At the end of the twentieth century, the predominant view within Western cultures of men’s relationship with emotions was characterised by terms such as ‘the inexpressive male’ and ‘restrictive emotionality’. In selfreport studies, men typically reported a lower frequency and intensity of experience of both positive emotions, such as love, affection and joy, and negative emotions, such as embarrassment, fear and sadness, than did women. Men reported lower levels of positive and negative emotional expressiveness than women; crying much less frequently; and no greater frequency of experience, expression or suppression of anger (Kring 2000). However, men did report that their anger involved aggression towards others more than women’s did. Men’s accounts of their emotional selves varied only slightly from observational studies and those examining cultural beliefs and stereotypes. Men used no fewer emotion terms in naturalistic talk or in recounting emotional experiences than women, but they were observed and believed to verbally communicate their feelings less than women. The only exception was that men were believed to express their anger vocally, through facial expressions and behaviour (Brody and Hall 2004). So strong were these beliefs and stereotypes that Robinson et al. (1998) termed it the ‘gender heuristic’: men were believed to experience and express more socially desirable self-oriented emotions, such as pride, and more socially undesirable other-oriented emotions, such as anger, than women.
These accounts of men’s patterns of emotional response resulted in the adoption of a deficit model, wherein men were assumed not to express the emotions they experienced. Men were supposed to be internalisers; their emotional experiences found expression only as physiological arousal rather than through speech or behaviour, resulting in a litany of personally, relationally and socially undesirable consequences, including drink and drug abuse, dangerous driving, violent outbursts, loneliness, depression and psychophysiological disorders such as headaches, backaches and ulcers (Goldberg 1976). At its extreme, this approach pathologised men’s purported inability to express their emotions verbally as ‘normative male alexithymia’ (Levant 1998). Given the personal and social ills that were supposed to follow from men’s emotional inexpressivity, men’s emotional lives became a primary location of efforts towards change in sexual politics: by changing the way men expressed their emotions, they might change both their selves and their societies for the better (Petersen 1998).
To believe that men’s patterns of emotional responding can change is, however, to theorise emotions differently from much of mainstream psychology. This research typically follows Darwin (1872) in conceptualising emotions as essential, as differing patterns of physiological and expressive responses to differing environmental stimuli, which must, in order to become cross-culturally prevalent through inheritance, serve some beneficial adaptive function (Buss 1995). However, the literature on biological differences, in areas such as cerebral lateralisation and testosterone levels, regularly concludes that the findings are inconclusive and even that the direction of causality between biological differences and differences in emotional expressiveness is uncertain (Brody 1999). Reported differences between men and women in emotional expressivity cannot be accounted for by recourse to biology or evolution alone.
In the absence of overwhelming biological or evolutionary proof regarding men’s emotional patterns, theorists turned to sociocultural accounts. For Seidler (1994), the post-Enlightenment epistemologies of mind, reason and objectivity provided for a version of masculinity into which men, in order to occupy dominant positions at personal, social and cultural levels, were forced to fit. By doing so, men devalued the embodied, the emotional and the subjective, both in themselves and in others. Through this estrangement from their own essential masculine emotional selves, men did violence to their selves and fell victims to culturally prescribed standards of masculinity. Such an account, by ascribing to men the status of victims, was highly compatible with the Men’s Liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s and clearly identified the object requiring change as the hegemonic postEnlightenment version of masculinity.
However, such accounts of men’s relationship with emotions were challenged at the start of the twenty-first century by more dynamic accounts of the role played by emotions in the politics of everyday life (Shields 2005). There were ways by which men and women could publicly express emotions that were considered ‘manly’. ‘Manly emotion’ was characterised by the subtle communication of a powerful emotional experience held under equally powerful control. Such an emotional display evidenced individuals’ authenticity, their essential humanity, while at the same time evidencing their capacity to exercise selfcontrol and to act within reason, all celebrated characteristics within Western cultures. The association of the masculine with the rational and the feminine with the emotional began to collapse. Attention was turned from how performances of masculinity, specifically the devaluing of emotional experience and expression, ensured and perpetuated male dominance to how particular performances of emotion, in particular relational and social contexts, could confer power and authority on individuals, regardless of gender.
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