The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Is it generally okay to reply to sort of old posts?
I think that emotions are more appreciated than what is commonly claimed, but that it matters a lot which emotions are shown, and when. Any show of emotions which envokes greed or reliance on others tend to reduce ones value (which is basically because you let your problems become other peoples problems).
We can learn the "real" preferences of people through fiction. Most will tell you that women don't like masculine traits, but if you read a novel for women, you will find that some of the "attractive men" in these stories have both masculine and feminine traits. In fiction, you will also see a lot of strong emotion, often, even from the lead male characters that women thirst for. What's important is how and when the emotion is shown. One description many women seem to like is "hard on the outside, soft on the inside". It's a skill. Or if done unintentionally, a result of the right experiences in life and the right upbringing.
It would be nice if there was more research on these things, but I haven't found any which approaches the topic in the same way that I am
I notice this even in famous literature for men. Surely, say, the Iliad is a work that is in large part about men expressing emotion? Achilles sulks, he rages, he cries, and he generally bares his heart. If I think about cinema, men showing their emotions seem like some of the most beloved moments: Vito Corleone mourning his son, for instance. If you watch, I don't know, Breaking Bad, it seems to me that there are lots of emotions on display; Jesse in particular is very open with his feelings. The most iconic moments from that show - Walt's despairing laughter at his money being stolen, Walt crashing to the ground in devastated grief, Jesse's angry-crying "he can't keep getting away with it!", etc., they're often explosions of emotion. If we get more lowbrow, men love, say, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, and the last I checked their male casts are quite emotive.
It seems more complex to me than just the rule that men shouldn't display emotion. I think the rule is that male emotional displays must be appropriate. A man who reacts emotionally to a small stimulus shows himself over-sensitive; a man who does not react emotionally to a large stimulus shows himself inhuman.
When compared to women, I think there are maybe three things going on.
Firstly, the kinds of emotions appropriate for men and women are different. Men are meant to react to some experiences that women do not, and vice versa. For instance, it would be appropriate for men to cheer, cry with joy, or hug each other if their sports team won the grand final, whereas stereotypically women might not react to that. Emotional reactions to competitive activities in general seem to code more masculine. By contrast, something like nurturing or tenderness codes more feminine and therefore is appropriate for women in a wider range of contexts. So each gender may have differently-shaped spaces of acceptable emotional expression.
Secondly, the modes of emotional expression appropriate for men and women are different. Take the sports example again - it's okay for men to cheer, dump containers of gatorade on each other, whatever, whereas that would look a bit more odd from women. If a woman is very happy, though, she has her own script for how to express that. Likewise for things like sadness or anger - a woman might go and cry in the bathroom, and a man might head out back and kick a rock, and those both seem like expressions of emotion, even though one is feminine and one is masculine. If you are only looking for feminine forms of emotional expression, you'll see that women do them and men don't, but that doesn't mean men aren't expressing themselves. They're just not expressing themselves in that way.
Thirdly, the line of appropriateness is in a different place. Above I talked about small and large stimuli. What's the line between them? Plausibly the threshold for acceptable emotional expression for a woman is lower than it is for a man; this would also mean women tend to express themselves more frequently. But once the threshold is exceeded, men can express themselves as well, and if they don't, something is wrong with them.
They might not do so, but is there really any social convention dictating that it's somehow unbecoming of them as women to do so?
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