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Men's coolness
The numbness of the inner world brings on unpleasant side effects with men. You can't conclude
from a man's outer presentation to his inner state of being. His mental state cannot be read from
the outside. Men always pretend to be indifferent and stoic. They are cool. And while the stoic
front is maintained with increasing efforts, an enormous amount of pressure can build up behind
it. Should the pressure go above a certain limit, a man becomes an explosive device. There are
two types of explosions: the aggressive one, directed towards the outside and the auto-aggressive
one, turning inside. In the first case a man turns angry or even violent, in the latter, he takes to
flight.
While women achieve a constant pressure balance by maintaining an unchanging level of
disapproval, formerly called nagging, men accumulate pressure to large degrees: after all they
want to ignore their inner world. Until finally there is no more way of overlooking the boiling within
and the inside pressure makes its way to the outside in a violent manner.
One could be tempted to see a parallel to the two arousal curves during the sexual act. While the
male curve shows an explosively dramatic rise and consequent fall, the female one is more
constant and uniform and lasts longer, with her lusty noises sounding like constant protesting and
his like a short fit of anger.
Because men don't carry their insides on their sleeves, they can change without notice. This
makes them ticking time bombs, ready to explode at any moment. Women, used to identifying
“weather changes” from unmistakable signs in other women, are surprised by their husbands'
sudden eruptions. They forget that men always carry invisible bundles of straw and just one more
can break their backs. It even surprises the men themselves.
It is unwise to unwittingly put pressure on a man from outside. The woman who teases her partner
to draw a reaction from him, is often dumbfounded by the sudden eruption that may follow a long
time of increasing lack of reaction. And then she wonders helplessly how a harmless irritation on
her part could excite such an intense volcano eruption. And she deems her partner to be slightly
off his rocker.
Actually, her question is wrongly put. She assumes that there is a direct link between her irritation
and his reaction, as is typical for women. And she isn't aware that he is not reacting to her minor
irritation but to the anger he's held in for the last three weeks. Because he won't complain and
nag, no, not for trifles, no, not him.
All of this results in misunderstandings between the sexes that can turn into a curse. Women
believe that men can't talk about their feelings which they aren't able to communicate. So she
asks him, trying to help him, trying to facilitate his expressions – because she wants nothing more
than to look into his soul, in order to see if she has a place there. When men always want to see
women's naked bodies, women always want to see men's naked souls.
But men keep silence. By choice. They even make a never-ending effort to ignore their inner
world, to play down their suffering and emotions. If they were to take seriously all that hurts and
puts them down, they would break out in tears at it all. Isn't it already enough work to put it all
out of his mind? And women make it all the harder by asking: “How do you feel? How much do
you love me? Do you like me, a little or a lot? Do you like my mother? Admit that you envy your
brother....” These questions are like the song of the sirens when Odysseus passed the island. They
constantly tempted him to give up the armour of male identity, to abandon himself to a blissful
dissolution, to melt into the world and find relief from the constant pressures of his efforts.
Because actually, men resemble women quite a bit more than they'd like to think. They have
weaknesses and emotions. They are happy or moody, they've got their periods and phases just
like women, but they have to deny it all. They have to move it to where passion mates with order:
into the outer world. So they remove their inner worlds from their perception and make their
feelings act incognito – until they find them again in the outer world masked as features of outside
interests.