Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
From infancy boys are trained to suppress their feelings and emotions, that expressing these feelings and emotions is (heaven forbid!) unmanly. How can we expect troubled youths to reach out for help when all their lives they have been trained to do the precise opposite? We fill them with the false notion that the very act of reaching out is unmanly, that the feelings and emotions they need to address and talk through are not for sharing, that 'real men' just "grin and bear it" stupidlystoically.
It just occured to me what one of the things that have been nagging me about this part here is.
Above, you described stereotypical Norwegians of either gender, and more than implied it's part of what causes violence, when in fact we're one of the least violent populations in the world, and the trait is most prominent in the areas that have the least violence per capita. The proposed solution is a more American rearing. I don't think I need to explain why this gives me a skeptical gut reaction as far as strategies for reducing violence are concerned.
I've spoken with some Americans on the phone; most of the men have expressed more emotion than the average woman here in Norway does. When Americans visit, a frequent characterization of Norwegians is that we're polite but reserved, that we suppress and hide our feelings and emotions, and sometimes even that we're outright cold. When watching news reports or interviews or the like from America, it never fails to strike us how the Americans shown there tend to be like actors, always exaggerating their emotions, putting it all out there, almost throwing it in your face.
To us, it's a bit akward and embarassing to see that sort of thing from adults, and many assume it's an act.
This is not a criticism of Americans, just an observation of the cultural differences.
Now, out of curiosity, I did a little experiment. I tried to find pictures of a group of adult Norwegians crying. Except for the Oslo terror attacks and the Utøya massacre, my search was quite fruitless. But, yes, we do cry, obviously. In private, where it's appropriate. Sometimes we do it with family and close friends nearby, such as in the hospital or at funerals, usually in silence.
As an example of this characteristic stoicism, a young woman (teens to twenties) was interviewed a day or two after the Utøya massacre, still in the clothes she received from the EMTs on shore. Without crying, without significant pauses, she relates how she had to help an 11 year old boy swim to shore. The boy's father was the first to die, right in front of him, from a point blank headshot. So the boy wonders why "the police" were killing children now, since his father (an actual policeman) had said the police only hurt bad people, and so forth. Her voice is unsteady at times in recounting this, just as when she spoke about the friends she lost, and she points out that she actually cried during that conversation and how she had to blink several times and dunk her head to make it stop.
This isn't suppressing anything. It's basic self control, taught to both genders. And I fail to see what the problem with that is.
Some people don't know their own limits, true, but that's a seperate skill, equally useful.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Young Men and Mass Violence - 
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