Thanks Beastro, I really appreciated your posts.
Women need advice and solutions and not to feel understood/heard and men need to the opposite. Anyone who doubts that about a guy, consider a decent hard working dude who feels underappreciated at his job that has resentment and bitterness infect his life, something that could easily be dispelled by a little acknowledgement from his superiors even if he gets nothing tangible from it but a pant on the back.
Yeah, there's a lot of overlap there with this pissed housewife trope. Years of un-or-barely-acknowledged work is grating, no matter who it's for. I squarely believe that at the end of the day most of us, whether we're comfortable with it or not, are wanting to feel understood -- we just go about it in very different ways. I've known so many men who are emotionally toddlers despite being terribly smart, expecting their work to speak for them and their intelligence. I'm just really sceptical that that can ever work out, versus the reality that we do share in all being ultimately quite vulnerable, scared creatures on this earth.
In a sense incels are a great example of this, they put up walls where they should be attempting to let their guard down.
Talking can help orient you and does so in ways that at first don't make sense. Simply doing what is needed often isn't enough, especially when your disposition leads you into undermining yourself doing things that are nominally good and would help, but they are being counter-productive. Being hard on yourself and always pushing for improvement can be good, but you get the positive feedback loop going negative, then you need to stop and think.
The problem there is simple thought and self-reflection often aren't enough. Vocalizing, especially to someone else comes with things that you cannot do talking alone or in your own mind. Whatever impact those thoughts have, they cannot have the full impact that comes with saying them to someone else's face, and that isn't a simple "Letting it out" thing, it also helps hammer things home and have them sink in.
The reason I brought up the whole men-women thing (though it has very obvious limits, like any generalisation) is just this; common experience of guys thinking a woman is trying to get help or advice -- i.e. that she's helpless -- when in fact she doesn't need any input on actually actionable steps but is instead just trying make sense of her emotional world and what's important, or that it's even valued suffering in the first place.
No, for the same reason being merciful on yourself isn't the same as excuse making and molly coddling yourself.
On this I think we need to define what the whole 'man up' thing actually means here then; because 99.9% of the time I've seen guys "man up" it's involved a mixture of negative-self talk and avoiding confronting that sense of self-loathing honestly. Like anyone who deals with a chronic internal critic
is dealing with childhood remnants.
I know I'm totally injecting myself into this context, because I struggle endlessly with appreciating anything I do -- could work straight for a week with no real breaks but sleep and I'd still feel like 'doing something nice' like drawing or even reading
fiction was nothing short of self-indulgence. (The only upside is knowing where it comes from, if only that were enough to dismiss it!)
(And yeah, I know about shoutbox antics, I would care much less if it was just memes and didn't instead come across as a weird, circuitous route to validating their own completely unhinged levels of misogyny.)