This image released by AMC shows Skyler White, played by Anna Gunn, after her daughter Holly was abducted by her husband Walter White in a scene from the fifth season of “Breaking Bad.” The series finale of the popular drama series airs on Sunday, Sept. 29. (AP Photo/AMC, Ursula Coyote)
Emotion, according to Stedman’s Medical Dictionary is “an intense mental state that arises subjectively rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes.”
We learn about our feelings at a very young age, through experience and formal education. Pre- and elementary schools are full of coloring sheets that display faces contorted into various expressions, large blocky letters naming the particular emotion. Happy, sad, afraid. These are pretty basic concepts, and for the most part, by the time we’re adults, we have a pretty good handle on them, or at least can usually recognize them with a certain degree of accuracy.
So why is it that when it comes time to attributing emotions to one side of the (obviously useless) gender binary, all the blame lands squarely on women? I chose the word “blame” intentionally, because when it comes to women, emotions are always counted as a liability. The number of times that women are depicted as “emotional” or “irrational” is beyond count. For some reason it’s still considered acceptable and even funny to wave away women’s emotions as products of their menstrual cycles (which, for the record, not all women have, and not everyone with a menstrual cycle is a woman).
There is a unique outlier in the culturally enforced female monopoly on emotions, however. Men are granted access to one emotion without any consequences: anger.
No one could argue that anger is not an emotion. It’s been on those coloring sheets since we were knee-high, right? It certainly counts as “an intense mental state” and is indeed “accompanied by physiological changes,” and cultural depictions of men allow them to express anger without any judgment. For them, anger is seen as the default mode of being or a natural response to stressful circumstances. Of course Liam Neeson is going to lash out when his daughter has been taken for the seventh time, or the moody detective is going to punch a hole in the wall when his lead goes cold. We’ve been culturally conditioned to see these explosions as typical responses, not as emotional outbursts that a woman would be demonized with. A female character who throws plates in response to stress would be labeled hysterical. Walter White can kill people and scream that he’s “the one who knocks” with impunity, but audiences will call Skyler White a bitch because she’s angry that her husband is selling meth.
Anyone who doesn’t believe men are emotional creatures has clearly never encountered a men’s rights activist blinded by his privilege and deafened by his own petulant shrieks of “Not all men!” Yes, all men do experience emotions, and yes, all men benefit from male privilege, having their anger dismissed as natural and not compromising their judgment.
I will freely admit that, as a man, I am angry. I am emotional in this situation, because I am angered and appalled by this blatant disrespect and blindness towards women. If you are a man, you have emotions. If you are a woman, you have emotions. Everyone has emotions to greater or lesser extents, and this systematic deriding of women and denial of men’s anger as a feeling is harmful and exhausting to everyone. Plus, look at the handy definition of emotion up there at the beginning of this column; that line of thinking doesn’t even make sense.
So, with all this in mind, are you feeling better yet?
Morgan Philley is a junior English major from Clinton.
