Fight for Feeling
I. Feminism and Feeling
I put little faith in male feminists. More often than not, they prove to be the same as their non-feminist peers. Although, in a way, I do appreciate their contribution to the number no matter how insubstantial. In an attempt to encourage more men to join the movement, despite them being the primary aggressors, I worry that we prioritized putting forward reasons for them to feel also victimized as if they cannot simply empathize and be held accountable.
It is true that little boys are shaped by the society to be the ideal masculine, no matter how fragile and/or toxic. I am concerned for teenage boys whose brains are already unfit for love and opposite-sex companionship due to early and unlimited exposure to pornography, although I rather think there had been a time when they were fine still, and should have had the heart to stop going to websites that blatantly displays what is obviously illegal and abusive.
I am saddened for young boys who early on are not given the gift of the childhood vulnerability, or the innocent belief in the power of every single individual, and instead are brought up as cruel princes. I recognize that at the same times as girls are being harmed, boys are being taught to harm. The latter is not the exactly same but is nonetheless as sickening.
However, I am also uneased by the indication that men might be losing personal accountability as the sources of these issues if instead they are associating themselves more to the side of victimhood. I worry about the man pictured above, whose arrogance might have just distorted feminism for him and others, to everybody’s detriment. Men are not intended casualties of the patriarchy. Although, one (men) often puts forward that they are just as damaged. But, is it comparable?
Male suicide rates are high. Undoubtedly, emotional repression puts men in a state of mind that is damaging to their lives and bodies. However, this was not the patriarchy’s design. If we look at the whole, it makes absolute sense that it is men who are taught to be cold. In positions of authority, emotions are perceived as a downfall while hard heartedness is commendable. Even this deficiency is ultimately for their benefit in the lens of economy and power, which is what the system values; it was just a chink in their armors.
On the other hand, women are bestowed the emotional labors. They are regarded to be emotional creatures, and are so with disdain. Women's aptitude for feeling is not rewarded, it is belittled and abused, at worst it is not believed. One or many a woman might learn to guard her heart as a response. Who then, exactly, does the patriarchy tries to rob joy, anger, grief, and sadness from?
The psychological and emotional burden of the patriarchy is not the man’s to bear alone, but that the whole of humanity share. It only happened to be amplified by this systemic prototype in varying faces. Still, though in no way do I mean to invalidate, but by definition: it is worse for the girl.
II. Emotions and Empathy
Emotions are integral and inevitable. The way this society prioritizes objects over subjects is no way to live and so the heart will always rebel against it. The trouble is not that we teach the wrong things about feeling, but that we interfere with feeling at all. The human heart transcends judgment and institutions.
Sometimes I think that we are a little too late in assessing our collective spirits. Our understanding and development of technology, something so unfeeling and incredibly detached from our nature that I often think of it as an evil, came quicker than our understanding of ourselves. That in of itself is a laborious, perhaps impossible, task; a labyrinthine concept only made more convoluted by exposure to another complex self and world that exists in the troubled plane of the internet.
Perhaps it is a deep seated society ill that the only natural thing we possess and express is one that we cannot possibly understand to its extent; that our beautiful yet finite languages cannot possibly grasp its true form. To see it with hope, we have empathy. So, we do not need words to understand. Of course, even then there is no concrete confirmation of a shared meaning, and still it is a great comfort to both parties. Feeling is a great blessing indeed. But, in empathy lies the gift.