#the jelqing made it that way

1. Try to give it form and to put it into words. Don’t allow it to be shapeless as that’s harder to resolve.

2. Agree that you will look at it and not ignore the pain - as any unexpressed emotions lead to problems later on.

3. Avoid triggers and memories that take you back in time, and open up old wounds, so you feel the pain again.

4. Ground yourself in the present and who you are today – and remember you have strengths, and good people in your life.

5. Don’t allow the hurt and pain to take control of who you are, or limit what you’ll do, or the goals you set yourself.

Male speech is typically understood to be about establishing dominance: report, versus rapport, which is female speech. It’s about clarifying the masculinity of one’s mindset, especially in comparison to others, which creates a constant low level of hostility in male interactions - everything is a competition, nobody can back down.

What is antithetical to being able to participate in, let alone succeed in that environment, is the (visible) capacity for empathy or even personal emotional reaction to anything at all. Those traits have been firmly established as feminine-coded, and therefore the presence of those in male speech is shameful.

To demonstrate one’s lack of emotion, one has to provide opportunities. Male “intellectualism” in general is an example of this, but male-generated humour is another. One can create a joke (more often these days in the form of memes, which is what I was looking at when I thought of this, but it occurs in the majority of attempts men make at being funny), or react to it (necessarily in public), and given its function as an establishment of dominance this automatically creates a constant competition to goad others into breaking first.

It isn’t particularly subtle. Most male memes by this point are open references to an offensive situation, and just formatted into a ‘comic format’. For example, I just saw one that was a screenshot of a scared Spongebob Squarepants, clumsily coloured dark brown, and captioned with a comment about escaped slaves fearing being brutally raped by their former owners if they were caught (I’m not going to share it and I hope you understand why). Posting this on social media is a claim on the part of the man who makes it that this is (yet another) topic he can consider while completely emotionless (masculine). Other men one-up this by commenting with how humorous they find it (but they have to balance demonstrating not being offended and not looking too enthusiastic about finding it funny, or they would be openly supporting another man, which is not the point) and further disseminating it and challenging others to demonstrate their masculinity.

Particularly with the current climate of internet humour, I think men have become overenthusiastic about this and compulsively attach themselves to anything offensive as an attempt to show their masculine objectivity (I don’t use this to excuse male support of institutional violence; the whole point is that they understand the wrongness of what they’re seeing and see the chance to posture as more important than resisting). For example, men latched onto Frankie Boyle more and more as he drifted more and more from risquè stand-up to just being verbally abusive in public, because the worse he behaved, the more opportunities he provided for other men to show their maleness.

This platform is especially useful for men who can’t measure up physically. The worst, nastiest humour tends to come from places like 4chan and reddit; men who claim pride in their deviance from the masculine physical ideal, but in actuality replace that with obsessive demonstration of how masculine their minds are.

There are other ways in which this is used, just as if not more insidiously. I think it is used consciously to attack anti-prejudice sentiment. Women who support social justice are invalidated by men on the basis of being emotional and therefore incapable of objectivity, and trapping any men who might have a cause to support us into having to demonstrate how they’re not us stops them from participating, and to force men of marginalised groups to put up with abuse.

To be more specific: white straight gender-conforming males have a “natural advantage” in this field because, society being what it is, they really aren’t affected by misogyny, racism, homophobia or anything else. They can use that position to come out with serious bigotry, which they do very easily, and they know that men of the relevant marginalised group will be socially compelled to pretend to like it. They can even push men to attack their own social groups in order to demonstrate their maleness. Keep them regarding their masculinity as more important than anything else and they will attack their own family, and men very often do regard it as more important.

Obviously, in addition to everything else men must find funny, they have to laugh at the abuse of women. Finding women’s language funny shows you don’t associate with women enough to appreciate what we have to say. Finding women’s interests funny shows you cannot relate to femininity. Finding rape funny shows you cannot relate to the pain and degradation that is socially understood to be What Men Do To Women.