As usual with my posts, this post will be quite vague and open-ended and not completely coherent, but I still would like to share some thoughts I have had for a few months. This post will discuss some observations I have made regarding the emotional labour trope and about how people feel completely comfortable in deciding for men what their emotional expression should look like and essentially what is allowed and what isn't. I'm very much open to criticism or additional thoughts on the subject.

I will start with what I think is a valuable analogy to understand the issue of men expressing themselves specifically in heterosexual romantic relationships. As been talked about extensively by feminists (and it has been used to demonize male sexuality, which I don't agree with it, but its based on a kernel of truth imo) the anxiety of many men feel when it comes to female sexuality and parental certainty has traditionally played a role in societies that feminists would describe as patriarchal. In these societies, chastity was emphasized for women, women had to dress extremely modestly, and in some cases they were strongly controlled by their husbands and their autonomy was restricted. Now my point here is not to talk much more about that, and I also don't think the feminist interpretation of this is correct, but I think its true that parental anxiety played a role in how society was traditionally structured.

What I want to point out here though is that I think a lot of women have a similar kind of anxiety regarding the paternal investment and competence of their male partner. And that this anxiety can also lead to problems for men, similar to how mens's anxiety led to problems for women in the past and still does in religious and/or traditional countries. Furthermore, we currently also have ideologies that play into all of this serving as a tool to justify and rationalize these emotionally induced reactions so that people no longer have to question themselves anymore. This is where "emotional labour" comes in.

The concept of emotional labour has been discussed here plenty of times, but a common interpretation in Western society is that men trauma dump on women because they have no one else to lean on, which results in women performing emotional labour for men. Besides me thinking that this is completely untrue and that women "trauma dump" more often on men who are expected to be the stoic rocks, I would like to explore the kinds of attitudes that underlie this idea.

Often times, the concept of trauma dumping gets brought up when men are sharing their negative experiences opening up to women. Then you will have people say things like "Well there is a difference between trauma dumping and opening up" or "Women are there to listen, but men just don't know how to open up in the right way" which is essentially a convoluted way of saying "men's emotional expression has to fit in a narrow box of what is allowed and the only thing deciding on the limits of that box is how a woman feels about it in a specific moment". In other words, women should be the ones to decide what emotional expressions are justified and allowed in men, with no further questioning about women's judgement or even just the complexity of defining something as trauma dumping and the possible sexist biases at play when it comes to what is perceived as trauma dumping and what isn't. It also does a good job of playing into agency biases by portraying the issue as self-inflicted, and it isn't the first time feminists have done this. They pretty much do this all the time.

How does this relate to the first part of my post? It relates to the desire to control an aspect of the opposite gender, in men's case emotional expression, and in women's case sexual expression, because of biological instincts regarding reproduction. Men feeling like their emotions are fetishized by women (they are meant to make her feel special), men putting on a performance of fake vulnerability to please their partner while knowing she wouldn't accept the true vulnerability because it would fall out of the narrow box, a lot of women acting like they are owed blind trust from men whenever the topic of paternity testing comes up, the ridicule of men who feel upset about being forced into fatherhood, or even the response whenever men open up about feminist ideology. Its always "you're allowed to open up, BUT only if I deem your expression and emotions appropriate". This obviously does not make actual vulnerability appealing at all.

The point of this is not to demonize women, or to claim all women do this. Its more about society-wide patterns that I think are partly rooted in biological instincts and that can be harmfull. Instead of having ideologies that excuse people not looking within, we should try to be humble and understand the complexity of human beings, while trying to understand eachother regardless of being different.