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Men are often expected to carry certain things without saying much. Fear. Loneliness. Insecurity. Sex. Money. Aging. Relationships. Sometimes even happiness.
I’m curious what belongs on your list.
What is something you think men are expected to handle quietly, whether anyone actually says so or not? And what makes it difficult to talk about?
There’s no particular answer I’m looking for here. I’m interested in where the conversation goes.
Evidently, my list is a lot shorter than most guys. Where the heck are they? This is anonymous, so grow a pair gentlemen!
My Dad was in the generation that kept it all in, EVERYTHING except anger. He had a triple bypass and a quintuple bypass as a result.
Seeing the damage firsthand made me see before I was 30 that that is not the way to live.
Being raised that way, it took a while for me to catch on the the silence. What made it difficult for him was the idea that it was "unmanly" to be open, vulnerable, and completely honest. His life advice? "Keep your bowels open and your mouth shut."
I can relate to this quite a bit. My dad was British and part of the Silent Generation. He had been a WWII pilot, and while he was a very loving man in his own way, he was also intensely private and largely emotionally unavailable. There were things you simply didn’t talk about.
I think that’s part of why I’m so interested now in the ways men communicate with each other, or don’t. I don’t necessarily fault that generation. In many ways, they were taught that silence was strength. But we also got to see what that silence cost them, and sometimes what it cost the people who loved them.
Male masturbation. The true national (international) pastime that no one talks about.
This is starting change, but no one discusses masturbation in the same carefree manner that they discuss sports or work or politics or religion or even sex. It remains by and large the act “that shall not be mentioned” even though the vast majority of men routinely practice it and enjoy it! Pornography is fair game for discussion, but masturbation, astonishingly, is not.
The stigma implanted into masturbation back in the nineteenth century endures today. You can provide a multiple of reasons why this stigma remains, but, stepping back, none of it makes rational sense. Aliens from another planet would think we were crazy.
I think you’re right that a lot of it probably makes no rational sense when you really examine it. We inherit these rules about what men are supposed to talk about, often without ever consciously agreeing to them.
What fascinates me is how specific those rules can be. Two men might comfortably discuss incredibly personal things about money, marriage, health, work, even fear, and then suddenly hit an invisible wall when the subject turns to masturbation or something sexual. Nobody announced the rule, but somehow both men know it’s there.
Maybe that’s part of what I’m trying to understand with this conversation. Not whether men should talk about these things, but where those invisible boundaries came from and why some of them remain so powerful.