the cute gay boy

being curious about emotions--especially the really Big Painful Stigmatized ones--and getting to the root causes so you can make slow substantial changes, rather than impulsive superficial ones, is pretty much always the way to go whenever possible.

most of the time when people apologize for their emotions (e.g. anger), they should really be apologizing for the behavior they engage in to soothe the emotions. because emotions in and of themselves do not actually harm other people.

people who say they are harmed by emotions are usually either

actually responding to behavior and simply uncritically accepting conflation between the two (e.g. "I'm afraid of your anger" often translates to "whenever you mistreat me you blame it on your anger, so if your anger is the cause of mistreatment, then my fear of mistreatment can only be discussed as a fear of anger"),

or are themselves engaging in a controlling behavior to soothe their own emotions that they are refusing to manage (e.g. "I'm afraid of your anger" often translates to "whenever you're angry I feel panic, and instead of interrogating what I'm afraid of and what I need to remind myself that I'm safe, I'm going to demand you never express feelings around me").

WITH THIS SAID.

a lot of the time what men call ''anger'' is actually just misogynistic resentment.

a lot of people will say ''men are only allowed to feel anger.'' this is just not true, but I believe there is something here that is gendered.

men are incentivized to outsource management of all pain and discomfort to women (and children). managing emotions is not paid productive labor, it is reproductive labor, so men--as a class--do not feel obligated to do it. feminized classes are supposed to do the unpaid labor. so men expect to outsource their emotional management to women and children in their lives.

this is why media often depicts women and children serving the role as "healing" the male protagonist. this is why women and children often are expected to learn how to not "set off" the patriarch. this is why people will say that men will get humiliated at work and "take it out" on their families. it's why men do not openly and by default process emotions with other men. the culturally normative expectation is for men to offload the effort of managing their emotions onto feminized classes.

men feel that it it women's responsibility to manage their emotions. they feel entitled to easy, pleasurable emotions all the time so that they can do good, productive, paid work without interruption. but then they still experience extreme, painful emotions that they don't know how to handle, because they are human beings, and emotions happen.

when faced with the dissonance between unbearable emotional pain, and women simply refusing to set down everything in their own lives to attend to it immediately, men become extremely resentful. they imagine that they are experiencing a painful emotion because women have neglected them, and then interpret their own emotions as cruelty inflicted by women.

I think the whole principle I outlined above (i.e. instead of suppressing emotions as evil and then lashing out impulsively to self-soothe, it is much more fruitful to be curious about emotions, to understanding where they come from, and figure out constructive ways to change your life that address unmet needs) really needs to be applied here.

if you realize you are experiencing this kind of misogynistic resentment, it is not helpful to try to suppress it. emotions grow when suppressed. even if you tell yourself you would never hurt someone, it is extremely likely that eventually you will justify lashing out at women in your life to self-soothe because you are not spending any time figuring out other ways to address the emotion.

instead, you need to really try to deconstruct your beliefs about emotions. you are not responsible for managing other people's emotions, but you are responsible for managing your own. even when they are enormous and debilitating. it is your life. if you are incapacitated by emotion, it means something really needs to change. you need to figure out what needs are not being met, and you need to figure out what can be done to meet them. this is not women's job. this is not the job of children. they have their own enormous debilitating emotions to manage!

there is nothing wrong with feeling negative emotions. there is something wrong with expecting to never feel negative emotions and then blaming them on other people, and using this blame as an excuse to punish them. it is essential that you understand the difference.

also, this goes for women expecting emotional management from children. it goes for cis people expecting it from trans people. it goes for tme people expecting it from tma people. it goes for white people expecting it from racialized people. it goes for nonblack people expecting it from Black people.

if there is a class that is constructed as "there to do unpaid labor for you" then you need to really interrogate any entitlement you feel towards anyone in that class to soothe your emotions for you.