Image © Nicole Baster from Unsplash.com

At the tender age of nineteen I came across the concept of the ‘highly sensitive person’ and, as I read through its traits, much of it clicked with me. I did have a hard time watching violent scenes in film and television, I did feel frazzled when lots of pressure was put on me. I did feel very strong emotions towards art; an almost overwhelming response to emotionally stimulating works and sounds. And I was seen as being delicate, sensitive and shy by others.

Finding myself in at least some of these criteria, I sent the link to a friend, upon which he responded, “Is this test to see if you’re a colossal faggot?” and in a move of exasperated anger, I shut the conversation window. That homophobic retort had been all too familiar by this stage of my young life. Soon after, I began to move away from such people, realising the disrespect really wasn’t worth putting up with. I don’t really know if I fully am a ‘highly sensitive’ person, though much of it certainly resonated for me. I was very anxious as a child, and may have had some kind of separation anxiety. I disliked being yelled at and would tear up — something that became a source of mockery in my later days of primary school. Much of the cultural expectation of boyhood is to be boisterous, aggressive and competitive. Lack of delicacy is a must, for some reason. I spent a lot of my childhood with adults trying to figure out “what was wrong” with me: introverted, quiet, not interested in sports. As I entered high school, I became a recurring target for ‘gay’ rumours and speculations. Which, truthfully, does a lot of damage for your dating life (if you’re heterosexual) and causes you to feel even more defensive and insecure about how you relate and compare to other males.

It can be a source of shame to be a male person who experiences emotions like this: one who feels more playful and joyful when happy, and gets mocked for expressing it. One who responds to negative experiences with tears in place of fury, or to be somewhat delicate and in need of encouragement, being told to “get a grip!” and “man up!” in response to your softness; to be insulted or ostracized for not quite fitting in. To be more moved and excited by romance than flat-out sex. It seems like ticking every box for “male failure” that you possibly can. Culturally, you’re dropping the ball, and you get reminded of this failure at regular intervals. I couldn’t yell or stay mad at anyone, particularly. I swallowed all anger, afraid to express it, afraid of hurting others. If I ever did hurt anyone, I berated myself as the worst person in the world.

“Man up!” is one of those statements that stings. The words consume you as if you’re crawling with a hundred biting ants, digging into your flesh as if testing to see how weak you really are. “Man up!” is a demand to stop being so frail, to stop being so sensitive, to stop feeling the way you do. It’s a counterproductive intervention. Mostly it just leads to greater upset, more emotional repression, and a lot of foul feelings developing internally. “Man up” can be a terribly misguided means of encouragement from people concerned you’re too passive, or a means of shaming you for expressing inappropriate frailty to their eyes. In the later case, perhaps because they themselves are uncomfortable by emotional displays and have learned to suppress and mask such feelings behind different fronts.

While, at least in Western cultures, sensitivity is rarely celebrated, it does offer some great experiences: investment in art and culture, immersion in the emotional experiences of others, greater empathy, appreciation of small sensory details in an environment. In an ideal world, there’d be an acknowledgement of the benefits that being a sensitive person can bring, rather than just reinforcement of shame and concern. Too often sensitivity is conflated with weakness. When I wasn’t treated poorly, I ran risk of being mollycoddled, smothered, and treated as overly delicate. Both approaches have their negative side. Smothering can be an extremely frustrating experience; it limits personal development and growth, reinforces the anxious view of the world as a dangerous place as much as negative experiences do, increases over-reliance on others, and it often leaves one feeling controlled and limited, as if your have a minimal say in your own life. Adventure, mistakes and exploration are discouraged: you’re just too vulnerable.

At the same time, there should be ways to deal with interactions with sensitive people that can acknowledge the often frustrating dynamics that can come into play. Stepping around someone’s feelings constantly, trying not to upset them, can be an exhaustive exercise. Likewise, learning to communicate that you’re stepping away in a response to high-levels of stimulus that have left you feeling drained is important too, instead of just vanishing from peoples’ lives for a bit and leaving them wondering what’s up. In another sense, treating sensitive children completely different from less sensitive children could be a breeding ground for resentment: if other children are yelled at, and one is not, it may read as favouritism and lead to bullying or ostracizing behaviour. And as much as I’d like to champion the advantages of sensitivity, it can have its burdens. Being upset over things that others can more easily brush off is never fun. Feeling shame and pain more strongly than others seem to can be frustrating, and lead to increased self-loathing. Putting everyone first, and feeling as though you exist to get trodden on is enraging, but feeling guilt when you try to establish boundaries also agitates. And having girls tell you that you’re more of a girl than they are is, frankly, just as emasculating and shame-inducing as the boys calling you a ‘big woman’.

Sensitive men tend to be walking a tightrope between trying to have their needs met and appreciated, and trying to avoid frequent emasculation for diverting from conventional gender expectations. Men, in general, tend to be conditioned to feel shame at weakness, delicacy, and failure. Being a ‘sensitive man’ you often experience those feelings of being disappointingly unmanly at much more regular intervals. There’s a sense that you’re different from other men in some ways, and most of them are hardly ever framed as positives. I think, when undergoing a lifetime of these experiences, many men learn to blunt their sensitivity, to censor certain thoughts and feelings. I know I have, at least, and to some extent that makes me rather sad. I feel as if, in some ways, I’ve lost parts of myself that I genuinely liked.

Sensitive men can develop a lot of bitterness in my experience. Sometimes it evolves into misogyny as they respond to the constant chiding for failing to like male things, born out of regular humiliation and being compared to ‘girls’. Other times they might develop a disdain for all things conventionally masculine, and see those men and those activities in a stereotypical way: ‘jerk activities’ for ‘jerks’. For all the positive experiences of sensitivity, it can also lend itself to an embittered and petty side. It’s all too easy to create hateful, negative caricatures out of the people who hurt us, and to project those on to others who reminds us, even vaguely, of those people. Sensitivity isn’t simply just being exuberant when energized, feeling saddened and wounded by slights, or emotionally engrossed in beautiful music: it can lead to unnecessarily aggressive responses when under pressure or feeling stressed, or when coupled with continual hurtful rejections. It’s important for sensitive people to have help in learning to balance and process these types of experiences in a productive, rather than harmful, way. Which, of course, is hard when people feel ashamed for even feeling them, and want to deny being this way at all. It’s a vicious cycle.

On a cultural side, I do wish we could embrace sensitivity in people in general, but especially work towards a more empathetic approach for men who have these kinds of emotional experiences. It’d be encouraging for a new generation of young boys who might veer towards more delicate emotional temperaments to not be shouted at to “man up!” when they feel overwhelmed or emotionally vulnerable, and aren’t dismissively compared to women or their genitals, or having their sexual identity questioned, when they express frailty or affectionate inclinations. Men, as a collective, should be encouraged to be more emotional, to embrace their vulnerability, to be allowed a variety of ways to express themselves. That’s only one small stone tossed into the waters of gender reform, of course, but those ripples would be delightful sight for me and, I assume, some other men too.