I'm continually talking to people and reading articles and books that purport to have evidence that males are incapable of expressing their emotions, that they're just 'shut down', and that others, especially their intimate partners, have a difficult time 'breaking through' the wall of silence. I especially hear this complaint from females who are involved in heterosexual relationships with men, and from more empathic males who are involved in gay relationships. "I try to get him to talk about his deeper feelings, about what is bothering him, and about the intimacy between us, but he just clams up and refuses to talk to me. It's like talking to a wall."
The inference is that somehow males can't talk about their emotions, as though they are suffering from some organic problem. But when one steps back from the individual experience and looks at the larger cultural socialization processes, it's hardly surprising that many men behave this way. We live in a society that teaches males from infancy to not feel, and especially to not feel pain (or at least not have the audacity to express pain if they do feel it). Males are socialized from early childhood to stuff their emotions, to treat emotions as an alien mental process, and to see the expression of emotions (other than anger) as 'girlish stuff'. While females are encouraged to openly express their emotions - to in fact delight in the expression of a whole range of emotions - and therefore learn the 'language of feelings', boys are given quite a different message. And the result is that, as boys grow to adulthood, they are told thousands of times by peers, parents, older adults, movies, and the media, that "being a man" is all about not expressing 'feelings' [other than anger, which is the one 'feeling' allowed to them].
When I give presentations on men's emotional wellness, I often ask the women present what their experience is with men in dating and marriages. By and large, the immediate reaction is that no matter how much they encourage their partners to 'open up' emotionally, the effort is mostly wasted (from the standpoint of the women, anyway). I then ask if any of them have male children. I ask what happens when their male children get into a fight or fall down and injure themselves, and start to cry. Many of the women invariably say they tell the boys to "stop crying and be a man" or "stop crying and be a big boy". And then I make a connection between those two situations, of their relations between themselves and adult males and their upbringing of their male children. I note that, when we say to young boys to "stop crying and be a man", what we are really saying to them is "stuff your painful emotions and don't feel the pain that naturally arises when we are injured." We (both female and male adults) continually relay that message to boys as they grow up, with the added injunction that by stuffing those emotions, they will successfully 'become men'. So, then I say to the women "If you don't want your daughters, when they grow up and date males, to have the same problems with 'silent men', stop suppressing the emotions of your sons."
When I mention this to my female colleagues, they often retort that many females nowadays actively encourage their male partners to "express their deeper emotions", and 'work alongside them' in that process. But there are ample anecdotal stories (some told to me by other males) that when the men start talking about their deep inner emotions - and especially the painful, often traumatic, ones - their female partners quickly back away from active support of such a process and suddenly express negative feelings about their male partners continuing to express such emotions "because you're not being a man anymore."
The writer bell hooks discusses this dilemma in her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (a book about which I've written a review that is posted on the MMWI website, under 'Men's Emotional Wellness'). In her relationship with her intimate partner, she actively encouraged him - as she was taught to do as a 'liberated feminist' - to express his inner emotions. But when he started expressing feelings that ran contrary to her deeper socialization as a woman who expected a man to protect her, she quickly squashed that expression. When her male partner pointed out the contradiction, she realized she had a 'walk your talk' paradox on her hands. She realized that there was a definite contradiction between women asking men to 'open up emotionally' and then not being able to handle the painful emotions that often arise when men engage in that process. This was due to women's 'older' socialized expectations suddenly arising, and their worrying that their partners were 'no longer acting like men' - quite paradoxical impulses.
One of my favorite "Sylvia" cartoons has the female character saying to her girlfriend "someday every man in America is going to start talking about his deeper emotions", and then the next cartoon block says "...and women are going to wonder why they ever asked." It's hardly an easy paradox to solve. Both males and females are raised and socialized in a culture that has gender expectations of either sex, and in spite of our modern 'feminist challenge' to those historical cultural limitations, often the 'traditional' expectations about gender role behavior trump the more 'enlightened' ones.
Men, as a sex, do not suffer from alexithymia (excepting sociopaths, mentally disturbed individuals, and those suffering from PTSD). Rather, they are raised in a culture that actively encourages them to 'not express' their feelings and fails to teach them 'the language of feelings' that many females have been encouraged to express. Until the larger culture understands the effect that their training and gender expectations have upon men, labeling males as incapable of expressing emotions falls in the category of 'blaming the victim'.
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