Myth that men suppress their feelings more than women

[Ava6]

This is utter BS. Men are only taught to suppress UNSELFISH feelings such as sympathy. The entire world caters to their absolute worst selfish emotions. Women are coerced into building their whole lives around mens' insecurity, dominance fantasies, fear of rejection, violent outbursts, sexual "needs", jealousy. All those are emotions that men get free reign on.

I'm undergoing ASD assessment and I took an empathy test. Guess what: the average NT man tests only slightly below the average woman (42 to 37). My result is typical for an ASD woman: 23. It's leagues below the vast majority of men and yet I still exercise an awful lot more empathy in my daily life than them. Which means that they are TAUGHT to keep a lid on all that sympathy towards women.

It's human females that are truly emotionally suppressed by the patriarchy. They are supposed to repress their anger, fear and resentment towards men and sense of degradation just to function in society everyday. They are taught to mistrust their instincts, sexuality, holistic unity with their body. They are expected to reign in their ambition, independence, dominance, creative drive, intelligence, dislike of children (for those that have it), need for orgasms and masturbation. They are gaslit when they figure out their oppression and PTSD from certain elements of it. They are supposed to keep quiet when suffering from pain due to their reproductive system and channel their spirituality into male-worshipping religions. Lately they are supposed to erase their whole existence to accomodate the genderfeelz of dudes.

I struggled with severe anxiety and derealisation (with painful physical effects) for close to a decade due to porn culture-induced body anxiety and worry about not performing femininity well enough . In large part, becoming a radfem and resolving not to give a hoot about those things has reunited me with my own body - and the disassociation disappeared overnight, as if waived away by a magic wand. The general anxiety's been greatly reduced too - because I don't repress my feminist feelings anymore. And males have the gall to say they're emotionally suppressed by society???

Absolutely superb post!!! Really insightful and thought provoking. I definitely agree, women have to suppress SO many emotions, it's both unfair and unhealthy.

And now the trans lobby is busy preying on autistic girls and thus undoing the progress of recognising HFA in girls and it's unique set of challenges for women. Screw you, Baron-Cohen, with your extreme male brain theory. It's on par with Freud's crap about women.

But back to male emotions: consider emasculation. I just scoff every time I hear that word because it's a unique socially constructed emotion dudes invented especially for themselves in order to encode male supremacy into the language. Think of the gymnastics women go through to avoid 'emasculating' their male partners (eg. repressing pride in their own achievements).

Zzzzzzzzzzz

If men want to campaign about men’s issues then they are free to do that. It’s not up to us as women to sort it out for them.

This post has made me think about my own experiences with eating disorders. I live or starve myself in order to suppress feelings (often anger). I think a lot is made of body image as a reason for eating disorders being a mainly female illness, but for me at least the suppressing of feelings is a much more potent trigger which is underexplored.

Binge not live!

You're almost veering into a 'them against us' position though which isn't helpful. Men and women have different pressures emotionally, you can make a good case for women having more pressure but doesn't mean mens issues should be ignored. The problem with men is they don't really know the pressures of being a women.

I used to be like this when I was libfem. Now as a radfem I realise that men made those rules and they enforce them. And that they do know about the shittiness of the female condition perfectly well, because they created it and they keep upholding it violently, economically and through social brainwashing. If they wanted to get rid of the restrictions on themselves by the patriarchy - then they would end the patriarchy. Unfortunately, that would mean the end of all their mountain of privilege as well and they will never sacrifice it.

I do, however, believe that the nicer men practice an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance in daily life in order to keep upholding the status quo.

I do, however, believe that the nicer men practice an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance in daily life in order to keep upholding the status quo.
I think so too. I had a thread about how to help men recently, cognitive dissonance sums it up nicely. Thank you