Jessica Yu’s Reviews > I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression > Status Update

“When researchers asked girls and women to define what it means to be feminine, the girls answered with positive language: to be compassionate, to be con-nected, to care about others. Boys and men, on the other hand, when asked to describe masculinity, predominantly responded with double negatives. Boys and men did not talk about being strong so much as about not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent. They did not speak about being close to their fathers so much as about pulling away from their mothers. In short, being a man generally means not being a woman. As a result, boys' acquisition of gender is a negative achievement. Their developing sense of their own masculinity is not, as in most other forms of identity development, a steady movement toward something valued so much as a repulsion from something devalued. Masculine identity development turns out to be not a process of development at all but rather a process of elimi-nation, a successive unfolding of loss. Along with whatever genetic proclivities one might inherit, it is this loss that lays the foundation for depression later in men's lives.”

“Men do not have readily at hand the same level of insight into their emotional lives as women, because our culture works hard to dislocate them from those aspects of themselves. Men are less used to voicing emotional issues, because we teach them that it is unmanly to do so. Even a cursory look at gender socialization in our culture indicates that a man would be far more likely to act out distress than to talk about it, while a woman would have the skills, the community, and the ease to discuss her problems.
Having forcefully pushed our boys and men away from the exercise and development of these psychological skills, we add insult to injury when we turn around and label them more disturbed and less evolved than women who have been encouraged to keep them.”