Hacker News Reader

Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

Very disappointing to see things phrased this way. Yes, certain aspects of traditional masculinity - suppressing emotion, hypercompetitiveness, risk seeking - are harmful. So are certain aspects of traditional femininity - submissiveness, excessive concern about appearance - and I don't remember an APA warning about that.

Putting 'masculine' or 'feminine' at the center of this just isn't constructive. Address the behavioral syndromes themselves, maybe note in the text that they're traditionally associated or correlated with gender roles, but FFS don't get all gender-essentialist about it. If nothing else, it just triggers all the MRAs and gives their leaders a talking point to rile up the regressives some more.

View on HN

"Suppressing emotion" is just another word for emotional maturity. Should we all be like babies, crying all the time, screaming when we're hungry, etc? An adult should recognize that while some emotions are useful, others are not and learn to accept and transcend them, and also that even the useful ones are sometimes useful to other people as well, but at other times only useful for the person having them and there's no need for them to be shared and burden other people.

Suppressing emotion is like level two on a five-point scale. Sure, giving your emotions free rein like a kid (level one) is worse, but suppression causes problems too. Those emotions will find a way out, whether it's suppressed anger turning into depression, suppressed fear turning into impotence, etc. There are literally thousands of books and scientific studies of this stuff. Read some.

Learning to deal with your emotions is the mark of true maturity. Suppression is itself a manifestation of fear, and denial of that fear. As with anything else, it's better to solve problems than to turn a blind eye.

Suppressing emotions is one way to deal with them.

Some people find outlets, some just suppress them. Maybe you have a different definition of what "suppress emotions" means?

Why are competition and taking risks harmful?

They're not, in appropriate levels/contexts. They're normal, healthy, often laudable and sometimes even necessary. The problem is excessive (i.e. harmful or situationally inappropriate) competitiveness or risk-seeking, whether they occur separately or as part of a common/identifiable cluster of behaviors.

Completely different wording. Risk vs excess risk. You can say the same about femininity. Excess reliance on others to do necessary but undesireable things, excess avoidance of conflict, even if it means never standing up to someone who is using/abusing you, not willing to serve in the military as a soldier in times of need, etc.

This smells like bullshit. Anything in excess is bad. Excess individuality kills cooperation, excess demand on cooperation and by extension conformity kills independent though.

Did you just not read the part where I said there were problems associated with "traditional femininity" too, before you jumped in to make the same point as though it was original?

FYI, hyper implies excess. "Risk seeking" implies seeking risk for its own sake, i.e. when it's not situationally appropriate. That's not "completely different" wording at all. The only bullshit here is your attempt to exaggerate conflict, which BTW is another part of that toxic behavior cluster we were talking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com