A couple of years ago, out running on a rural track some distance from houses or paved road, I met a group of twentysomething men running the other way. As we passed, nothing happened beyond the usual countryside exchange of monosyllabic greeting. It was an ordinary, unremarkable encounter.
But it stuck with me, because for a split-second something remarkable about social norms in my part of the British Isles felt very palpable: that in this country — at least, where I live — a woman can run for miles, alone, and know that the physical risk to her from male strangers is so low as to be negligible. And to a far greater extent than anyone seems to realise, we owe this extraordinary social achievement to an aspect of male socialisation contemporary culture seems hell-bent on dismantling: male emotional repression.
Last week, everyone decided young men’s emotions needed another airing. The media class determined en masse that the TV drama Adolescence was actually a documentary, and that we need more internet censorship to stop boys’ feelings going wrong. Speaking at the Dimbleby lecture, the former England footballer Gareth Southgate popped up to lament the way young men are turning away from real-life mentors to “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers”, who teach boys that “strength means never showing emotion”. And, on cue, Victoria Derbyshire invited three young UK men onto Newsnight, where they discussed when they last cried. Even Keir Starmer is worried.
Two out of three could not remember; all agreed that there’s a general, culture-wide pressure on men to restrain their emotions. Implicitly, we’re to understand that this is A Bad Thing. And we might be forgiven for imagining that all these young men really need is Elsa’s message in Frozen: “Let It Go”. What could possibly go wrong? Watching that clip, though, I remembered the running club I encountered in the countryside a couple of summers ago. It struck me: are we sure we know which feelings men would express, and how they’d express them, if they felt truly empowered to Let It Go?
While there’s plenty of overlap between men and women, on several important axes the sexes are markedly different. These differences include physical strength, sexual aggression, propensity to violence, and normative approach to handling conflict. Violent aggression is much more common in men than women, and the difference between the sexes grows larger the more lethal the aggression. Men are also vastly more sexually aggressive than women: 98% of the individuals prosecuted in the UK for sex crime are men.
The majority of victims of sex crime are women: one in four women reports having been subject to some form of sexual violence since the age of 16, while among men that falls to one in 18. 94% of survivors of rape or attempted rape are women, and within the UK’s legal definition of rape all rapists are, necessarily, male. Most murders of women are by men, and of female victims of homicide between 2009 and 2020 in the UK, most were killed by a man. In 87% of cases, the murderer was an intimate partner.
But this is not, or not only, a female victimhood story. The majority of victims of violent crime are men, and men murder each other far more frequently than they murder women. Between 2010 and 2024, 570 homicides were recorded in the UK, of which 156 were female and 414 were male: a male-on-male homicide rate nearly three times higher than for women.
Rather, it’s a story about male aggression. The asymmetry comes about because, as Louise Perry has pointed out, most men can murder most women with their bare hands, and the reverse is not true. For the sex difference in propensity to violence and sexual aggression is attended by a similarly marked sex difference in physical strength.
These days, for complex and mostly well-intentioned reasons, such differences tend to be downplayed. No one wants to be constrained by stereotype. This egalitarianism has been taken to some strange extremes, such as the tendency of fantasy-type movies to include fight scenes in which petite women trounce huge, hulking men. (Again in Frozen, at the end tiny Anna punches Hans over the side of the ship with a single blow.) Combined with shrinking families and changing social patterns, such pervasive movie falsehoods accumulate to mean it’s now possible for a woman, especially a middle-class one, to get all the way to adulthood before realising how much stronger men are — let alone the subtler sex differences.
And where these differences are noticed, it’s often to get them wrong. One common stereotype across both sexes, for example, is that women are more emotional than men. Men tend to make this claim because they want to think being emotional is bad; women, conversely, because they think being emotional is good. But the claim itself has always seemed strange to me, because it fits so poorly with the evidence.
As I’ve already noted, men commit the vast majority of violent and sexual crime. And these are offences that tend, with the exception of the odd psychopath, to be perpetrated in a high pitch of emotion, whether anger, lust, or some other intense, irrational state. This isn’t to excuse violence, of course. But we might wonder whether it’s not so much that men are less emotional than women than that they experience a different and possibly more extreme spread of feelings.
This is not to assert that there are no quiet, gentle men who feel things deeply, or that there’s anything wrong with such a personality. Where people of either sex are unhappy, there’s often a complex mix of internalising (that is, introspective or self-directed) behaviours, such as sadness or rumination, and externalising responses, such as hyperactivity or aggression. And while there’s a great deal of overlap between the sexes, internalising appears to be more common among women and externalising more common among men.
The increase in public support for emotional expressiveness might well bring relief and reassurance, at least to those men who are more prone to internalising. But what about those men — who are, remember, as a group far bigger and stronger than women — who feel intensely, but tend to externalise negative emotion? Which is to say: what about the men who have a propensity to respond to sadness or anger with violence or aggression? It strikes me that, among this group, a far more prosocial message overall than “Let It Go” might well be “Suck It Up”.
And this brings us to the real heart of the matter. If “Let It Go” is a risky message, at least for men who tend to externalise, “Suck It Up” is not much of an alternative — at least not on its own. It invites the question: “Why?” Why, that is, should men accept this demand for self-restraint? The question is especially mordant when both the aggression being restrained, and also the restraint itself, are denounced as “toxic masculinity”. You would need a truly inspiring reason to accept so bewildering an edict; and yet to my eye no such reason is currently on offer. (I don’t think being invited on Newsnight to talk about crying counts.)
In a culture that offers men no idealistic reason to suppress their baser instincts, then, those young men who don’t simply act out violently can perhaps be forgiven for adopting an individualistic one: honing their ability to control their own urges and feelings, then directing this capacity for self-mastery to purely selfish goals. This is the moral vacuum within which influencers such as Andrew Tate operate, teaching a value-free programme of masculine self-control stripped of higher aims beyond individual wealth and sexual dominance.
But the core of the problem isn’t men being told to control their feelings. It’s the poverty of the ends to which that control is then ordered. Because even strength and aggression are not bad as such: both domestic public order and international freedom from conflict rest ultimately on a capacity for violence. But the kind of violence that upholds public order or defends a nation isn’t comparable to (say) that employed by the machete-wielding teenage gang members that crashed a birthday party in Essex over the weekend. On the contrary: the capacity of public-spirited individuals — almost always men — for controlled violence is what stands between us and that kind of chaos and fear. The willingness of a few good men to be prosocially violent in an emergency is the ultimate guarantor of the peace in which I can run alone.
Encouraging men to repress the extremes of their emotional range is not wrong or cruel. It’s civilisationally essential. But there has to be a why, or few will bother — and those that do will do so for purely selfish ends. And then, before long, you won’t have a civilisation; just (at best) warring tribes, or (worse still) omnium bellum contra omnes.
Obviously things aren’t anywhere near that bad. If they were, I wouldn’t be betting only on advancing age to keep me safe on my runs. Perhaps instead of a Labrador I’d have a Rottweiler. Perhaps I’d have a running machine in my panic room. But if we don’t want things to get worse, we can’t go about encouraging men to “Let It Go”. With heartfelt apologies to the sensitive ones: overall, male emotional repression is good, actually. What’s missing isn’t more masculine emotionality. It’s honour, appreciation, and a more transcendent reason for sublimating aggression and sexuality than just being able to take selfies in a Lamborghini.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
