Brene Brown's research focuses on shame and vulnerability and how that impacts people's lives and her talks on The Power of Vulnerability is one of the all-time-most-viewed TED talks. Her further research into caused her to reach some conclusions about how shame varies by gender which she discussed in an interview published in The Atlantic:
I was able to have a phone conversation with Brown, and I asked her to explain how shame and vulnerability manifest differently for men and women. She told me that "messages of shame are organized around gender." For women, she said, there are whole constellations of often contradictory expectations that, if not met, are sources of shame. But for men, the overarching message is that any weakness is shameful. And since vulnerability is often perceived as weakness, it is especially risky for men to practice vulnerability.
What Brown also discovered in the course of her research is that, contrary to her early assumptions, men's shame is not primarily inflicted by other men. Instead, it is the women in their lives who tend to be repelled when men show the chinks in their armor.
"Most women pledge allegiance to this idea that women can explore their emotions, break down, fall apart—and it's healthy," Brown said. "But guys are not allowed to fall apart." Ironically, she explained, men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and they are criticized for being emotionally walled-off; but if they get too real, they are met with revulsion. She recalled the first time she realized that she had been complicit in the shaming: "Holy Shit!" she said. "I am the patriarchy!"
The contradictory expectations of women - one of which is sometimes summed up with the phrase "having it all" could provide a partial explanation to The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness in recent decades.
Then on the male side, what Brown observed is the same sort of phenomenon Norah Vincent observed when she spent a year disguised as a man:
Vincent's first act as a newly minted male was to join a quintessential bastion of camaraderie -- a men's bowling team in a working-class Pennsylvania neighborhood. The only problem: She's a terrible bowler. But the men didn't boot her off the team. "It's an amazing thing, because I think that shows you the generosity that they had," she said. Her experience with these men turned some of her long-held perceptions about men being harsh and rejecting and women being warm and welcoming upside down. ... The team bowled together for nine months and gradually Vincent gained entrance to their inner sanctum. She found that all the cussing and good-natured ribbing is just how men often show affection for one another.
... Jim said he thinks Vincent came into the experiment with some misconceptions about men. "I think she expected to find like a bunch of guys just talking about women's private parts and a bunch of racists and, you know. I think, kind of, that's what she came into this thinking," he said. Vincent agreed. "They really showed me up as being the one who was really judgmental, because they were the ones who took me in, not knowing anything about me. They were the ones who made me their friend ... no judgments attached," Vincent said.
This particular phenomena seems to make a good argument for gender-specific safe spaces both for men and women though only one of those two is politically correct at present. It's also a recognition that women may exhibit a degree of influence even in a patriarchal society and that perhaps such a society need not be inherently oppressive towards one gender. This seems to be one aspect of female influence strangely forgotten.
