//Hari ng Sablay\\

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

~*~ I'm no authority on repression. I'm not even a psych major, as much as I would've made a decent one because I love observing and tinkering with how the human mind works. But I know that people have had to deal with repression since they decided to bring order into their lives. And one of its biggest victims is the typical Filipino male.

Well, the typical male in general is one repressed soul. He's been brought up to think that showing emotion is a weakness a man must never have, and a luxury only women should avail of. So the patriarchs of old decreed and established. And so, the dimwits have succeeded in making walking time bombs out of the male populace to this very day. Men feel very similarly as females, and are often subject to the same human emotions. Girls, they bawl it out. Guys, they brawl it out. Which can be better than what others do. Others just push those emotions down, locking em up or burying them deep. I am a man, I must show no sign of vulnerability. I am tough, oozing with machismo. Boys don't cry. Right. And then these same men go ballistic over a spilled cup of coffee, go to whores to fuck their brains out cause they dare not approach their equally repressed (his fault) and frustrated (also his fault) wives (or worse go to a male lover), shoot the motorist who cut them off on the road, or blast their own skulls open because they realized at mid-life how unenjoyable their life has become. There. Throw in the Filipino flavor, and you get helium expanding really quick in a little balloon.

Women? Such weaklings. Crying and whining all the time. Crisis comes, they cry, they move on. Another comes, same thing. Men. The strong, invulnerable men. Crisis comes. And another. And another. Not budging... not budging... Kaboom. Self-destruction.

This is why I've come to admire those men who can actually let it out. To hell with the stereotypical machismo rules. I'm a man, i feel, but I can tough it out like the best of em. Boys don't cry? Sure, but men do. Being a victim of stereotypical male repression myself, it can be pretty hard to break out of the shell the men of the earlier generation threw me in. I can only hope that i'll ever break out of it one day. At my age, it might already be too late. Still, guys just gotta lighten up and be themselves. Men are still human after all, who have hearts and souls that feel. No point in being a bottled up, stone-faced gladiator who ends up in the looney bin. It may take strength to be undaunted by anything, but for men it'll probably take a lot more strength to admit that they feel and hurt every now and then. No, a lot.

And they call women the weaker sex.

...at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss... - Paolo Coelho, "Eleven Minutes"

Migs, 9:16 PM

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

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