Why Are Men So Much More Emotional Than Women?
Unintegrated feelings run most men from behind the rational facade
In a story that I recently read about Democratic women married to MAGA men, one of the comments was made by a guy with a Marine symbol as his profile image. He said, “Not even a survey to back this weird fantasy up. Show some data.” The original story, written by a man, was based on the accounts he’d heard from listeners on his SiriusXM radio show and from his related Facebook page. They were the tales told by women who were struggling with being married to men who since the 2016 election now felt emboldened to disrespect them in ways they had not in the past. In other words, the story wasn’t meant to convey anything other than the personal experiences of some of the people that the author had talked to.
But some disavowed emotional part of the commenter was apparently poked at by the subject matter — perhaps the self-reported fact that some women find MAGA men quite distressing to live with. His reaction was to try to dismiss the source of those feelings within himself, turning the focus outwards instead to demand statistics and data — in other words, by trying to counter and dismiss the emotions that story brought up in him with a bid for the rational.
I’ve seen this time and again, where the more someone is wedded to the infallibility of being rational, the more emotional they are actually likely to be. We need to know and understand our emotions in order for us not to be consumed by them, and pretending to live in a world where only science and data count is misguided at best, foolish at worst.
As I’ve already discussed in Your Emotions Are More Useful Than Your Thoughts, being cut off from your feelings doesn’t mean that they don’t affect you. In fact, it means the exact opposite.
People who have no real access to their emotional landscape are destined to be run by those very emotions from behind the scenes, like a puppet master pulling strings. They react, rather than respond and otherwise lash out at things that poke at their sore spots without even quite knowing why. Conversely, people who have fluency with their emotional landscape are able to better understand why they do what they do and to use that knowledge to help shape their lives and destinies. They are actually more in control of themselves than people who stuff and sublimate every emotion, only to have those seep through or explode in times of stress.
Most men have been socialized to believe that having emotions is feminine and weak. Emotions are also considered to be irrational, and out of control. Rather than learning to feel their emotions and work with them, men are more likely to stuff and disclaim them — which ironically, quite often leads them to behave in irrational and out of control ways. It’s true that acting from a place of pure emotion is likely to be unbalanced, but actually, this is something that is quite common with many men. When you think of the term “hothead,” who is most likely to come to mind? When you think of who is the most likely to get into fights or to berate strangers on the internet, who comes to mind? Men!
Women can be hotheads and irrational as well, but they are more likely to have their emotional sides integrated into their personas, and because they are less afraid of their emotions, in many cases women are better able to use them as tools; to combine their thoughts and their emotions to make decisions and to express themselves.
Mindlab founder and chairman Dr David Lewis said: “Gender stereotypes about men being stoic and women being emotional are reinforced by our day-to-day consumption of media and our social interactions.
“We tend to oversimplify and exaggerate the perceived differences between men and women and are more likely to focus on evidence that supports our existing gender stereotypes.
“This study suggests that men feel emotion just as much as women, sometimes more strongly, but are less willing to express these emotions openly due to expectations put on them by society.”
Men Are More Emotional Than Women But Less Likely To Show It
It’s nearly impossible to determine if there are any genetic differences between men and women as relates to emotion because our respective socializations play such a large part in how we behave. However, some studies have actually shown men to be more responsive to emotional stimuli than women, with many men admitting that they actually feel much more than they are letting show.
A sad new study released last week finds that most men would rather experience electrical shocks than be alone with their thoughts . (Yes, really.) Here’s how the study worked: First, men and women were asked to sit in a room alone and think about nothing — aka meditate — a task which prompted most of them to have negative thoughts. Then, they were given the same instructions, but with the added option of administering a small electrical shock to themselves, presumably as a distraction. Only a quarter of women chose to self-administer a shock, but a whole two-thirds of men did. (One man shocked himself 190 times.)
The only difficult emotion that has been traditionally socially sanctioned for men is anger, which often masks more vulnerable emotions such as fear, insecurity, guilt, or shame. Some men are so uncomfortable with their negative emotions that rather than face them, they construct elaborate intellectual-sounding frameworks to try to make sense of them.
Social critic, Jordan Peterson, is a glaring example of this. His millions of mostly male followers resonate so strongly with him because now they too have a way to externalize and intellectualize their vulnerable emotions. As I said in Looking At Life Through Wound-colored Glasses,
Western societies are enamored of the logical, the rational and the scientific, but emotional and rational aren’t necessarily the antithesis of each other. In fact, our emotions actually give us a lot of information that can be analyzed and used to make decisions from a place of choice rather than kneejerk reaction, but you have to be able to meet and understand your emotions before you can use them in that way. That takes effort and it takes vulnerability. Some people would just assume construct a framework to justify their wound-based beliefs instead. That takes effort also, but it doesn’t require the deep personal excavation of places that feel uncomfortable and so it may be easier to choose that.
All the better, if somebody else like Peterson constructs the handy framework for you, and all you have to do is adopt it as your tribal marker. Peterson’s theories are often contradictory or easily pulled apart, and yet they just feel so right to his followers who are happy to gloss over these glaring inconsistencies in the name of their emotional resonance.
I don’t know that men are inherently more emotional than women, although as I’ve said, some research indicates that they are. But what I do see almost every day is men who stuff or disavow their vulnerable emotions who are quite obviously at the mercy of them. They are overly enamored of things that they consider to be scientific and suspicious of anything that they can’t easily quantify.
Einstein was a great proponent of intuition, but there is no room for this kind of balance in the lives of some of these men who think that emulating Star Trek’s Mr. Spock is a desirable or even a possible thing. Their unexamined wounds and fears are writ large all over their interactions with people who invoke those vulnerable emotions within them. They have never learned how to feel and process these places in themselves and some would actually rather give themselves electric shocks than go to that uncomfortable place within. Our society has done men a terrible disservice in demanding that they stifle this very basic part of their humanity.
The quickest way to resolve difficult emotions is to allow yourself to experience them fully. This isn’t particularly pleasant to do, but once it is accomplished, it is much, much easier to move through those feelings. The way to not be carried away by your emotions is to acknowledge them and use them as information. When you embrace your emotions, you can learn to understand them and work with them. Pretending that you never feel anything that is hard to feel is a surefire way to be completely run by those same difficult emotions — something that many men fall prey to, making them in general, the much more emotional sex.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2019
“More recent studies show that as infants, male babies are more reactive emotionally, as well as more expressive of those emotions. This may help explain why, when men stuff down, or mask, their true feelings, most notably sadness, society suffers the consequences. When they do so, internalized pressure has more potential to erupt negatively.”
