This is self-indulgent - feel free to blame it on a solid week of Twitter hounding the "I'm at capacity" lady - but I've been thinking about the gendered performance of emotion. I've been yelled at for feeling too much & yelled at for feeling too little, sometimes simultaneously.
It tends to be men who yell at me for having too many feelings, and it tends to be women who yell at me for having too few. But there's always an underlying anger that people can't just turn down your emotions or turn your focus away from your own feelings and onto theirs.
There's just that sort of expectation that women exist to provide care and empathy on command - as witnessed by how much that "I'm at capacity" message just enraged people - and obviously, this plays out in a much more cruel way for women of color, trans women, etc.
I don't think it's the quantity of feeling that is the problem: It's the expectation that women should be totally other-directed, that their whole emotional lives should be centered on thinking about and meeting other people's needs. We don't put that expectation on guys.
People just genuinely handle emotions differently in conversation! People can be guarded! They can freeze up around tough topics! They can worry so much about what to say that they have to practice what to say! Social ease is not gendered but women have to clear a higher bar.
(Obviously, as MANY people have pointed out, disability is the elephant in the room here -- people with autism or PTSD or even garden-variety anxiety are going to display emotions differently in conversation than NT folks and that is viciously stigmatized.)
(And gender bias around emotion infects the medical system itself -- we now understand Borderline Personality Disorder to be something akin to complex PTSD, and to be common among both men and women, but for a long time, it was the classic Woman Who Feels Too Much diagnosis.)
(Which is to say, for years, we took a constellation of symptoms common among survivors of extreme childhood abuse, slapped on extra symptoms like "promiscuity" or "sometimes questions own sexual ID" and said it was a woman-specific disease that made you unfixable & evil.)
(I could go on about this but I'm pretty sure I actually wrote a book about it in 2016, so.)
