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Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

nytimes.com

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Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#311

Post by poslathian »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #89
adamsea wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Female sexual attraction favors secure men who don't talk feelings. This results in men feeling unable to express their emotions around their significant other." Sources?

The evolutionary psychology idea is that women are attracted to men who show leader-like traits. That means appearing to have high self confidence, not expressing doubt but seeming certain, seeming generally happy and energetic. In terms of leadership, who do people follow? The guy who's got good ideas but is not quite sure of himself, or the guy who tells you it's going to be insanely great?

Speaking of leading to the “insanely great” promised land, apple’s cofounder was an infamous crier...not sure how that fits into the worldview here.

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#312

Post by weberc2 »

munificent wrote: post #104
bmarquez wrote: post #3

I participated in men's work, not specifically the ManKind Project but a closely related organization. I personally found it helpful doing weekly check-ins and having people holding me accountable to my goals. Unfortunately, the stigma regarding men sharing feelings is prevalent in western society, and it's not only the men causing it. When I told several female friends about the work they did, their response was: "A…

> it's not only the men causing it. One thing I find fascinating about humans is that we are so compulsively cultural that we will actively propagate cultural practices that are harmful even to ourselves. When you are young, you absorb whatever culture is around you completely uncritically, and then you immediately turn around and start broadcasting to the next generation. Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but…

> Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but it's really hard to uproot a norm or more once it's settled in, even if it's one that causes you personal pain.

I don’t know if I believe this in general. Certainly we are happy to utterly change our lifestyles whenever a convenient new technology comes about. How much have smart phones or social media changed us culturally in the spans of a couple decades? If culture can change quickly over convenience, surely actual pain would drive it to change even faster. It seems that those “hard to change” cultural aspects are actually _useful_ in some way, and therefore they survive.

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#313

Post by ryandrake »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #302
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confidence and overt vulnerability are opposites. No one is going to be impressed if you burst into tears during a code review. They're going to be a lot more impressed if you bullshit your way through with positivity and can-do. This is irrespective of the quality of the code. This culture rewards overt displays of competitive individualism and punishes weakness irrespective of actual productivity, value, or objecti…

>> Generally, being confident gets you breaks, even if you're astonishingly incompetent or just plain manipulative and dishonest. It gets you breaks until you reach the line which people don't want you to cross (which you will eventually cross due to your ever-inflating ego). At which point everyone you know will silently isolate you and you'll not even be able to realise what happened in time (again, due to your ove…

That glass ceiling limit seems to be at the CEO level, in the case of Elizabeth Holmes and other various "confident phonies" that get posted here on HN every few weeks. So, there doesn't seem to be a practical limit to how far overconfidence can get you in your career.

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#314

Post by jpendry »

pdub123 wrote: post #279

If you think "The Patriarchy"^TM exists, you have a very simplistic, univariate understanding of reality. You're associating causality for whatever negative things happen to you in your life, not with your own set of circumstances, choices, or human agency, but rather with one single factor-- some ethereal 00.00001% group of conspiratorial, ostensibly straight white old men... with whatever happens to you in life. It…

There are many problems with your argument, but I’d like to focus on the fact that your understanding of the definition of The Patriarchy is wrong.

From Wikipedia[0]:

> Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.

How many female presidents have we had here in the USA? What percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs are women?

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#315

Post by Drakim »

cameronbrown wrote: post #307
claudiawerner wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a great deal of civilisation, so was rule by tyrants and warlords, and eating meat. Arguments from nature don't get you very far.

Don't be reductionist. Most arguments have grounding in nature and the real world, believe it or not.

Having grounding in nature doesn't mean that it ought to be kept around though. Lots of harmful stuff is grounded in nature, and lots of amazing and good things have no grounding in nature. We have to examine everything and decide if it's worth keeping around regardless of the source.

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#316

Post by cameronbrown »

Drakim wrote: post #315
cameronbrown wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be reductionist. Most arguments have grounding in nature and the real world, believe it or not.

Having grounding in nature doesn't mean that it ought to be kept around though. Lots of harmful stuff is grounded in nature, and lots of amazing and good things have no grounding in nature. We have to examine everything and decide if it's worth keeping around regardless of the source.

And that's a fine opinion to have, but I doubt you'll find many people that think gender is harmful enough to be not "worth keeping around".

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#317

Post by m1sta_ »

bmarquez wrote: post #3

I participated in men's work, not specifically the ManKind Project but a closely related organization. I personally found it helpful doing weekly check-ins and having people holding me accountable to my goals. Unfortunately, the stigma regarding men sharing feelings is prevalent in western society, and it's not only the men causing it. When I told several female friends about the work they did, their response was: "A…

It's worse outside of western society.

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#318

Post by Drakim »

cameronbrown wrote: post #316
Drakim wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having grounding in nature doesn't mean that it ought to be kept around though. Lots of harmful stuff is grounded in nature, and lots of amazing and good things have no grounding in nature. We have to examine everything and decide if it's worth keeping around regardless of the source.

And that's a fine opinion to have, but I doubt you'll find many people that think gender is harmful enough to be not "worth keeping around".

Sure, but I think you'll find a lot of people are more than happy to drop the idea that only boys can play with toycars and only girls can play with dolls, and that if a girl like toycars she isn't "behaving like she should".

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#319

Post by claudiawerner »

cameronbrown wrote: post #316
Drakim wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having grounding in nature doesn't mean that it ought to be kept around though. Lots of harmful stuff is grounded in nature, and lots of amazing and good things have no grounding in nature. We have to examine everything and decide if it's worth keeping around regardless of the source.

And that's a fine opinion to have, but I doubt you'll find many people that think gender is harmful enough to be not "worth keeping around".

It's not a matter of the number of people who think (after all, there are a great number of people believing climate change isn't real and that the earth is flat) but the arguments which are presented. If someone has made an argument to the effect that gender is harmful enough to not be worth keeping around, then you can respond to that argument. However, not all opponents of the patriarchy argue that gender itself shouldn't be kept around. In fact, that's quite a niche position.

Re: Men Are Waiting to Share Some Feelings (2018)

#320

Post by weberc2 »

fapjacks wrote: post #271
dang wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've participated in some of this work and agree that having feeling-sharing be the top line item is misleading. Feelings are involved, but the core of it is to face what one has been avoiding, in order to become stronger and grow. There's plenty of room for stoicism in that. The way to overcome pain is to acknowledge and include it instead of denying it. The difference is huge, and most of us need help to get there—…

This is stoicism though. To process things instead of holding them inside, bottling them up, or putting them off such that they salt our enjoyment of life. However there's a social component of this feelings-sharing which is the subtext of the parent comment. Not all issues need to be shared, and in fact it's a kind of emotional vampirism to prioritize sharing emotional context without focusing on the explicit purpos…

Agreed. What dang referred to admiringly as “integrated masculinity” sounds a lot like stoicism to me.
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