Toxic

Be a man

Society has a serious problem with male aggression, especially when that aggression turns toxic and abusive, often toward women and children. This is very visible in South Africa, but it is not unique to it. The common solution we hear is that men need to be more emotionally expressive. On the surface, that sounds reasonable. But the type of emotional expression being asked of men is very specific.

Men are encouraged to express emotions like sadness, unhappiness, vulnerability, and emotional pain. These are emotions that are traditionally associated with femininity. The idea is that if men accumulate or adopt these traits, they will relate better to women and children and become less harmful.

Here is the concern. Men are particularly good at accepting these emotions when they come from women or children. Not perfectly, but far better than the reverse. That didn’t happen by accident. Society trained men over generations to expect these emotional expressions from women. Men learned how to deal with them, tolerate them, adapt to them, and often step back in response.

This is reflected in the jokes men tell each other: “You won’t win the argument,” “You are always wrong,” “Your woman is always right.” These jokes are not random. They are a form of social conditioning and acceptance. Men learned, over time, how to coexist with emotional expression coming from women.

Women, on the other hand, were not trained in the same way to accept these emotions from men. That creates the paradox. Men are told they should express these emotions, but when some men do, many women respond poorly. These men are often labeled as soft, too emotional, weak, or unattractive. Many women openly state they are not attracted to men who express emotions this way.

One might argue that women need to grow up, but this reaction is also shaped by society. Women were not taught to receive vulnerability from men. Instead, the emotions that are broadly accepted from men are aggression, anger, and fear. Those are the emotional languages society recognizes as “male.”

So, when a man finds himself in emotional distress and tries to express what he is genuinely feeling, he quickly learns that honesty leads to dismissal. He’s told to toughen up. And this message does not only come from other men. It comes from women too.

As a result, men default to what they know works. Aggression. In many cases, aggression is the only way society clearly understands that a man is angry or in pain. Without aggression, his emotions are often invisible or ignored. That is what society has trained everyone to expect from men.

Men themselves agree this needs to change. They know this form of expression is destructive. But the alternatives are not effective for them in practice. While emotional vulnerability works socially for women, it often does not for men.

This creates a dangerous cycle. Aggression becomes the primary emotional outlet. When that aggression goes on for too long and the message still is not heard, it escalates into abuse. That is where real harm happens, and that is the crisis we are dealing with now.

So yes, men should be more emotionally expressive. But this is a two-way street. The people asking for these changes also need to learn how to receive and handle men’s emotions. Asking for vulnerability without knowing how to accept it only pushes men back to the one expression that society still understands from them: aggression.