Do Your Feelings Have a Gender?
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We tend to talk about emotion as though it belongs to the private world. It is something that happens inside us, something we experience, express, suppress and manage. And yet, the way we experience emotion is not entirely private. What we consider an appropriate emotion, how we are expected to express it, whose emotions we are expected to attend to and even which emotions are considered valuable are shaped by the social worlds we inhabit. And one of the most persistent ways in which emotion has been socially organised is through gender.
Emotion has historically occupied an uneasy position in a world that tends to value rationality. It is often treated as the opposite of reason, which is associated with objectivity and clear, systematic thinking, while emotion is seen as subjective and unpredictable. This is why emotion has often been viewed as less compatible with the “scientific” or “objective” approaches valued in academic theories (Oakley, 1981; Graham, 1983). But Sartre describes emotion as “having meaning and signifying something” and believes that it is “not a chaotic relationship between the self and the universe: it is an organised and describable structure” (Sartre, 1981). So, why has emotion been treated as inferior to reason? This question becomes even more important when we look at how ideas about reason and emotion have been connected to masculinity and femininity. Reason became associated with masculinity, while emotion became associated with femininity, turning the distinction between the two into a hierarchy.
Learning to Be Masculine and Feminine
The construction of masculinity and femininity begins long before individuals consciously identify themselves as masculine or feminine. Chodorow’s work on gender development shows that gender is also reproduced through the ways early relationships and childcare are organised. She says that the differences between male and female personalities are reproduced across generations through the roles women occupy in early childcare and socialisation (Chodorow, 1974). She writes that “mothers tend to experience their daughters as more like, and continuous with themselves . . . By contrast, mother experience their sons as a male opposite” (Chodorow, 1978). Boys encounter their masculinity through an experience of differentiation from the mother, making the development of masculinity a process of separation. The boy learns what it means to be masculine partly through learning what he must not be. As Chodorow puts it, for boys, “learning what it is to be masculine comes to mean learning to be . . . not womanly” (Chodorow, 1989). This means, if the feminine is associated with emotionality, relationality, dependence and care, then masculinity is constructed through distancing the self from these qualities. The boy then learns what it is to be a male and also that certain ways of being are incompatible with being male, and this is one of the ways through which emotional restriction can develop.
The Socialisation of Feeling
Parents teach children about emotional expression and expectations both directly and indirectly, through what they say to children, how they respond to their emotions, and what children observe in the emotional lives of adults around them. Research on emotion socialisation suggests that boys and girls are given different opportunities to express and understand their feelings. Mothers have been found to talk more about sadness and fear with daughters than with sons (Fivush et al., 2000). Fathers, meanwhile, have been found to respond more often to boys’ expressions of sadness with minimising comments such as “Don’t be such a baby,” while mothers were more likely to respond in encouraging ways (Cassano et al., 2007). Over time, these responses can become part of how children understand their own emotions.
Socialisation shapes how we understand and make sense of our experiences. Gender norms become cognitive structures, ideologies, schemas, stereotypes and beliefs through which people interpret their own experiences and the social situations they encounter. So eventually, the social can become psychological.
Invisible Labour
The gendering of emotion also shapes how care and emotional work are divided. The sexual division of labour has historically placed women closer to the work of maintaining relationships, caring for children, and regulating the emotional life of the family. Zaretsky describes this division through the separation between “personal feelings” and “economic production”: “Women were identified with emotional life, men with the struggle for existence” (Zaretsky, 1976).
Emotional labour is important for social reproduction. Families need more than material resources, like the continuous management of relationships, conflicts, anxieties, dependencies and needs, and yet this work is difficult to recognise because it is associated with femininity. Emotional labour is often treated as something women simply do, almost like a natural extension of femininity rather than a learned skill. And this leaves women “subordinated as unskilled and stigmatised as emotional” (James, 1989). When care is seen as something women naturally provide, the work involved in it becomes much easier to overlook.
There is also something particularly powerful about calling women’s emotional labour natural, because once it is naturalised, it becomes an expectation. If women are naturally nurturing, then not wanting to nurture can be seen as selfish; if women are naturally empathetic, then not wanting to take on someone else’s problems can be seen as cold; and if women are naturally good at relationships, then maintaining them naturally becomes their responsibility.
The problem then is that care becomes something that is expected from women, without recognition or compensation, and women become, in effect, “society’s emotional sponges” (James, 1989). Of course, capitalism benefits from forms of labour that it does not necessarily have to pay for, and emotional labour is particularly easy to extract because it is so often disguised as love. The fact that caring can also be meaningful or pleasurable makes this exploitation harder to recognise (Müller, 2018). Yet its emotional value does not make the labour any less real.
Love, Intimacy and Emotional Labour
This division becomes especially clear in heterosexual relationships. It is easy to say that “men don’t communicate” and “women communicate too much,” but this misses how emotional responsibility is divided between them. If masculinity is constructed through autonomy and emotional restriction while femininity is constructed through relationality and care, then heterosexual relationships can become sites in which these two forms of socialisation fit together very well. A woman’s capacity to identify feelings, initiate difficult conversations, maintain connection and respond to vulnerability can end up making up for a man’s difficulty with emotional expression, which can leave her carrying more of the emotional labour in the relationship.
And this does not mean that men do not experience emotion. Research suggests that men’s emotional lives are complex, and that differences between men and women vary depending on the emotion (Martin, 2024). The issue may be less about the ability to feel and more about which emotions men feel comfortable expressing, how they understand and label them, and who is expected to deal with them. This can affect relationships, as difficulty recognising and expressing emotions can make intimacy harder. Men who report greater difficulty expressing their emotions also report lower levels of intimacy in their relationships (Jansz, 2000).
Beyond the Binary
The feminisation of emotion has also been used to undermine women’s authority. It can be associated with care while also being treated as irrational. Women are expected to manage feelings but are also constructed as too sensitive. Men, on the other hand, are expected to control emotion, and this control becomes associated with authority and strength. This is why the rational/emotional divide needs to be understood as a hierarchy, because the traits associated with masculinity have historically been given more authority, privilege and legitimacy.
At the same time, we cannot speak of “men” and “women” as though everyone within these categories experiences emotion in the same way. Connell’s idea of hegemonic masculinity shows that masculinity is shaped not only in relation to femininity, but also through different forms of masculinity, where some are treated as more legitimate than others (Connell, 1995). Ideas about emotional control have also been used to create hierarchies between different groups of people, particularly through racial and colonial ideas. Similarly, homosexuality has historically been associated with femininity and, as a result, with greater emotional expressiveness.
Even the idea that there are only two fixed categories of male and female is complicated. Much research on sex differences still relies on “a stable and dualistic sex/gender system,” even though people’s experiences of sex and gender are much more varied, including intersex, trans and queer lives (Petersen, 2004, as cited in de Boise, 2015). Masculinities are multiple. Femininities are multiple. They intersect with class, caste, race, sexuality, nationality, age and other social positions. So, who gets to define what counts as masculine, feminine, rational, emotional, appropriate or excessive? These categories themselves are shaped by power.
Towards Change
Contemporary masculinity has increasingly made room for emotional openness. The emotionally unavailable man is no longer necessarily the ideal. Men may be encouraged to communicate, attend therapy, discuss relationships, show affection and become more emotionally intelligent. Of course, these shifts matter, but they do not necessarily mean that the underlying gender order has changed, because emotional openness can itself become a part of masculinity. A man who is comfortable discussing his feelings may be understood as emotionally intelligent, desirable or mature, and romantic competence can become another form of masculine competence.
As Allen argues, young men being more open about romance does not necessarily challenge hegemonic masculinity; instead, it can show how hegemonic masculinity has adapted to include a form of masculinity that was previously seen as less acceptable: “the way in which hegemonic masculinity has appropriated and reconfigured a previously subordinated romantic masculinity” (Allen, 2007). This does not mean that men becoming more emotionally open cannot make a difference. Of course, men taking greater responsibility for their own emotions and for the emotional work involved in relationships can reduce the burden placed on women. But becoming more emotionally open does not necessarily mean taking on more of this responsibility. Men may become more comfortable expressing their feelings while women continue to carry more responsibility for maintaining relationships and managing emotions.
These patterns are capable of changing. Connell describes his idea of hegemonic masculinity as a “currently accepted strategy” and stresses that “hegemony then, is a historically mobile relation” (Connell, 1995). What counts as dominant masculinity can therefore change as the social conditions that sustain it change. Chodorow also points towards the importance of changing the organisation of childcare and family life in thinking about how gender is reproduced, and raises the possibility that changing how mothers and fathers share care may also change how gendered emotional patterns are passed on.
Rethinking Emotion
I think the goal, then, is not to make men more emotional. That still assumes that men are naturally less emotional and that becoming more emotional means becoming more feminine.
As Hearn argues, emotions are “social and ideological constructs,” even where they are also connected to intense mental and physiological states (Hearn, 1993, as cited in de Boise, 2015). This means that the question of emotion is also a question of power. Who is allowed to express anger? Who is expected to absorb it? Who is comforted? Who provides the comfort? Whose vulnerability is recognised? Whose vulnerability becomes someone else’s responsibility? And whose labour remains invisible?
Perhaps what is required is to question the binary and the gendered organisation of emotion itself. What if emotional competence were treated as a human capacity rather than a gendered one?
We have spent a long time treating masculinity and femininity as though they describe natural differences between people, when they are also products of history, socialisation and power. These arrangements are learned, reproduced and rewarded, but they are not inevitable. They can be changed.
- Ritika Raina, Therapist, Feel Fuzzy
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This piece was written by Ritika Raina, therapist at Feel Fuzzy. Ritika creates a warm and reflective space where clients can slow down and make sense of themselves at their own pace, approaching therapy with an inclusive, intersectional lens. Her practice is integrative with a foundation in psychodynamic understanding, exploring how early experiences, relationships and internal patterns shape the way we relate to ourselves and others.
If this piece has brought up anything for you, or if you are looking for a space to process what you are carrying, you can learn more about working with Ritika here.