Why have we made emotions gender-specific?

A human capability, not a gendered one.

I saw a good post from Matt Haig this week, and what he said is something we talk about often.

Here’s his post in full if you can’t / don’t want to click the link:

His caption was even more beautiful:

“We all arrive here crying”.

It’s an important point about how we keep talking about emotions. I often see people telling men to “get more in touch with their feminine side”.

It’s generally well-meaning, but it plays into the problem that we’re trying to break: the fact that we’ve made emotions gendered.

Emotions aren’t feminine, they’re human.

The notion that they’re feminine is a social construct/concept/belief, not a biological fact or certainty.

When we tell men to get more feminine, we’re reinforcing that faulty social construct, whether we like it or not.

We should either be telling people:

a) to get more human,

b) to get more comfortable sitting with and processing natural emotions.

Both are more accurate, and the latter particularly is specific and gets to the nub of the issue. “Be more feminine”, while being a phrase that we can probably cognitively understand, isn’t really that specific. What does it even mean? There are limitless ways we can define femininity, so what does “get more feminine” even mean?

I also come at this with my marketing hat on.

The golden rule of marketing is you should speak to your target audience in their language if you want to bring them along on the path you’re trying to take them down.

If we’re trying to reach a bunch of men who have repressed their emotions for decades and think they have to be ultra-macho, and our solution is “get in touch with your feminine” side, how do we honestly think that will land?

Do we think they’ll put down their dumbbells and skip down the road to therapy? If anything, they will probably just retreat even further into their sense of masculinity as a defence mechanism.

In truth, the people who will resonate with the phrase “getting more in touch with your feminine side” will be the men who have already done this. We’ll be preaching to the converted.

So, this should be the part where I helpfully lay out a five-point plan on exactly what to say, right?

That would be nice, and without making excuses, it’s not as easy as that. This is a complex conversation, and finding the right words is half the problem.

But the one thing I do know is that there are times when talking about masculinity and femininity is incredibly helpful, and I don’t think this is one of them.

We have to help people realise that we are humans (crazy discovery, I know), and the boxes we operate within are mostly social constructs, built at a point in time to serve a minority, not something we should keep ourselves trapped within.

Emotions are human. We have them for a reason. Time to stop demonising them.

George x