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25. Mar 2025|08:43 |
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Last week, everyone decided young men’s emotions needed another airing. The media class determined en masse that the TV drama Adolescence was actually a documentary, and that we need more internet censorship to stop boys’ feelings going wrong. Speaking at the Dimbleby lecture, the former England footballer Gareth Southgate popped up to lament the way young men are turning away from real-life mentors to “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers”, who teach boys that “strength means never showing emotion”. And, on cue, Victoria Derbyshire invited three young UK men onto Newsnight, where they discussed when they last cried. Even Keir Starmer is worried.
Two out of three could not remember [when was the last time they cried]; all agreed that there’s a general, culture-wide pressure on men to restrain their emotions. Implicitly, we’re to understand that this is A Bad Thing. And we might be forgiven for imagining that all these young men really need is Elsa’s message in Frozen: “Let It Go”. What could possibly go wrong? Watching that clip, though, I remembered the running club I encountered in the countryside a couple of summers ago. It struck me: are we sure we know which feelings men would express, and how they’d express them, if they felt truly empowered to Let It Go?
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Where people of either sex are unhappy, there’s often a complex mix of internalising (that is, introspective or self-directed) behaviours, such as sadness or rumination, and externalising responses, such as hyperactivity or aggression. And while there’s a great deal of overlap between the sexes, internalising appears to be more common among women and externalising more common among men.
The increase in public support for emotional expressiveness might well bring relief and reassurance, at least to those men who are more prone to internalising. But what about those men — who are, remember, as a group far bigger and stronger than women — who feel intensely, but tend to externalise negative emotion? Which is to say: what about the men who have a propensity to respond to sadness or anger with violence or aggression? It strikes me that, among this group, a far more prosocial message overall than “Let It Go” might well be “Suck It Up”.
And this brings us to the real heart of the matter. If “Let It Go” is a risky message, at least for men who tend to externalise, “Suck It Up” is not much of an alternative — at least not on its own. It invites the question: “Why?” Why, that is, should men accept this demand for self-restraint? The question is especially mordant when both the aggression being restrained, and also the restraint itself, are denounced as “toxic masculinity”. You would need a truly inspiring reason to accept so bewildering an edict; and yet to my eye no such reason is currently on offer. (I don’t think being invited on Newsnight to talk about crying counts.)
In a culture that offers men no idealistic reason to suppress their baser instincts, then, those young men who don’t simply act out violently can perhaps be forgiven for adopting an individualistic one: honing their ability to control their own urges and feelings, then directing this capacity for self-mastery to purely selfish goals. This is the moral vacuum within which influencers such as Andrew Tate operate, teaching a value-free programme of masculine self-control stripped of higher aims beyond individual wealth and sexual dominance.
But the core of the problem isn’t men being told to control their feelings. It’s the poverty of the ends to which that control is then ordered. Because even strength and aggression are not bad as such: both domestic public order and international freedom from conflict rest ultimately on a capacity for violence. But the kind of violence that upholds public order or defends a nation isn’t comparable to (say) that employed by the machete-wielding teenage gang members that crashed a birthday party in Essex over the weekend. On the contrary: the capacity of public-spirited individuals — almost always men — for controlled violence is what stands between us and that kind of chaos and fear. The willingness of a few good men to be prosocially violent in an emergency is the ultimate guarantor of the peace in which I can run alone.
Encouraging men to repress the extremes of their emotional range is not wrong or cruel. It’s civilisationally essential. But there has to be a why, or few will bother — and those that do will do so for purely selfish ends. And then, before long, you won’t have a civilisation; just (at best) warring tribes, or (worse still) omnium bellum contra omnes.
https://unherd.com/2025/03/male-repression-is-good-actually/ |
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