I Blame Patriarchy

So I've been delving into a lot of reading on the subject of gender, feminism, and patriarchy. A lot of very interesting things come up when you really think about this stuff.

Masculine conditioning in our society obviously points males to maintain certain norms. The stereotype of the male condition is, of course, the unfeeling and stalwart being who deals with things on a completely detached and distance level. The effect has been compared to that of Effexor, an SNRI which essentially begins to block out feelings to the point of a person resembling a zombie.

Men are socialized, in a general sense, to be everything that is specifically not feminine. Concepts like empathy, sharing feelings, and addressing emotional concerns have been virtually eradicated between two heterosexual men. Most guys I know would grow really freaked out and uncomfortable if a male friend approached them and began talking about how hard it's been dealing with being dumped, or how concerned they are that the other is angry. Guys are simply "supposed" to be equipped to deal with these feelings alone rather than showing weakness by going to others.

And what do guy friends do when something devastating happens in their life, say a parent or significant other dying? They go drinking. Not only is drinking a social lubricant, but it provides a way for men to actually connect with one another, providing a sort of plausible deniability in their feelings. This is pretty sad, really. The constant drive for competition in the normative male makes showing vulnerability a horrible thing. I've seen this first hand with a lot of my friends; there are some of them that I could never even imagine opening up to, describing how I feel about certain things, etc. It's kind of sad, really. There are some, though, that are a lot more receptive to it, but it's tough to get them to open up themselves. Maybe it's some kind of fear of exploitation?

I've never had a whole lot of female friends that actually open themselves up. Most of the ones I knew in high school, with a few exceptions, fell into two categories: those popular and high-up ones that always carried a peppy sense of "happiness" without ever seeming to show any sort of chink in their armor, and the ones that seemed to expect that I was the normative male, causing feelings to be pushed off the table. There were then the shining few who would open themselves up, to an extent, but it seemed some things still remained buried. It then became difficult to adjust to actually having someone available to speak about what's driving me to do things. In never really having opportunity to open up before, it's tough to move to doing just that.

Honestly, this may be why I'm so intent on making friends who lie on the opposite side of the gender spectrum. I suppose that such societal norms make it a lot more comfortable to open up to women. The strange thing is, though, the person who I spent a lot of time with in the first few months of living out here was a girl, but for all intents and purposes may as well have been a guy. Everything was shut in, guarded. It just felt horribly awkward whenever I tried to ask her how she felt about essentially anything. Maybe that's merely because it's strange to see a male share his feelings, no matter who's doing the listening?

More thoughts on this later, probably. Gender studies is fascinating.