Emotion

Here’s one of the oldest, normalized attacks against women:

“Women are emotional; men are rational.”   I can’t begin to fathom how much discrimination has been unleashed on women because of this lie.  The often repeated “women are more emotional than men” is meant as a put down, an assumption that emotions are bad and women are bad – or incompetent, unstable, untrustworthy — for having them.

Can we please put this lie in its grave where it belongs?  First, it’s an illogical binary.  Emotions aren’t the opposite of the rational.

And second, all human beings express emotion.

I suspect this lie continues to hold sway because women cry easier, more often and with less inhibition than men.   But crying isn’t even an emotion.  It’s the result of an emotion like sadness, joy, fear…to name a few.

Men express emotions all the time.  Harvey Weinstein was notorious for his rages.  Sports fans are legendary for their emotional outbursts.   The recent news footage from Philadelphia, after the Superbowl, is a typical case in point.    Eagle fans unleashed their “joy” of victory by turning over cars, tearing down street lamps, igniting fires.   It was mayhem driven by a riot of male emotion.   Take a moment and try to imagine if the same public destruction and chaos had been driven by women.   It would have “proven” how unstable women are;  however, when men indulge their emotions, it’s considered normal.

And it’s impossible to bring up male emotion without noting Active Shooters.  They’re all men.   It’s not possible to let loose a barrage of bullets on innocent people without being in the grip of emotion.

How curious that men don’t lose standing by expressing emotion in violent, murderous ways while women lose standing because we shed tears.  In what universe is that rational?

Why have men gotten away with the belief that “women are emotional,” and thus less-than-men, while men are paragons of rationality?

My guess is that if we look under the rock of most sexist attitudes, we’ll find a strategy for bolstering masculinity, one that’s dependent on demeaning women.  An unquestioned belief to this strategy is that women and men are opposites.  But we’re not opposites.  We’re all human capable of engendering the same panoply of virtues, vices and emotions.

The fear of emotion is a fear of women crying, is a fear of women expressing vulnerability, is a fear of vulnerability that makes men uncomfortable to their core.  The male strategy for dealing with this is to frame women’s tears as proof of male superiority.   This would be comical in its irrationality if it wasn’t so destructive to women and to our world.

And finally, I wonder…how many of the 70,000 people in the swing states who voted for Obama in 2012, but who didn’t vote for Clinton in 2016, made their decision on a false belief that women are too emotional to lead.   It remains to be seen how destructive that false belief will be to us all.