Criticism, vulnerability, and emotional depth in men

Okay, continuing reading Mindset by Carol Dweck. Today there's an interesting passage that honestly sometimes you read passages and you go past them and you have to go back because something about them just rubs you wrong. Like, I'm not sure about that. So I'm going to read this short paragraph.

Boys are constantly being scolded and punished. When we observed in grade school classrooms, we saw that boys got eight times more criticism than girls for their conduct. Boys are also constantly calling each other slobs and morons. The evaluations lose a lot of their power. She's talking about this in the context of difficulties with criticism that women face.

And what's interesting about this paragraph is like 80 to 90 percent of it is grounded in her expertise as a psychologist. But that last sentence is opinion. That those judgments that boys receive lose most of their power. As a man, I can tell you it's not true. It's not true at all. The little stinging things of a friend calling you a slob or something like that, they stick with us too. The difference is we keep them in our reaction or, you know, sometimes we just fight.

But the ultimate result of holding those things in is over time, this is what hardens us. And it's also what makes us less vulnerable. And also what makes us have less emotional depth in our relationships. I'm not sure how to explain it deeper than that. But mostly because this is probably the first time I've really thought about it. You learn to guard yourself.

And I think this also plays into what she is talking about here, which is sex stereotypes. You know, how a woman should be, how a man should be. And I wouldn't say that there's anyone who in particular teaches this to you. It's just something that number one, you learn through observing men and other boys your age. And it's just something that you develop.

I don't know how to describe it beyond that you learn to hold things in. So it's not that men feel the criticisms, even the casual criticisms, in particular, actually, the casual criticism is not that we feel them any less. It's that when asked about it, we won't admit it. Because it's against what we're supposed to be. To say that, actually, yeah, that's done a little bit. That's hard. Because now you're offering yourself up as weaker. Yet we're supposed to be continually presenting ourselves as stronger.

So I just thought that was an interesting passage, because just for a second, she slipped out of psychologist and into just a normal person with an opinion. And it's wrong. It's not true. And I just, I couldn't get past that. I'm like, no, that's, that's not true. Because those things have always bothered me, especially when I was a younger man. Criticisms and being teased and stuff were really hard on me. They weren't easy at all. They were very difficult and very formative to the person that I became.