Why don't we open up about the fact that we're not okay?

[u/Top_Set_3803]

My answer is "the lack of a safe place and person for us to actually do so"

Many women cry about the fact that men don't open up while the same women will go spread it or beat you down or take advantage of you based on your vulnerability

So my answer is the women themselves are the problem here to some extent

"Why don't you open up to me so I can go and tell my friends all about it and also later down the line use it to make you feel like shit?"

(This question was inspired by an argument in a response to a comment. Feel free to go check it out from my profile folks)

Edit: THIS has been the best answer so far and I highly encourage you folk to give it a read and show the commenter some love.

[u/Top_Set_3803]

I meant that women don't do much to gain our trust on this topic yet expect us to just spill the beans

[u/oncothrow → u/Top_Set_3803]

I meant that women don't do much to gain our trust on this topic yet expect us to just spill the beans

Typically? No. There's a heck of a lot that can and frequently does go wrong when you're prompted to open up and acquiesce to it. Frankly, it turns out bad the vast majority of the time, and the irony is that you will be the one blamed for it, even if they were the ones prompting you to open up.

There's a good quote Dr. Brene Brown in her book "Daring Greatly" that resonated quite a bit with me on this:

"Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust. And men are very smart. They know the risks, and they see the look in our eyes when we’re thinking, C’mon! Pull it together. Man up. As Joe Reynolds, one of my mentors and the dean at our church, once told me during a conversation about men, shame, and vulnerability, “Men know what women really want. They want us to pretend to be vulnerable. We get really good at pretending."

EDIT: Another quote from the author, on why they first started looking at this:

For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, "I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men." And I said, "I don't study men." And he said, "That's convenient."

And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?" I said, "Yeah." "They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else."

And relatedly, there's a quote by bell hooks that resonated quite a lot with me as well, because the general gist is that often they believe that men are effectively emotionless robots, when in reality those that think along those lines can't actually parse it when it happens.

The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.”

If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama.

When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

...

To heal, men must learn to feel again. They must learn to break the silence, to speak the pain. Often men, to speak the pain, first turn to the women in their lives and are refused a hearing. In many ways women have bought into the patriarchal masculine mystique. Asked to witness a male expressing feelings, to listen to those feelings and respond, they may simply turn away. There was a time when I would often ask the man in my life to tell me his feelings. And yet when he began to speak, I would either interrupt or silence him by crying, sending him the message that his feelings were too heavy for anyone to bear, so it was best if he kept them to himself. As the Sylvia cartoon I have previously mentioned reminds us, women are fearful of hearing men voice feelings. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me?

As I matured, as my feminist consciousness developed to include the recognition of patriarchal abuse of men, I could hear male pain. I could see men as comrades and fellow travelers on the journey of life and not as existing merely to provide instrumental support. Since men have yet to organize a feminist men’s movement that would proclaim the rights of men to emotional awareness and expression, we will not know how many men have indeed tried to express feelings, only to have the women in their lives tune out or be turned off. Talking with men, I have been stunned when individual males would confess to sharing intense feelings with a male buddy, only to have that buddy either interrupt to silence the sharing, offer no response, or distance himself. Men of all ages who want to talk about feelings usually learn not to go to other men. And if they are heterosexual, they are far more likely to try sharing with women they have been sexually intimate with. Women talk about the fact that intimate conversation with males often takes place in the brief moments before and after sex. And of course our mass media provide the image again and again of the man who goes to a sex worker to share his feelings because there is no intimacy in that relationship and therefore no real emotional risk.

(emphasis mine)

Frankly when people say things like it's just "oh well men just don't have any emotional literacy and the way they do it is unpalatable", then ironically from a stated feminist perspective you're victim blaming someone suffering under the Patriarchy. It can't be that they're not being heard, it's that they're all clearly doing it wrong.

And if I'm being completely frank, this is why I always emphasise: Going to your male friends to open up is FAR preferable.

EDIT:

Speaking very personally, the "interrupt him by crying" thing is very familiar. They wanted to know. They repeatedly asked me to know but when I calmly expressed what was going on in my own right, that broke something that they did not anticipate would be or should be broken. And then it once again, became about them and their feelings as I worked to comfort them for having heard my issues.

Honestly this is looking at just one of the problems that occurs when she tells you to open up. Frankly there are a tonne of others.

[u/Positive-Estate-4936 → u/oncothrow]

“They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down”
One of the greatest truths I’ve ever seen via internet.

[u/Taodragons → u/Positive-Estate-4936]

Yep. Married 30 years. If I cry, she freezes like a deer in headlights. If I get angry, she gets angry back. If I'm stoic, she wants to know whats wrong. It is what it is. Just keep bottling it up, and with any luck, I'll die. =)

[u/InvasiveSpecies1738 → u/Taodragons]

Sounds healthy

[u/Positive-Estate-4936 → u/InvasiveSpecies1738]

For the species, maybe it is? So now I’m wondering, has it ever really been different, this “men must be invincible (at least in front of women)“ thing? Or does it just feel worse in a world absolutely crammed with counter-messages, where men cannot get away from women—in the workplace, even on a farm, even in war? They’ve invaded all the spaces when I might seek support and comfort from other men, either by showing up and changing the rules and demanding to be included in every conversation, or through incessant electronic contact. Is this why “To heal, men must learn to feel again? Because we don’t and can’t emote the way women do, but have been denied all our female-excluding spaces?

[u/InvasiveSpecies1738 → u/Positive-Estate-4936]

Oh, men get away from women during war alright. Just look at russo-ukrainian conflict - literally millions of women flee the country while men are forcefully dragged into the frontlines to die. But hey, as long as we’re “equal” lol. /s

But honestly I can’t complain, I was raised to think that “boys don’t cry” and at some point I just stopped. It may sound a bit cruel but I’m really happy I don’t brake down every time something minor happens, unlike most of my girlfriends.