Thread by @JuliusGoat

Women are more emotional than men.

Men are just undeniably more rational.

Big shout out to the dudes taking these tweets to mean “women aren’t ever emotional and never commit crimes” rather than sending up the idea that men are uniquely rational.

you are the real heroes

Yes, men are simply driven to achieve in ways that women aren’t.

Here is a very common response to this thread.

A very common response. Dozens, maybe.

But here’s a very important thing:

They are all men.

I want to be clear that I understand why someone would say that these are not men. I understand very well the urge to disassociate maleness and personhood from this group.

But they are men. They are people.

This dude doesn’t get it.

Irt the above: left the name off b/c I just want to examine a common response, not put a single such response on blast.

It’s interesting how the point “men are *also* emotional and irrational” is received as “*only* men are emotional and irrational.”

Scrolling through recent mentions I can easily find replies like this, which suggest “See? Women are emotional too!”

Yes. Nobody is arguing that women aren’t emotional.

But people say women are uniquely emotional. And presume emotion is negative. That’s what I’m commenting on.

When you’re so committed to gender as a zero sum competition, any suggestion that it isn’t seems to be received instinctively as a proposal of a diametrically opposite zero sum game.

Short version: you guys are telling on yourselves.

Emotion is a component of being human. It’s one of our attributes. It’s one of our senses, you could say. And people have an extraordinarily wide and varied way of experiencing them.

Our ability to experience emotion is a strength, as is the width of that spectrum.

When we presume emotion to be weakness, or create a societal expectations that emotion should only be experienced in a single way, or confined to a single gender, we rob ourselves of that great strength.

In unfortunate cases, we might even get a gender that experiences a full range of emotions but feels societal pressure to express them only within a narrow range.

Or individuals with unique emotional spectrums who are shunned rather than embraced.

This harms everyone.

It’s not good for a person to believe the only appropriate expression of any emotion they have is rage.

It’s not good for a person who is able to express all their emotions accurately, or for somebody whose emotional experience is unique, to be told that strength is a weakness.

And a society based on such bad assumptions is weaker for it.

Is my point.

Yeah but are they though?

I don’t know a lot of women who have punched walls, for example.

Bad for the wall. Bad for the puncher. And it seems like maybe there was something emotional going on there. Not always rage. Yet it comes out as rage.

So interesting, to suppose I wouldn’t be able to find photos of men crying, or that the lack of such Photos is proving a contrary point, or that ... sobbing and crying are two different emotions?

Also: I am a goat MAN. Crucial point.

It occurs to me that if you believe any expression of emotion other than anger is irrational, you might use imagery of weaponry to talk about displays of emotion.

You know, like “triggered.”