Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of TikToks of mostly white teenage boys with the text, “We got the message girls, guess we’ll just start bottling up our emotions again…”
And while this trend is fairly new (dating back to approximately April), the idea that women are somehow refusing to listen to men when they talk about their feelings, and that they are therefore responsible for their depression, emotional trauma, and even self-harm, is as old as misogyny itself. When these boys say “girls” they’re probably referring to one or two specific girls who didn’t want to act as their unpaid therapists.
For years now, women – especially those who identify themselves as feminists – have been encouraging men and boys to find healthier ways to process their emotions. This idea has been contorted by some to mean that men have previously been prevented by society from expressing their emotions at all and that we now should work to be more receptive to men discussing these emotions – which isn’t exactly the case.
As women, we are taught from a young age to cater to men’s emotions. We see our mothers acting as therapists to our fathers; we see our brothers get away with throwing fits of anger well into their adulthoods (something that we would never be able to do); we hear stories of women being beaten and even killed as a result of their husband’s anger; we allow our boyfriends to become possessive and jealous of any man who so much as speaks to us because it’s seen as “romantic”; and when we discuss things like mental illness and suicide in school, the examples we are given are almost always of white straight teenage boys.
And today, as more and more women are refusing to do this emotional labor, they are labeled as insensitive or uncompassionate for doing so. Take Mac Miller and Ariana Grande’s relationship. In 2018 when Miller fatally overdosed, many people were devastated, and rightfully so. However, Grande was soon blamed as being the cause of this overdose. Miller’s fans claimed that if she hadn’t broken up with him five months earlier he would still be alive.
This is a classic example of women being treated as rehabilitation centers for “broken” men. The idea that women can fix flawed men or that, “the right woman can change a man for the better” has been seen as romantic and even been the subject of countless romantic novels and movies. This idea – and many boys on Tik Tok apparently – seems to ignore the fact that a woman’s purpose in life isn’t to perform emotional labor for men who refuse to deal with their emotions in healthy ways.
When we teach young boys that they are allowed to get away with violent and manipulative displays of emotion while teaching young girls to stay quiet and calm, we force girls to mature much faster than their male counterparts. And as teenage boys aren’t completely unobservant, it’s easy for them to think that it’s appropriate to dump all of their feelings onto any girl that responds to their Snapchats and expect to be coddled much like they would expect of their mothers.
So, PSA to all young men: Next time you consider treating a girl like your unpaid therapist, choose instead to talk to an actual therapist or even a school counselor.