Letter of the Day | Men need to cry

THE EDITOR, Sir:

Since the dawn of time, women have been raised so much different from their male counterparts because society viewed them as two vastly different entities, with different roles in society, simply based on their sex.

Men were supposed to be the strict hand for the children and the one charged with providing for and controlling his family. He should be the head. He should show very little emotion because that was a woman’s job.

She should be the one to take care of the children’s emotional needs. She is expected to cry and be forthcoming with her emotions (to an extent) and be in accordance with the instructions of her husband.

As we can see, this is no longer a method that works, if it worked at all. Instead of raising them as a boy and a girl, why not raise them based on the individual that they are and their individual emotional needs?

All humans are equipped with emotions. We can’t instruct men to forget some of their emotions. If you raise a man to forget that he can be soft and loving, that he has the ability to cry and show sadness, that he sometimes needs someone to talk to or a hand to hold, what do we have a left? We have anger, pain, frustration, and a need to control. Where can that lead to? Maybe murder-suicide, as seen in the news recently?

Now, I’m not saying all men are slobbering monsters waiting for the moment to kill their wives. I’m saying that they need to express themselves. We need to raise them to see that it is OK for them to show how they feel. Not just the perceived stronger emotions, but the other ones as well.

ALLOW THEM TO FEEL

Stop instructing our boys that if they cry, it is feminine and homosexual. They have a God-given right to express what they are feeling. These emotions weren’t something that they acquired like a bad habit that you need to beat or train out of them. They were born with them, it is a part of who they are.

Who are we as parents and as a society to try to break that away from them and separate them from those feelings? Then have the unmitigated gall to be shocked when they do something characteristic of someone who has a warped sense of emotional expression or no emotions at all.

Emotions have to come out in one form or the other. Why can’t we foster an environment in which these emotions come out in the form of talking to someone about it or just feeling free to have a healthy cry? An environment where, when a man is sad about a woman leaving him, he can cry without being told to toughen up and stop acting like a girl or gay.

Allow our men to feel and maybe they wouldn’t take such drastic measures to show us that they can feel.

HUGARCIA GREEN, Bsc

Marine Biology (major)

and Plant Biology (minor)

@wiredbyhoney