have those people who are like “poor men under patriarchy!! never allowed to express their emotions!!! :(” ever been in the presence of a man who is frustrated or angry about something because in my experience they express their emotions far too much and scream or break things or kill people
Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuser’s emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house. When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort. His partner’s life crises, the children’s sicknesses, meals, birthdays—nothing else matters as much as his feelings.
It is not his feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his partner’s feelings and his children’s feelings. Those are the emotions that he knows so little about and that he needs to “get in touch with.” My job as an abuse counselor often involves steering the discussion away from how my clients feel and toward how they think (including their attitudes toward their partners’ feelings). My clients keep trying to drive the ball back into the court that is familiar and comfortable to them, where their inner world is the only thing that matters.
For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuser’s selfish focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.
Lundy Bancroft. 2002. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Books. pp. 30–31.
I don’t think this is an either/or.
We can recognize that the patriarchy teaches men to trivialize the emotions of women AND that it teaches men that feeling emotions is shameful AND that violence is the only acceptable outlet of their emotions (and that that is somehow not actually an emotional act) AND we can admit that in addition to nurturing abusiveness this also really damages men.
QueerAnarchism 