ourselves the whole time. Just as the wisdom to fight patriarchy exists, hidden under the shit, in men too.
For any men who are ready to embark on the journey of introspection, who are ready to do their homework, I will say: It is so worth it. No, you don’t get a cookie, or ready access to the woman who’s rejected you. You get something better - yourself. The capacity to be empowered by your own integrity. An expanded imagination about what’s possible for you and possible for society. So worth it.
Not only didn't men not hold our foremothers' hands, they beat them, institutionalized them, jailed them, called them crazy, hysterical, depraved, evil, witches, and killed many.
If they don't like the cage either, they need to help us break it. And quit whining about their privileged position. They're only changing because we are independent enough to be able to deny large numbers of men the access they FEEL (they're very comfortable expressing that feeling!) entitled to.
Beautifully said. Men have much to gain from learning how to regulate their own emotions and to be self sufficient. They would have better relationships with everyone, not just a romantic partner.
It’s so true. I see my adult son who gets to experience a range of emotions and the richness of life that can bring. He is my proof of concept. My husband broke free of his chains years ago as a teenager. His father who fortunately lived a good distance away tried to enforce all the male norms and was incensed that any son of his preferred reading to hunting. Together we raised a man who is awesome and yet still was dipped into the patriarchy somewhat because it’s a juggernaut. I know several other cycle breakers. It’s going to matter.
I am finally in therapy after years of “I don’t need therapy, I am rational and I can just rationalize my feelings and stick them in a box and NOT open the box” which was something I learned from my family in many ways. Especially growing up low income, you do what you have to do, you get along. Therapy and feelings are for people with money and free time, hah.
This recently lead to a conversation with my parents about our families avoidant way of dealing with conflict. My dad said “I think you came by naturally, it was how I was raised and I’m sorry.” God, I nearly cried. He told me once that his goal in life was to be nothing like his father and I think he thinks he failed on this point. But the fact that he owned up is still progress.
Also the other day in a facetime call he actually said “I love you” to me, instead of offering to send money or a care package. Ugh, I’m crying.
Part of the patriarchal conditioning includes a system of being where feelings aren’t real, and no one worthwhile is vulnerable enough to care.
Women end up being stuck in the patriarchal double bind of being supposed to do all the caring, while none of the caring is valued. And men aren’t allowed to care at all.
Part of overthrowing patriarchy is acknowledging the way you want care to matter to you. Own the way you want to express it and receive it. With reciprocity, not avoidance.
Glad your dad is babystepping his way into that. It’s not easy.
Both my sons were brought up knowing they could feel all the emotions and that was ok. The day my eldest got married I wrote him a letter saying not to take his wife for granted and not to wait for her to ask him to do anything but to think ahead. It seems to have worked.
Sometimes the best we can do is work on that next generation. Seems you did that and I congratulate you!
Thank you. I know he isn’t perfect, but who is? He has a stepdaughter and he does a lot of the parenting for her, so his wife can work knowing her daughter is in safe hands. He is settled and happy, his wife is happy as is her daughter, and that’s all I ever wanted for him and whoever he loves.
And those relationships are generational. Men who learn to regulate their emotions and be self sufficient raise children to do the same. Just as patriarchy is generational.
Perfect. . . Thoughtful. Articulate. All of your response.
Best wishes from Cajun Country, Louisiana.
So many statements to love in your reply, Joanne, including your comments I the screenshot shown - hopefully - in my next post
Unable to post my screenshot. 😢 Part of the screenshot states, “The fight isn’t over.”
It's so interesting that you mention introspection. I think that's the missing link in our culture overall. Mental scrolling rather than truly examining ourselves and how we affect one another.
'Grown men are responsible for doing their own damn homework' A wonderfully succinct summary.Thank you for another really interesting post, it helps with the homework.
I honestly don’t know how you do it. My blood was boiling after his first comment. But the final, “If you knew anything about…then you should know…inserts unsubstantiated claim here.” Oh right,mask slipped, cue mainsplaing example.
I’ve spent my whole life working with children as a babysitter when I was young to teaching preschool, elementary school, and High school history. Boys are just as wonderful as girls until we ruin their empathy and tell them to shove everything down and be a man with all that implies. As a teacher and parent I will absolutely do this work with boys and girls but not the adult men. Every woman lives with an inheritance of fear and it is high time men help break the pattern.
i almost missed the mask slip, thank you for pointing that out! what an insufferable cad
Expecting grace from women who don’t know you is strange because grace is by definition unearned and given freely, not owed. Individual women in our lives may give us grace, and we may give it to them as well, because no one is perfect. But to demand it amounts to taking women’s kindness for granted.
The thing the really bothers me about these reactions to being told that it’s a skill, is the assumption that I was born with the skill simply by virtue of being female. HA! Does anyone understand how many decades it takes if you’re a woman? I often marveled that my 3 brothers, who grew up in the same domestic violence situation I did, seemed to be able to avoid all the years spent in the fetal position sobbing because some emotional land mines from the past just exploded. I spent my young adulthood trying to avoid the work, which didn’t work. I had to learn the skills, too.
EXACTLY. Do these dudes think I'm having a great time in therapy? That self-examination and improvement is easy for women? It's not. I called my sister sobbing and hyperventilating at 3am a couple of weeks ago. I've got enough on my plate without holding their hands too.
Plus, as you surely know, we couldn't do the work for them if we wanted to. It just doesn't work that way. I was scared, too. I felt out of control, too. It was all too much for me to bear... too. So, there's an essay in that for me. Thanks.
I look forward to reading it!
White incel men think unlearning sexism is too hard, and that they should be able to verbally harass anyone talking about it.
That’s why they’ll be left behind.
In his comments on other posts he said women can’t imagine the pain men hold. Women have it easy they’re just born and they don’t have to do anything. How do you even try to speak to someone who is so ignorant?
With that kind of mentality, he and all of his friends are lost causes.
I know so many great men that these freaks in the comments just don’t seem to understand something really important here: We don’t need you. We do not need to educate you, or to listen to you. You can get with the times or not.
They will go extinct.
and they are. the internet is the last place they think they can debate because they no longer interact with women or most people in real life
The Manosphere is a union-busting cult.
Maybe moms stop calling their very average sons “king” “prince” and other dog names that imply royalty.
When they aren’t.
The phrase "training wheels for their humanity" is so true.
This idea that patriarchy is a cage really resonated with me.
As a young man, I was savvy enough to realize that it had been methodically built by the men in my family, while at the same time recognizing that my father did the best he could to provide me a few tools to escape.
But in "recognizing the cage" versus "demanding women become the zookeepers", you've put your finger on the question of responsibility in a powerful way.
Thanks!
Man has epiphany, realizes he needs to work on self. Reads feminists, pops off in the comments about whatever, receives criticism instead of the praise he expected. Takes the criticism as justification to quit the work he started on himself, not realizing he had taken for granted the help and encouragement of strange women just because he asked.
This is awesome and certainly deserves much more attention from me than I can give on first blush as it is long and it's late here. Thank for sharing so much of your time and wisdom. I will be spending much more time on this excellent post.
The icon you are for writing this after that guy got offended by your last post!!!!
Dear Professor Meredith. I love your work, and found this article very interesting. As a girl, I absorbed, by osmosis I think, that almost everyone was more important than me. I had a few relationships in which I did most of the heavy lifting and was heartbroken when they ended. Looking back, though, it was a blessing. I got married when I was 25, to a good man. However, I always wondered why he had so much more free time than I did, and that his needs pretty much always came first. I remember one Christmas Eve. He’d been out with his work mates for a Christmas do. I’d been up a lot of the night with our youngest son, but when he staggered in at about 6 in the morning he went straight to bed and slept for the whole day. I was furious. But did I say anything? No, I did not. I just accepted it and carried on. He had many good qualities which was why I stayed. Plus, I suffered with depression and I know I wasn’t that easy to live with either. He died in 2011 and I still miss him every day.
Just a couple of days ago, I was talking with my hairdresser. She told me she had split up with her husband. He had left her in the centre of Birmingham (UK’s second largest city) on her own, in the evening. Her phone had run out of battery but she somehow made it home. That was the last straw, so she told him it was over. He is still in the house, doesn’t see what he did wrong, and is being difficult. Her question was “When are you going to grow up?” It makes me wonder why I didn’t see that incident with my husband as a deal breaker, or at least a conversation about how it had affected me and why I was so upset. But I always loved him.
Anyway, I didn’t intend to write an essay. Thank you for reading ❤️
The loving them is the hardest part sometimes. Because their behavior is annoying, it’s childish, but they aren’t BAD people. They just never learned better and then they continue to not learn better. And you end up feeling like it should have been your responsibility to fix them, to draw that line, to make them grow up.
Which, with a partner, it’s absolutely an option if you know to demand it (many don’t, as you pointed out, it’s just kind of the way things are and you don’t recognize for years and years that it was harmful) or they refuse to realize it’s a problem because society and media have made them think it’s fine and changing would be hard.
I’m glad he was good in so many ways and you loved him. I do wish you’d been able to have all that with someone who was carrying an equal load with you.
Bless you, thank you. I actually didn’t realise how much he did until he was no longer here to do it. But, yes, I am very conflicted about how much time, effort and emotionally draining it was to keep everybody happy. I see you have said you are in therapy. I might need to do the same to process all of this.
I am remarried now, to a man who does most of the heavy lifting in our relationship. I have several health conditions, so he does most of the housework, the shopping, the cooking and works full time. Again. He isn’t perfect, and there are things he says that have me raising my eyebrows 🤨 but we love each other and it isn’t a deal breaker.
Agreed they may not be bad people, however, it still makes them unsafe.
Wow! Thank you. I struggle with the boundaries and feeling responsible for my partners growth. I am awed and impressed by your responses to the arguments and by keeping to the point. Teach me, sensei!
This article is everything in my personal life right now.
Fuuuuckin’ A, sister!