We are taught how to speak, how to walk, and how to fit into this brutal culture of curated faces from the moment we see the light of this world; yet we are never taught the truth about navigating the trauma and hurt of life.
Society has taken the foundations of our emotionality and brute-forced them into a blueprint that moulds men into a “fortress” of emotions, with the cracks in its stone shamed as “weakness” or “vulnerability”, and women into “rivers of emotion”, ever flowing only to be dismissed as “hysterical” — a mere performance framed as female performativity.
This isn’t a fight between genders or an advocacy for either gender; it is a call to question the gendered social architecture that dictates whether trauma must be kept “fortified” or turned into a “spectacle” to be judged in the eyes of society.
The binary theory.
Growing up in this society, we witness a clear bisection in the “conditioning” of men and women when it comes to dealing with personal grief and trauma.
Both of these forms of conditioning are inherently toxic and are forced upon both sides, resulting in silence and withdrawal on one end, and emotional intensity on the other.
This bisection creates a “trauma-response paradox.” We are socialised to believe that there are only two ways to hurt: you either bury the pain until it turns to stone, or you scream until the world turns away. This binary doesn’t just dictate how we act; it dictates what we are allowed to feel.
The silence: “stifling” of masculinity.
For men, this social conditioning drives them to believe and accept that anything perceived as “soft” must be rejected and banished.
When trauma actually hits, the dominant response is often usually “normative male alexithymia.” This isn’t merely a refusal to talk; it’s an inculcated inability to process trauma through words.
NMA is a psychological term used to describe a subclinical form of alexithymia, which is the inability to identify and describe emotions in oneself.
Many of you may have felt “bad” or “off”, yet been unable to distinguish between feeling lonely, disappointed, or anxious; this can be an undifferentiated sign of NMA. It can become so concentrated that it turns into somatic substitution — a psychological process in which emotional distress, such as anxiety, sadness, or anger, is experienced as physical symptoms like insomnia, indigestion, or headaches.
A widely accepted concept related to this is the “anger funnel”; cultural norms often make anger the only “socially acceptable” emotion for men. Consequently, more vulnerable feelings like grief, shame, or loneliness are discarded or considered insignificant.
The ultimate tragedy of the “fortified” man isn’t just the silence he keeps, but the profound isolation that this architecture demands. By rejecting the language of hurt to preserve the stone, he effectively burns the bridges that would allow anyone to reach him. His trauma isn’t merely hidden; it becomes inaccessible — both to himself and to those trying to help him, leaving him to navigate the crumbling ruins of his own psyche in total solitude. He becomes a prisoner of the very fortress he was told would keep him safe.
The storm: “intensity” of femininity
Much like NMA, we see emotional pathologisation imposed on women; it is society’s tendency to undermine a woman’s hurt and trauma by framing her response as a symptom of her “unstable” nature rather than approaching it as a valid and logical reaction to an event.
In such a predicament, trauma often manifests as heightened anxiety and externalised distress, which is then wrongly labelled as “hysteria.”
Due to this, women often display greater emotional expressivity, especially with positive emotions, while internalising negative emotions such as sadness — leaving them to drown in the “flow” of a plea for help that no one chooses to hear.
Society’s duality in claiming to see genders as equal has led to women needing to express their trauma with greater intensity just to be heard, yet that same intensity is used against them as a reason to disbelieve their trauma.
It becomes a deadly Catch-22.
Even when women’s emotions flow freely like a river, society builds “dams” around them to prevent them from “overflowing”. This ugly and forced act of victim-blaming, and the loss of societal accountability, has led to restrictive emotionality in many women — the tendency to inhibit the expression of certain emotions and an unwillingness to self-disclose intimate or personal feelings.
This cycle of invalidation ensures that her trauma is never resolved, only managed. When society dams the river, it leaves her choking on the very emotions she was told to express. She is unheard when loud and invisible when quiet — utterly trapped by design.
The architecture of erasure.
The tragedy of this gendered architecture is that it leaves no room for the human at the centre of the hurt. We have created a society more comfortable with the consistency of a stereotype than with the messy reality of a soul in pain. By the time the fortress is built or the river is dammed, the person we were before the trauma is gone — replaced by a socially acceptable version of suffering that satisfies the blueprint but starves the survivor.
We are left standing in a landscape of our own making, surrounded by curated faces that offer no recognition. Perhaps the architecture can be dismantled, or perhaps we have lived within these walls for so long that we have forgotten there was ever a sky above them. The binary remains, haunting and absolute, leaving us to wonder whether the masks we wear to survive have finally become our skin.
We are still waiting to be understood without needing the mask. But for now, we continue to speak into the void, wondering if anyone is truly listening — or if we are simply echoes in an empty hall.
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