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Why Do So Many Men Avoid Showing Their Feelings?

Why needing help from others, and showing vulnerability is coded OUT of our most common understandings of masculinity.

Kaia Maeve

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Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

TLDR: If more guys trained in the traditional fighting arts (with good teachers, not that Cobra Kai crap) maybe they’d find out that self- compassion and empathy are attitudes of the strongest men. Not the weakest.

The guys were just watching the football game

My writing friend Ed Frauenheim told me the other day about an incident. From what I gathered, he was watching a game with some old friends.

One of the guys made a snarky comment about an athlete who was out with an ankle injury. The epithet of choice was, of course, to call the guy that most demeaning of all terms.

A pussy.

This manliest of all manly slurs actually stems from the Latin word pusillanimous, defined as “Lacking strength and firmness of mind; wanting in courage and fortitude; being of weak courage; faint-hearted; mean-spirited; cowardly.”

But we all know that most men associate this slur with women, and her most sacred parts. You know, the parts of us that babies are…

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