The man’s prison
Why you’re only allowed to show a small part of what you feel, what it costs you to push the rest down, and why that bottled-up pressure has to go somewhere.
This is the emotional spectrum of a human being.
This is where masculinity starts, at birth. Complete.
- "Don’t cry, son."
- "Stop being such a pussy."
- "Don’t make such a fuss, man."
- "I want a real man."
- "You don’t need anyone."
- "You’re so fucking sensitive."
A man can be anything, as long as he’s a 'man'.
The story he was handed looks like something to hold on to: never show weakness, stay in control, project dominance, command status. On the inside it’s a prison you never see.
Being a woman is rarely questioned: colour outside the lines and you’re usually still a woman. For men it works differently. Every day the world quietly tests whether you’re man enough. How you react to pain. To doubt. To a row. To emotions you’re ‘supposed’ to put away instead of show. Think of the moment you feel something sad and act tough anyway. Or the moment you would rather say nothing than admit you don’t know. Being a man rarely feels like something you simply are, but like a status you have to earn again and again, and can lose just as easily. One slip, showing weakness at the wrong moment, a gesture that looks too "gay", and you’re "not a real man".
What it costs you is playing the strong man non-stop: taking risks, staying on top, putting away anything that looks like weakness. You don’t own your manhood. You rent it. So you live in a constant state of tension, an exam that never ends.
“I’m strong.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“All good.”
“I don’t need help.”
The prison has no bars. We’re the guards ourselves; just think what gets thrown at you the moment you step off the norm.
You don’t have to be soft or gay to get this thrown at you. The accusation works on every man, and that’s exactly why it keeps everyone in line. Those who are get it twice over. So you keep up the front, big and strong, even when you feel unsure or afraid. Every single day.
What do you push down?
Be honest with yourself for a second. Which of these do you keep in, sometimes or most of the time?
Stopping feels more dangerous than carrying on.
So why not just show what you feel? Because you know exactly what it could cost you: respect, your place in the group, and the fear that your partner will never look at you the same way again.
And you don’t just get that back. Get known as the weak one once, and it sticks to you. That’s no small thing, that’s your place among the people around you.
There’s a reason this lands so hard. For our ancestors, belonging was a matter of survival: outside the group, on your own, you didn’t last long. Your body is still built for that. Which is why "you aren’t a real man" doesn’t feel like an opinion, it feels like an alarm. In your body it goes like this:
Something happens
Criticism in a meeting. A joke at your expense. Your partner doing better than you.
Your body switches on
Your heart speeds up, your head gets hot, your jaw clenches. Before you’ve thought anything at all.
You do something to make it stop
Talking louder. Shutting down. Walking off. Lashing out. Anything to get rid of that feeling.
You may recognise the short fuse after a bad day, or the shutting down at criticism. That’s this alarm going off, not your character. And a body that stands in this every day can’t keep it up forever.
The same pressure, two directions.
Shutting a part of yourself away eats at you. Sooner or later the pressure has to get out: inwards, or outwards.
3 to 4 men a day die by suicide in the Netherlands, just over twice as many as women. A man who never learned to carry his own turmoil turns it on himself.
These aren’t the same, and not equally grave. One turns inwards, the other hits another human being. But they come from the same source: a man who never learned what to do with his own feelings.
What it looks like when the pressure turns outwards.
This isn’t here to blame you. It’s here so you can see it, in yourself or in someone around you, at the point where there’s still something to be done.
Violence almost never begins with a blow. It begins with her freedom being made smaller step by step, often wrapped up as "protection" or "passion". That’s called coercive control, and research tells us it follows a fixed pattern.
History
An established pattern of controlling behaviour in earlier relationships.
Love bombing
The relationship moves extremely fast. He claims her completely to deaden his own emptiness.
Isolation
Coercive control. Step by step he becomes the owner of her time and her social circle.
The trigger
A looming break-up or a new job, something that reclaims her autonomy, sets off his alarm.
Escalation
Stalking, threats, violence. Extreme measures to keep control in place.
The turn
He registers that restoring his dominance has irreversibly failed.
Planning
Coolly preparing the ultimate act of control.
The eruption
Femicide. The most predictable murder we know, and precisely for that reason preventable.
Do you recognise any of these stages, in yourself or in someone around you? In the Netherlands you can talk, free and around the clock, to Veilig Thuis (Safe at Home) on 0800 2000.
Dominance isn’t strength.
A man who has to keep his woman small in order to feel big breaks down exactly the thing he needs most: her trust.
As long as he keeps control of everything around him, he never has to feel how little control he has over himself.
That isn’t a strong man.
That’s a man who has lost control of himself.
That shows where this behaviour comes from, and it excuses nothing: what he does stays entirely his responsibility.
Which leaves one question. Talk to a man one to one and almost nobody defends these rules any more. And still they stand. How?
Read chapter 3 for why nobody is the first to speak up.