Real Men Cry

And psychopaths rage

Can I tell you three things I love right now before we get into men crying (which I also love)? I am heading to Paris next week for Glynn’s 50th and this newsletter about packing better blew my mind. Sara Petersen’s take down of gender bias in Cocomelon will make you hate it even more, as if that was possible.

This ObGyn is a grassroots hero. I know Kamala yard signs have taken awhile to come, but this woman is making her own Kamala-Tim signs for reproductive freedom. Follow her and order some.

Now let’s talk about the importance of dudes crying. Of course we are doing this because of the swift and disgusting backlash to Gus Walz joyfully sobbing while watching his father onstage at the DNC.

I can only hope my own kid is so proud of me one day. And the Internet was mostly delighted by it, as it should have been. But of course there were haters on the right who called Gus things like “weird” and a “blubbering bitch boy.”

Not only is it sick to insult a minor about anything, but it is toxic to perpetuate the lie that men shouldn’t be able to show a wide range of emotions.

I actually got my own husband Nick Aster on the microphone to talk about all of this on the podcast.

I want all three of my kids to have all of the emotions.

I talked to Peggy Orenstein, the author of Boys & Sex about this very thing. She interviewed hundreds of young boys and their parents about their lives. Here is what she learned.

First of all people would always say to me, “how’d you get boys to talk to you like that?” But boys want to talk! Nobody asks them enough to talk emotionally and deeply the way we ask girls too. Many of them never have the opportunity.

I would ask a lot of them, “What's the ideal guy?” And it was like they were channeling 1955. They would immediately go into talking about athleticism and sexual conquests and being rich. But it was also so clear they wanted alternatives to that. They really wanted ways that they could be a fuller person, especially around emotional suppression.

They were really in pain.

A lot of us adult women can attest that many adult men don’t have a big range of emotions because they lost it, because they weren’t taught to practice it. Their brains don’t wire that way any more.

So I would say the best thing to do right now to help little boys, even boys as young as your son is to name a broad range of emotions so that they have more than happiness and anger.

If sad goes to anger, if frustrated goes to anger, if confused goes to anger, if everything goes to anger, you can see why that can become a dangerous situation. So it's really important as mothers, but also as much as possible for the men in their lives, to really pinpoint emotions so that they can name the emotions in themselves and that gives them more of a range as they get older.

Hate is not usually a primary emotion. There's usually something underneath that. There's hurt, there's sadness, there's pain, there's something else. We need to plant the positive seeds and the full range of emotion when they are very young, whether it's how we talk about their bodies, or it's how we allow them to express emotion, or how we teach them to behave with others on the playground.

You have to make sure that nothing feels dirty or unspeakable or taboo to talk about when they are little because as they get older and things get more complicated they need to know they can come to you as someone who is not judgmental, as someone who has already shown openness.

Society suppressing male emotions is sadly nothing new.