Girls Are Too Emotional

Photo illustration by Chintana Phravorachit / VOX Staff

By Barry Langer / VOX Staff

I am a man. Since I am man, I have no place for emotion in my life whatsoever. I have room, though, for thinking about food, mindless diversions such as music, electronic gadgets and sports, as well as to follow my primal need to be infatuated with women.

A woman, unlike a man, tends to have plenty of room for all sorts of important thoughts as well as an endless supply of emotions to go with them. Men do not understand why women have all this capacity for emotion.

Meanwhile, you women do not understand our lack of emotions, yet you still feel compelled to get us men to express them. It’s a compulsion of some kind, because you will seemingly share your emotions with any man, almost as if it were to catch us off guard and trick us into sharing some fragment of a feeling. But, alas, since we harbor no hidden emotions , the tactic never works.

But that doesn’t stop women from telling us the very intense and personal feelings you have, even if we’re complete strangers. Sometimes it’s about the special someone in your lives. Sometimes it’s about someone random that you had a strong gut reaction to. Women are often portrayed as being overly weepy or sentimental or wrapped up in romantic swoons. But the truth that I most often see is the flip side of the emotional spectrum — and it’s usually not toward men, but your fellow gender.

Many of you just said to yourself, “Oh, he’s so very wrong.” But I can’t tell you how many times that I have heard one woman call another woman the B word — either right to her face or behind her back — for no apparent cause (maybe that’s because we men are oblivious, but I’ll get to that later).

Case in point: A friend of mine worked on a local newspaper (no, not VOX) and started dating one of the guys there. His ex-girlfriend found out, and went around telling everyone that she wished my friend would just drop dead. OK, so that’s pretty typical after a breakup, right? Well, there’s one big caveat: My friend was going through radiation treatment for cancer at the time.

Men hate this kind of emotional drama. We do not want to listen to you women moan about the women — or sometimes even men — you hate. Men do not act this way, even after we’ve been betrayed. We simply cut the offending person out of our life and pretend like he or she never existed and move on. End of story. We would prefer it if you could act this way, too, but then we don’t understand your capacity for emotion.

When women do decide to vent such feelings to us, we simply nod our heads and go to our happy place until you finish and it’s time for us to eat, play a video game or make out. We know our disinterest just makes you more upset, but we can’t do anything about it. The only hint of emotion we feel is when we amusedly watch another man get slapped in the face by a woman for not doing anything wrong. Once in a while I’ll even go up to the woman and ask her why she slapped her man. The last time I did this, I got this response: “He was talking to that other girl.” He wasn’t talking about anything in particular, just talking. “What’s the problem with that?” I asked. “After she talked to her, she hugged him.” Hugged him. See how your womanly inability to control your emotions — even a positive one — will more than likely only get you and others in trouble?

Man’s emotionless-ness is not simply a part of his genetic code, but also a defense mechanism. And so is what I call our “Obliviousity.” Obliviousity is the extreme ability that all men everywhere possess that allows us to not notice that new haircut, Lacoste shirt, or Baby Phat velour dinner gown you just got. Again, unless what women want us to notice has something to do with food, mindless diversions or their increased sexiness, it will not register in our brains or in our hearts. We simply cannot help it, so I plead to you to stop yelling at us, hitting us and giving us the cold shoulder because we honestly don’t know what we’ve done wrong.

Our Obliviousity might make some of you women think that there’s some deep thought or emotion passing through our minds. In reality, we’re just zoned out listening to the low background hum that drones throughout our heads. We really aren’t thinking about ways to confuse you. We’re really not feeling disconnected or distant from you — at least not more than is normal due to our lack of emotions. It’s just that we only respond to food, ESPN highlights and the remotest possibility that you’ll say yes when we ask you out.

Barry is a senior at the Weber School, and wrote this piece because a girl had overreacted to his polite suggestion that she be quiet or that he would take away her talking privileges. He also would like to make it known that the above piece does not necessarily reflect his own personal beliefs — nor VOX’s — but also that it’s still 100 percent correct.