At The Atlantic online, Lily Rothman thinks advice columns specifically for men aren’t emotional and, well, feminine enough.
A new addition to the field came just recently, with Slate‘s debut of a new advice-for-men column called the Gentleman Scholar, and he’s not alone. There’s not actually a shortage of men giving advice. Still, looking at the questions men ask in those forums, it’s clear that the message about male emotions hasn’t evolved too much past a punch-line.
Next Tuesday, we’re delighted to have Slate‘s “Dear Prudence”/aka Emily Yoffee visit our American Advice class at Lake Forest College via Skype. We firmly instructed the students to bring good questions for Ms. Yoffee. Perhaps I’ll ask her about her take on Rothman’s thesis.
Categories: General
Her column mystified me—she wasn’t taking issue with the advice columnist, but with his advice-seekers. Huh? Does-not-compute. (I also think she’s wrong about women never asking for advice about fashion; there are fashion advice columns, and the infamous “do’s and don’ts” from Glamour. There’s a whole industry of fashion advice for women, because women’s fashion is intimately tied to social class in a way that men’s fashion isn’t—women seeking to move up in social class need to learn all the intricate rules of dress and fashion of the class they seek to rise to. Men just need to put on a suit and see a decent barber. That might be an exaggeration, but really—men don’t have anywhere near as many intricate details to perform to cover the fact they weren’t born into the upper middle class or higher. Remember all the brouhaha about our First Lady showing her well-toned arms at a State dinner? I had no idea what all the fuss was about—great dress, arms to die for, where’s the problem? Come to find out, the problem was that she was breaking social-class attire rules. Fortunately, she’s done it so often that she’s set a new style standard.)
Am I alone in thinking that you write to an advice column for practical advice, and not emotional advice? I don’t know—-it wouldn’t occur to me to ask for intimate emotional advice from a stranger, particularly a stranger that doesn’t share my background (thus, no grounding in the particulars of my situation). But practical advice? Sure.
What La Lubu said, but I’m also baffled (and saddened) by the continuing conflation of ‘emotional’ and ‘feminine’.
Yesterday I finished reading Donna Freitas’ The End of Sex (review to come), and one of her main arguments was that when we assume “hook up culture” benefits men and marginalizes and/or objectifies women we are buying into continued stereotypes of men as sex-addled animals with little interest in emotionally satisfying relationships. Freitas herself admits buying into this assumption when she first began studying college students’ sexual experiences in the mid-2000s. What she found, instead, were virtually equal numbers of women and men dissatisfied with sex that did not happen in the context of emotional-relational meaning. Young men were yearning, along with their female peers, for better ways to meaningfully relate to the people they were sexually attracted to. Unlike women, they struggled with where and how to express those desires, since our cultural narratives about men equate “masculinity” with objectivity and dis-interest in emotional attachments.
Anyway, it sounds to me like the advice column trends are following this pattern of public silence regarding emotion among men (as a population). Hopefully, as we move away from toxic notions of male emotional incapability and recognize that men are capable of emotional sophistication and depth of feeling just as women are, we’ll see fewer pronounced male/female differences in questions asked about sex and relationships.
I think the columnist went overboard. The guy is starting a new advice column and he took the questions he had and ran with them.
@LaLubu – I think advice columns without a specific focus are usually assumed to be about your personal problems. However, I also would never write in to one. I would rather get that kind of advice from someone I know.