Why I don’t like the Men’s Rights Movement
I don’t support Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs), or the establishment of Men’s groups and whatnot. You know how there is this whole idea about how traditional views of masculinity and the role of men actually makes men suffer. They are not allowed to express their feelings, not supposed to cry, suffer in silence. Men are encouraged to “tell their stories”, share their pain and so forth. Stop bottling it all up — we’re told.
I don’t agree with any of that. This isn’t how men are built. We do not benefit from sympathy; compassion is like kryptonite for us.
This whole trend is an imposition on men of what works for women. You all like to talk about your emotions, share your pain, get sympathy, have a good cry — and all that helps you cope and move on with your life. That’s great — for YOU. But this is the opposite of what works for men.
Sympathizing with us just makes us weaker and less able to cope. Sharing our feelings resolves nothing for us, and ultimately just makes us feel trivialized — because what we feel, we feel deeply, and it doesn’t go away by talking about it, it just becomes another random topic of conversation, which feels like short shrift.
Women act like, if you talk about your feelings, that in and of itself resolves them. We’re not like that. We “bottle up” our emotions because for us, that is where they belong. Verbalizing them is not the same as working through them; we work through them internally, and carry on with our lives in the meantime. We only allow them to disrupt us on the inside, because stability, peace and tranquillity are too important for us in the rest of our lives.
And as for sympathizing with our pain or whatever difficulties we endure — it does not make life easier by talking about how hard it is. It is hard, it will stay hard, and we just have to keep going — we cannot afford to indulge in self-pity. People who are relied upon, who provide the strength and stability of a family can’t afford to complain. You carry your own water, and it is no one else’s problem, and that is the attitude we need to maintain in order to function properly.
It is absurd to heed the advice of women on this kind of thing — they’re not men, they can’t do what we do or be what we are, so it seems unhealthy to them, but it is precisely what keeps us healthy.
If you are a woman and you want to help the men in your life with whatever they are going through — just let them feel appreciated; know that they are grappling with things, with feelings, with pain, with doubt, with responsibilities, and just appreciate them. That’s all we ask, and it is all we need.
