As Joe Erhmann said in his TEDTalk, “Be A Man,” the words , be a man, impacts a boy’s life more than we realize. I can think of at least one time when I was told to stop crying or to man up by a male role model in my life. Now I don’t believe it was their intent to make me not display emotion at all, just that there are appropriate times to be emotional. However, the appropriate times to display emotions was never really shown; I was just told when to not show emotion.
For instance, my grandfather on my dad’s side passed away when I was around the age of 12. When we held his funeral, my grandmother, father, mother, and two brothers sat on the same row as me, in that order. My mother and grandmother were constantly wiping their eyes with tissues. Meanwhile, my father and my brothers sat there silent. None of them shed a single tear or sniffle, almost as if they were statues. I was bawling most of the service. What would you expect from a twelve year old who went to bed with a grandfather, then woke up the next day to be told he no longer has a grandfather? My brothers still sat there, stone faced. My father was trying to silence me, not in the, “real men don’t cry way,” rather he just gave me handfuls of tissues and my mother had to take me out to the bathroom. Later on was when the, “be a man,” logic came. My brothers were out on the patio at home and I still had a runny nose from crying. My brothers poked fun at me for crying and sounding like a baby. This may not seem like much, but over a lifetime this can change someone.
In fact, things were different around 6 years later, when my grandmother on my dad’s side passed away. During the funeral, I couldn’t shed a tear for the longest time. It wasn’t until I went for my orientation for OSU a few weeks later when it hit me. I had gotten to know some really cool people and we started talking about stuff. I don’t remember how it got brought up, but I started talking about how it was nice to just take my mind off of my late grandmother for a while and I was thankful for meeting them. Then, without me even thinking about it, my eyes started getting watery, I felt a lump in my throat, and I tried to finish my sentence but I choked on my words. The choke turned into sniffling and I was so close to losing it. Then the man who had been leading our group stood out of his chair and hugged me. He said, “I couldn’t even tell, none of us could. You were strong man,” and at that moment it just all flooded out of me. That was the first time I cried in a while. I know he didn’t mean for it to come across this way, but he was equating me holding back my feelings to being strong. Another prime example of someone unintentionally building the idea of a strong male being emotionless.
Both of these moments are prime examples of how people accidentally reinforce the male emotionless figure that Joe Erhmann mentions. Even though they meant well, moments like these subtly reinforce the idea in young mens mind’s that emotions are not to be expressed in front of others.
Works Cited
Erhmann, Joe. “Be A Man: Joe Ehrmann at TEDxBaltimore 2013.” TED, 20 Feb. 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVI1Xutc_Ws.
