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I don't necessarily agree. Sometimes we gotta strip our emotions and deal with problems pragmatically and surgically. Mistakes are okay when it is allowable, but when the stakes are higher, they are unforgivable.
Life isn't fair, why should any scenario be any different? If we want to get by and survive, we have to deal with it and figure out ways to implement solutions our own way.
I'm not saying you need to cry about everything though and I've said that in the take. But somebody does't need to be ridiculed for crying when their wife dies. You can have emotions and still do what needs to be done. I grew up in a mining town. I've seen men come out of that mine after an accident. They were able to behave pragmatically when they needed to but they all had tears in their eyes as they pulled a dead coworker out of the rubble. Their tears didn't stop them from doing what they had to do.
Hmm, I wasn't applying this to men only nor am I saying emotions are unimportant, but they must be a null-factor in most situations. I've seen enough critical mistakes guided by emotions rather than pragmatism. Perhaps I'm different in that I'm not really affected by pretty much anything because it happens all the time, things can be mourned for later, but solution timings won't wait for anyone or anything.
And I'm not saying there is no room for pragmatism either, or that you have to cry all the time. I've seen far too many good men lost because they didn't deal with emotions properly. By all means encourage people to behave pragmatically in the moment but let people grieve after.
I find it somewhat strange that a lady is giving advice on what men ought to do or to think. True - some of my gender need further guidance. But a bird teaching a fish how to swim still is irritating to me.
Sorry to say it, but I do not think that you are qualified to make statements like the above. I don't give advice on pregnancy either. Peace.
And your entitled to your opinion thanks for reading anyway.
:D Be safe
Hmmmm if your 4year old falls over you should tell him that doing dumb things (not looking where he is walking, or running when he shouldn’t) comes with consequences. He has no reason to cry or complain because it was his own fault.
Manning up is about taking responsibility for your actions. Showing emotion when you caused the clusterfuck is not a good thing.
4 year olds dpnt understand the concept of "that was your fault" theyd only be hearing "dont do that" after a complete accident that they would have avoided had they known it was going to happen.
And just because it was their fault, doesn't mean they can't cry. Ever heard of scraped knees and pain?
@BaileyisDarcy Generally you tell 4 year olds not to run on the pavement or something and, generally they don’t listen to you until they fall over. So he now knows what happens if he runs and that’s the prime opportunity to enforce that lesson because he’s just learnt it himself.
He can cry for sure, but it’s important to tell him it’s his own fault, because you as the parent WARNED him about it and now he has experienced it.
Sure, let the kid know that he was told not to run on the footpath. But he doesn't understand fault. And you certainly dont say it ad coldly as that.
The best way fot a kid to learn is to make mistakes, he's not going to do that with you standing over him dcreeching DONT DO THAT
@BaileyisDarcy Haha.. I think you're reading his replies through an amplifier.
I'm with @Cosytoasty on this. They do need to know they aren't supposed to do that, because in life you can't expect to be comforted for the results of your own stupid mistakes.
Yes he's still little, and yes he hasn't learned that yet (for some reason?) But that's a lesson the sooner learned the better. I know I'm glad I learned it early.
I'm not sure I even need to post this since the people that my answer involves aren't going to be reading about it on this website lol. We need all types in the world, because I frequently hear women saying that "men aren't men" anymore and they shame men who aren't hyper masculine traditionalists.
i laugh at any man who tries to act real masculine & i speak soley based frim my own experiences
i never met my parents & including grandparents & was raised by strangers throughout my life & i was never consulted with the "man up" BS i hear too often about
i was an emotional wreck for a few years because i was bitter i would never meet my parents... ever & at that time i did shed a lot of tears & i was mocked for it by a few supposed "manly men" that i had to put on the deck if i was to be respected
the term man up doesn't necessarily mean stop crying for something, it also means take responsibility for yourself and how you treat the world. man up and be a good person. cry when something bad happens, share and show your emotion. just man up when u need to take responsibility for yourself.
Agree. Thats the tricky thing about language iwords mean different things to different people. I have told someone to man up and quit blaming everyone else or man up and get a job or man up stop cheating or man up and tell me what you really think. It can mean be a man of good character.
@NottybutNice yup. agreed
I'm with @hellionthesagereborn and @markscott here.
Men do need to man up, and it's not referring to being emotionless or cramming them all in a pint jar in your stomach.
It's about taking a man's role, doing what needs to be done, and being in control of your emotions. Like you're supposed to.
You should have called this "How to make your son a pussy 101". Newsflash honey, the world is a scary and horrible place. Even if you man up and toughen up you are still going to struggle and suffer a lot. Without getting tough first, others will eat you alive. Plus, men are the only thing standing between women and children, and all the horrors there are in this world. We all need to be soldiers, at least somewhat. Your take would make sense if we were living in a Star Trek like universe, where the people are evolved and nice and everything is beautiful. But thats not where we live. So this take is a pile of crap
While I do agree to a large degree we do need to teach the children not to be quite as sensitive a d vulnerable as they often are this goes for girls as well
We need to teach them to accept their emotions but not be ruled by them
Absolutely but part of learning how to not be ruled by emotions is learning how to process them properly. Sometimes dudes gotta cry. There is a difference between crying because someone was mean to you and crying when a loved one dies.
That is a good illustration of something that means very little and something that actually warrants strong emotions
Which is exactly my point. Sometimes strong emotions are warranted and bottling them up is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I would never say to any of my male friends to "man up" if they really do need to cry, I tell them to "man up" when they're being a coward.
And personally, if I ever do need to cry, then I will. But I'm not that kind of person, and I won't force myself to express emotions when it's not necessary simply to break gender norms. If something makes me sad, then I prefer to figure out a way to fix the problem rather than to just whine about it.
I like that distinction, actually. Great point!
I'm not abdicating for men to break down all the time. I'm abdicating for men who at times need to show strong emotions being able to express them openly. Some people just aren't criers and that is fine, but some are regardless of gender. I'm more or less fighting the notion of emotions equalling weakness. You can be both sad about something and find a rational solution or way of dealing with it. You can in fact do both.
Obviously.
My point was that if I'm sad, I don't see how just whining about it will help. I would much rather discuss how to fix it than discuss how I feel about it.
i agree with you, shouldn't be called "man up". Maybe "toughen up".
I do think its important to teach your kid, male or female, a certain level of toughness and independence. you can't be there for them for everything, sometimes help just isn't coming. its not nice, but the world isn't nice either.
you dont want to raise a wimp. you want to raise a hero.
Absolutely, but sometimes even heroes cry.
Men always complain that they are told to toughen up and not taken seriously that's why male suicide rate is so high.
Now that a woman actually mentions that men don't need to man up it's okay to be easy on yourself... look at the dudes complaining lol.
Have you considered that maybe it's two different men saying the two different things? And not just a monolithic hive-mind group of "men"? And the point is that it doesn't matter what any ONE person says, because it's an attitude of society. Men are still going to be rewarded/punished on the same criteria, despite this article being posted.
If that was the case we would have seen a huge drop in suicides, we should have seen a high suicide rate in the sixties, seventies and eighties and a sharp drop in the nineties and more recent times as "man up" started to lose "favor", as we would never had heard this before the current rise of feminism and its attack on masculinity. Yet if we look at the data we see the exact OPPOSITE. Suicide rates for men INCREASED the more we began to attack masculinity:
i.pinimg.com/.../...259294b6f2ca664e62277ef070.jpg
As you can see suicide was substantially less common in the fifties when this attitude was most prevalent then it is now when this attitude is being frowned upon. The fact is men are built differently then women and this notion that the right way for a man to act is to act like a woman is not only sexist but its also detrimental to men.
People stress too much these days and take unnecessary load on themselves and worry too much about every action. Period.
Now that I don't understand why it happens. These days every quote and lifestyle method is controversial and results in heavy criticism.
Not at all, you see the increase of suicides of men rise with the rise of feminism which itself is the antithesis of masculinity and traditional roles (you also see the rise of depression in women following the same curve as well). Again, if this was due to the "manning up" culture we should be seeing these sucides being more common to that era then we do in the "maning up is bad" era, but we see the exact opposite. The moment the idea that gender and gendered behavior as being social, that was the moment we start to see the downwards slide (studies have shown that traditional people are happier then non traditional and are healthier). Men are different from women, this is a fact. In my post I pointed out that biologically the reason why men do what we do (other then being built for protecting others) is because we are not inherently valuable due to how we reproduce (most of the work comes from women) this means that men have to constantly prove their worth and value in order to avoid
being replaced by another man. That is why men push other men to do more to be better, because we can be and will be replaced. Your not going to want a man who doesn't have his life together to be your husband or the father of your children, that would put you in a horrible position. If he lashes out every time he gets upset that can be outright dangerous (men are significantly stronger then women, that means if he lashes out their is going to be real damage done). If he runs in fear at the first sign of trouble, his wife and child will be put in harms way, he saves himself at the expense of multiple other people. If he gives up at the first sign of failure he then accomplishes nothing which not only does not benefit him economically, nor does it benefit him in the area of romance as women do not flock to failures (a grown woman is not seeking a man who still lives in his parents basement and has no job) but it also is to his detriment because men CRAVE responsibility and purpose.
Of course men and women have differences and different instincts as well. But people can easily avoid being unhealthy about it like how many dudes are being now.
So how do you know they are being unhealthy about it? That is an assumption on your part and its an assumption based upon how WOMEN deal with their problems. Because they don't do it like you do, you assume that they are doing it wrong. They are not. No one is telling a man he cannot feel, no one is saying he cannot grieve, that's not something that happens (at least not as a whole, obviously your going to get the handful of people who are just crappy human beings), yet women/feminist like to equate telling a man to take responsibility, to look for solutions rather then sit by and do nothing as being the same as telling them not to feel and that is not the case.
@hellionthesagereborn You said that I am making an assumption about men, followed by saying, "yet women/feminist like to equate telling a man to take responsibility"
smh
"as being the same as telling them not to feel and that is not the case." Why did you only take half the statement? You are taking it that way, you are saying that manning up is the same as demanding that a man not feel and those are not the same. This idea came about with feminism, hence my reference to feminism. That is not an assumption, that is a fact we do not see this idea that manning up is the same as not feeling until feminism came in and attempted to undermine gender roles (which they are attempting to do. They may think its for the best (its not and provably so) but that is absolutely what they are doing). Your premise is that men and women are the same and function the same, which is false. That assumption is what fuels the idea that the reason men do not respond like women do to various events is due to society instead of biology (which I pointed out is not the case, we do know for a fact that it is predominantly biology), again a false premise.
You then assume that the meaning of the phrase of "man up" is to suppress emotions which it is not (as can be seen by most of the male comments, the male downvotes for your and other womens comments supporting this notion that its to suppress emotions, and the upvotes on all the male comments saying that its not used in that context). Those are all assumptions being made by your argument (whether your aware of it or not) and they are false. The notion that men HAVE TO act like women or they are some how doing it wrong is incredibly demeaning and sexist, not to mention also physically impossible for men to do based upon our biology. Its incredibly unfair to demand that of men and it ignores all the very important aspects of how we cope with our emotions (like resolving conflict, pushing through pain to get a job done etc.).
@hellionthesagereborn You accused me of making an assumption on all men yet you went into saying that women and feminists say it as if all women do. You did the same thing as I did.
That's why I didn't quote the entire sentence.
Not all women, I was reffering to women who make these arguments. I'm sorry that I did not articulate that better. It was not all women, their are plenty of women out their who fully understand this concept, however out of the groups who attack it, it is predominantly women, not all women, not women as a whole, but many women do not understand this. I thought it was evident by the context that I was speaking of a specific subset of women (hence the /feminist. I was reffering to women who either identify as feminist or adhere to (consciously or unconsciously) feminist philosophy). As for your generalization, that wasn't about generalizing men, I stated that if you are demanding that men respond to events like women then you are making an assumption about how men operate which is incorrect.
... and you realize that I also meant not all men, right?
Of course, I was not reffering to anything you said about all men, I stated that their was no correlation between being told to man up and suicide (statistically we could infer the opposite), and that suggesting that men need to change how they deal with their emotions ignores biology and is rather sexist in that it deems that the "female" way of dealing with emotions is better then the "male" way. The only thing I said was that your premise of your argument, that men and women process and deal with emotions the same and that its only society that alters the behavior was an assumption which was not backed by scientific data. I was not referring to any assumption of "all" any group, that was an assumption of how each gender processes emotions (which is a general statement as exceptions will always exist). I was merely pointing out that this assumption was incorrect (as I have pointed out to several other bits of evidence that counter that claim (plus our amygdala's respond differently).
@hellionthesagereborn But many men actually say it by themselves that this is what is increasing suicide in men. I mentioned that and said nothing about whether or not it is right or wrong.
Not many men, in fact very few men. But their are men who say that, primarily feminist men. And again, its not driving suicide because as I pointed out suicides began increasing after the sixties and seventies right when the feminist movement started to pick up steam and target college students. So again, if anything you have a better probability of feminism being the cause not the notion of manning up which has existed since the beginning of our species and as a result we should have seen a decrease in suicides not an increase by your/their reasoning.
@hellionthesagereborn I rather heard anti-feminist men saying it._.
Well I have not but if they do say it they are wrong (again, I pointed out the data and it shows the opposite effect).
@hellionthesagereborn I get it. The fact is, I did not state what is right and what is wrong in my original opinion. I just stated the kind of attitude I see guys showing here.
It's hard to put phrases like that in context with words, I have probably used it twice on this site, if a young guy is down and out I would try to offer more constructive advice, and tell him good luck. But sometimes people are being overly defeatist they need to growl and say fuckit, and put up some resistance.
Women are the ones who really enforce this deal, though. Most guys don't really care that much what other dudes think, it's what women thinks that drives a lot of what we do. I could give a rat's ass what a guy thinks of me, but if a woman I liked told me to man up, it would get my attention.
I remember my father calling me a pussy because I had tears in my eyes after hurting myself on my dirtbike we were on the way to the emergency room. I'm going to teach my boy to be strong and resilient but I'll never say that to him. My father only called me a pussy on a handful of occasions growing up but I remember each instance vividly.. thats very psychologically damaging for a boy.
I can imagine that. If there is ever a time to cry it's on the way to the emergency room! By all means teach your son to be strong and resilient, but sometimes part of being strong and resilient is learning that it is okay to cry and learning that sometimes you need to ask for help. Some of the strongest most resilient people I know are people I've seen cry. My mom sat with my grandpa holding his hand while he died. She had tears in her eyes the whole time but she was able to be there for him (her father-in-law). If that isn't strength I don't know what is. Crying isn't the absence of strength. You seem like a great guy. I'm sure you are either raising or will raise a great kid.
I don't have any kids but when I do I will be mindful of what I say to them. Its a tough balance... boys can't be babied they have a tough life ahead of them and need to be tough too. I agree with what you're saying but at the same time men do have to be strong. Women by and large are disgusted by a man crying they're just turned off even if they "know" it should be okay for him to cry in this situation but they will still hold it against him.
I'm a woman I know what turns women off and crying over serious matters is not one of them. You don't think if you have a little girl she's not going to have a tough life ahead of her as well? Both genders have their crosses to bear. Learning how to deal with emotions appropriately is a part of having strength. I've never met a man I respected who didn't cry about his kids. The strongest man I know is a huge softie. I've seen him cry a ton. Tears don't keep him from leading a Mine Rescue team down a collapsed mining shaft to pull people out.
cry me a river
I think it's important for parents to let their children express their emotion in healthy ways... Growing up my parents always got mad if I started to cry and told me to stop. Or told me that being angry is unnecessary. And I don't think that's healthy
Its ok to not be perfect but I find this don’t be too hard on urself ideology bunch of bs and its thinking like this that’s gunna turn potentially strong and successful guys into skinny jean wearing pussies whose mom or girlfriend pays the bills. do u know how many times I sucked up my fears and got things done because others told me stop being a pussy.
Well I'm glad you had a good experience with this. I guess I'm probably what you would consider to be a pussy, because I spent my whole life hearing "man up" while my grand-father or mother beat me to a pulp. One time when I was 9 I remember I got a big ole seven-inch shard of wood impaled in my arm and started crying in front of my grandpa's friends, so in addition to losing quite a bit of blood and going into shock, my grandfather took me up to the house and beat the shit out of me... good times. The result is I'm a cold person who can't form connections with others and often times I'd rather move out of the way instead of drawing attention to myself. I've never thought I was good enough. I've tried to use therapy to correct my abusive child-hood, but you'd probably consider that a weakness too. No one being physically or verbally abusive (being called a pussy) has ever inspired any meaningful personality or behavioral changes in the long-term. Human psyche doesn't work like that.
@WhistleForTheChoir I had a very physically abusive father too. Haven’t u heard the expression that abusive parents either create drug addicts or very successful people? Just depends how strong of a person they are
You know, I've never heard that phrase in my entire life, but it sounds like you're saying the best possible parenting strategy has an equal chance of making a drug addict or a decent person... which would be a pretty bad record.
@WhistleForTheChoir great example thanks for sharing
Sounds like you will repeat the cycle in the verbal abuse category
@NottybutNice Nope, I refuse to continue it. No plan for a relationship, and obviously no plan for kids. Although I don't think I attacked anyone anywhere either...
Exactly, we aren't women. Nobody is going to solve our problems and tell us they care. So it's up to us to 'man up' and fix our situation ourselves.
Luckily my dad rarely mans me up and this is why I don't really explode. I learned to control my emotions by myself. I'm not shamed but motivated. Why can't we all just motivate people instead of shaming? Criticism and judgement is ok but never shame.
And that thing turned me into an empath.
The suicide rate of men is because of that man up bullshit misconception that they should be robots.
Life is not perfect. You can't go to your little safe room and cry about it. Life is hard you need to be tough.
Another issue about this is actually on the other side as well - lots of women and dating advice tell men that "a man is interesting when the woman can't tell how he feels". "He's mysterious".
In a way, it tells people that to be an attractive man, you have to be stone cold and hard to crack.