Powerful men have been getting a lot of credit for acting emotional lately and I have mixed feelings about it. Of course I do – I'm a woman. I'm feeling stuff, actual ooey-gooey emotions, every waking minute of the day – unlike men, who apparently "let their guard down" only once in a while. We chicks are crazy that way.
Anyway, I watched Jon Stewart's Daily Show monologue on last week's Charleston church massacre and I was moved by the way he dropped the comedy in order to make a more earnest point. He was as incisive and analytical as ever, but you could also see the heartbreak in his face. "Maybe if I wasn't nearing the end of the run or this wasn't such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral," he said of his decision to display his unvarnished feelings about the racist killings, "but I didn't."
And a couple of days later, Barack Obama made headlines for showing his sensitive side in what are seen as "unusual displays of emotion" for the President, who has been widely criticized in the past for being detached and socially aloof. He welled up delivering the eulogy for his vice-president's late son, Beau Biden, and in recent speeches on subjects as wide as his trade agenda, health-care reform and racism, Obama has been uncharacteristically passionate – showing frustration, sadness and a bit of cheeky affection. After a meeting with Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, he commented in a speech, "I don't know whether this is appropriate, but I just told Sister Carol I love her." As the New York Times crisply noted, "It was the kind of comment his demonstrative vice-president is known for making, but less often heard from the president."
Whether Obama is willfully attempting to reveal a more human side to the American public or whether, like Stewart, he's just letting it all hang out as he nears the end of his run, hardly matters. He's being more emotionally expressive than before and the effect is evidently contagious. After taping a revealing and personal interview the other day with Marc Maron, a foul-mouthed curmudgeon and comic who hosts the weekly podcast WTF out of his Pasadena, Calif., garage, Obama swept out with his security detail, leaving Maron to spontaneously burst into tears. "I'm just overwhelmed with emotion," he told NPR.
Look, I'm all for influential males learning how to be more open and less closed, warmer instead of colder. In addition to drastically reducing the number of text-message breakups on college campuses, men expressing their feelings in a compassionate way will, I suspect, just make the world a better, more civilized place on every conceivable level. Even if they do it in science labs or standing in front of podiums or while watching a drone strike in the Situation Room, men having feelings and talking about them can only move us forward as a species. But I must confess that something in our collective willingness to go "Ahhhh" when we see evidence of this makes me feel exhausted. Even a bit annoyed. (Being a woman, I'm naturally in touch with my irritable side.)
It's a bit like when my husband takes the kids on a train or a plane journey. He inevitably comes out the other side invigorated, his faith in human kindness restored. "Everyone was so lovely!" he'll say; "The attendants gave me free beer!" Needless to say, this has not been my experience of long-haul journeys with small children, because, well, there's nothing cute or touching or moving about seeing a woman travelling with her kids, is there? That's just what we women do. And the same goes for expressing emotions. When Hillary Clinton broke down and wept on the Democratic nomination campaign trail in 2008, the headlines were hardly supportive. "Can Hillary cry her way to the White House?" asked the New York Times. "Do Clinton's emotions get the best of her?" wondered ABC News. The answers to these rhetorical headlines were implicit: no and yes. And of course, for Clinton, like all women in power, the issue of feeling stuff is a double-edged sword. Show too much emotion and you will be branded hysterical. Show too little and you're an ambitious, mercenary fembot.
In her new book about the female brain and behaviour, Moody Bitches, the American author Julie Holland argues that women are "designed by nature to be dynamic, cyclical and, yes, moody," and that it's actually not a bad thing. "Our dynamism imparts flexibility and adaptability. Being fixed and rigid does not lend itself to survival. In nature, you adapt or you die."
Clearly the boys are catching on to this little evolutionary trick. I'm all for powerful men emoting. I just wish we didn't give them so much credit for it.