It is recommended that you read the articles in the series in order, as each depends on the previous.
1.0 Introduction
What is it that goes on inside men and women that gives them two different characteristic ways of dealing with emotion? What is it in society and culture that shapes these tendencies?
These are the questions explored throughout this series. The present article tries to articulate the underlying structural difference in the self that shapes these two tendencies. It has been suggested in the previous articles that men’s emotionality is mediated more aesthetically and women’s more affectively. We need to explore now more of what this means.
2.0 Emotion and Intellect
We are more familiar dealing with meaning in conceptual rather than emotional terms. The intellectual function is that dimension of the self where explicit questions for understanding are addressed.
We use images to represent insights and construct conceptual schemes to represent what we have grasped in our understanding. This explicit way of dealing with meaning has the most potential for precision and clarity.
Within the broadly intellectual realm we also have explicit but less direct ways of expressing meaning, such as through stories, symbols, proverbs. We use these rough rules of thumb and simplified mental images to navigate through this world of meaning. By contrast, the highest clarity of meaning in itself is expressed theoretically, with clear definition of all relevant terms and relations.
It is less obvious, but we also deal with meaning through emotion.
For example, most people would have had the sense of having a feeling of ‘incompleteness’, for want of a better word, when hearing an explanation that doesn’t quite add up. There is an indefinable sense that the argument being advanced is deficient somehow, but we cannot put our finger on it. We also commonly feel some sense of uplift or excitement when we suddenly understand something for the first time. Those habitually seeking new understanding usually develop a finer sense of the interior signs of whether they are likely to be on the right track or not.
This interior sense includes the emotional. Emotions are not only obvious but can range from very concentrated to very diffuse. They can shade away into a very fine interior sensation, so that it is not obvious whether the phenomenon is still an aspect of emotion.
If the mental constructs we use to define emotion and emotionality do not include an adequate ‘structural’ account, these interior phenomena might be put under a different category, and the link with emotionality be obscured.
Another example. What is commonly called intuition is an insight, which is a grasp of possible intelligibility, interiorly recognised in an emotional unification of meaningfulness but as yet unexpressed or clarified conceptually. It involves an interior feeling of rightness about one’s conclusion but an inability to give an explicit, reasoned account for the conclusion.
Although intuitions can be quite correct, they have the limitation of being less easily communicable, and so less likely to be convincing to others. The explicit development of meaning through intellectual process and clarification of concepts is often needed to reveal openly the validity and reasonableness of the intuition. Intuitions can feel subjectively very convincing, yet such a feeling can accompany true or false intuitions.
This feeling of conviction is an example of emotion in its relation with meaning.
3.0 Emotion’s Intrinsic Meaningfulness
As well as emotion associated with the explicit or implicit intellectual engagement with meaning, emotion has an orientation to meaningfulness in its own right.
That is, there is a meaningfulness of an aesthetic kind oriented to beauty rather than to truth. It has its own goal.
The meaningful apprehension of beauty can indeed include thinking about what is beautiful and wondering why it has emotional effects. But that is an aspect of the intellectual, the subject matter of which is the realm of beauty. However, there is an engagement with the experiential in which the objective is not understanding but the apprehension of the beautiful.
Importantly, this process too engages with meaning, but it does so indirectly. We pay attention in a manner that seeks meaningfulness, but instead of going on to ask questions, remains in the experiential level, ‘circulating’ within it so that the realm of sensation-emotion-feeling is interiorly differentiated in a fuller way. In a broad sense this is what is meant by the aesthetic.
It is as though one has an incipient insight, but instead of trying to clarify what it means conceptually, one tries to feel what it means.
There is still a ‘straining’ towards meaning, but it seeks to differentiate the experiential correlates of meaning. So there is a type of clarification but it is experiential, not intellectual. As well as being the phenomenon of aesthetic perception in general, this kind of engagement with meaningfulness is intrinsic to the process of emotional development.
4.0 Emotional Development
Emotional development occurs in a direct way and an indirect way. Its indirect mode of development is that aspect guided more explicitly by intellect.
That is, one thinks about what a particular state of feeling meant, why did one feel this way, what might lead to feeling differently, do others feel this way, and so on. The understanding gained this way can to some extent directly change one’s emotional state and to some extent provides methods that could be used in dealing with one’s emotions.
Emotion’s direct mode of development occurs within the experiential realm itself.
The articulated movements of interior sensation become the focus of attention, not in an attempt to articulate them but in an attempt to ‘move’ them so as to obtain equilibrium, or to fluctuate in certain ways, to stir up or to calm down. During this process one is guided by the felt shades of meaningfulness ‘carried’ by the emotional currents.
Emotion tends to develop in this direct way more spontaneously, beginning in infancy, for at that time one has little or no capacity to develop indirectly through intellect. This aspect is guided by others. Direct development is grounded in what sensation provides the emerging self to work with, both exterior and interior sensation. This is made more complex by the growth of sensitivity, the colouration of the sensory by personal preference. Patterns of preference emerged to shape personality, as well as an emerging sense of masculinity and femininity.
5.0 An Incipient Masculinity and Femininity
5.1 Introduction
It seems clear that in infancy and early childhood at least two consistent differences are manifest between boys and girls.
Boys tend to be more physically active than girls, running around, pushing and shoving, more physically excitable and restless.
Girls tend to settle more readily. At the same time girls tend to develop verbal abilities sooner than boys, more readily focusing on speaking to others and listening to stories.
Boys’ attention span for this kind of thing seems shorter. Although these propensities can be reinforced or counteracted to some extent, there seems to be an innate difference independent of these outside factors.
5.2 Sensory Focus
It seems reasonable to conclude from this that boys and girls are somewhat different in the degree to which they consciously experience some different sensations. Since at this age the higher controls of meaning have yet to develop, we can see more of the instinctive at work.
Boys feel more impulses to whole body action. They seem impelled to run and tumble, to manipulate objects, and to interact with each other in these ways.
Girls feel more impulses to look at faces, to talk, to sit together in quiet activities.
It is not so important to identify the degree of difference, but to note that it points to some differentiation between the sexes. Since boys and girls both engage in the full range of kinds of activities it is not a question of sharp demarcation, but of general tendency. We can also see that between individual boys and individual girls there are different degrees of this. Some boys are less physically active and some girls are highly active. Similarly with verbal ability.
5.3 From Preference to Self
Once a preference develops it tends to be self-reinforcing. If you enjoy something you want more of it. If you work out how to produce these pleasurable experiences, intention strengthens preference.
As boys and girls develop the skills that reinforce their initial preferences they also gain enjoyment from this growing mastery, which contributes to a stronger sense of self.
As they are encouraged by parents and others to recognise and value the attributes and skills that make them characteristically masculine or feminine these become part of this growing sense of self.
So a basic difference in experiential consciousness, in which boys and girls feel a different frequency of impulses of certain kinds, develops and takes on form in conscious self and in culture as expressions of masculinity and femininity.
Some views on gender see such development as problematic, as though only the instinctive impulses can properly be ascribed to male and female difference, the rest being ‘artificial’.
But it would be artificial for a human being not to cultivate meaning and growth.
Looking further down the track and seeing the difficulties that arise between the sexes, some wonder whether this could all be shaped from the beginning, pre-empting the development of gender and admitting only the basic empirical differences of male and female.
Some incline to reject even instinctive differences, and if there are any, want to admit only the individual differences, not those characterising male and female generally. These larger questions of ideology and methodology are not being addressed here. Here it is assumed that the kind of process described above provides the field within which we are trying to gain a deeper understanding. I am not trying to imaginatively recreate a ‘gender neutral’ world and build the theory on that.
6.0 Adolescence and Emotionality
In adolescence the implicit sexuality of childhood becomes explicit in the self-conscious attempt to comes to terms with one’s sexual feelings. This applies pressure to develop one’s emotional life in new ways.
New meanings inform and shape one’s feelings. The social mediation of emotion tends to become more pronounced as boys and girls try to assimilate new sensations and feelings into a newly self-conscious sexual identity.
For both boys and girls there is a certain precariousness in this process which usually leads to some uniformity of outward expressions of gender, finding safety in numbers and not wanting to stand out from the crowd.
It also accentuates the mode of dealing interiorly with emotion. The interior habits developed in childhood provide the resources one draws on to negotiate this new phase. The forms of interaction of boys with each other and girls with each other set the social context for this new stage of emotional development.
7.0 The Emotionality of Girls
It was noted earlier that girls tend to develop verbal facility sooner than boys, especially in the social sense.
Girls are more likely to spend time talking about things that have some felt social significance and paying attention to each other’s feelings in a direct way.
This process includes the explicit naming of feelings and trying to work out why someone feels a certain way, and why you feel a certain way yourself. Girls pay more explicit attention to emotional communication and deploy more explicit attempts to understand it. This helps girls to develop more explicit ‘levers’ of control to deal with this kind of social emotion.
Through this process girls develop what I am calling the affective mode of emotionality, a specialisation of emotion that habitually looks to direct interpersonal relation, face-to-face communication, for its ‘matrix’ of identification and recognition.
For girls, discussing and thinking about their feelings provides the means of getting a handle on emotions. Girls learn to feel by interacting with each other in face-to-face ways usually involving verbal communication. Young girls’ play typically includes talking to dolls, having imaginary conversations, which extends this process in solitude.
8.0 The Emotionality of Boys
Boys generally are more physically impulsive and motivated to whole body action, and to learning to manipulate objects. Boys play with toys and other objects, not having conversations with them but doing things with them, exploring, building, fighting. Boys play with each other in a similar manner, with games centred on objects, exploration, competition. This is all common observation.
What is not as generally recognised is that this pattern of activity fosters a distinct kind of emotionality. It is not a lesser version of girls’ emotionality, but is different in kind. If this is not recognised boys come to be regarded for what they are not doing rather than for what they are.
Initially boys’ emotional focus is not as obvious because they are doing rather than talking, or the talk is more incidental. But throughout this they are constantly thinking, in some way trying to understand why things are the way they are, how things work, how to do something they do not yet know how to do. The field of preoccupation is not personal interaction but physical action.
The kind of thinking one does in the absence of explicit naming and conceptual development is in general terms aesthetic.
Everything has a ‘feel’ to it; objects, toys, animals, movements, games. When trying to learn about the world in this way one does not try to name the various aspects and develop an explicit conceptual understanding of them, but memorises visual impressions. When exploring, one does not name every tree and gully in words, but ‘names’ them visually as remembered places of a distinct configuration and often having a particular emotional tone. A particular isolated area might feel ‘scary’; another place ‘friendly’, and so on.
But there are many shades of feeling for which there are no names like that. Without names these become a highly subtle interior language of remembered associations. The world of objects becomes a language. Engagement with this world has a fairly continuously emotional tone to it, but this is subtle and less obvious. Different objects have a characteristic ‘resonance’. One feels closer or more distant from things, people and remembered experiences.
Girls development of affective emotionality parallels this, but their language of remembered associations is more focused on facial expressions, tone of language and so on.
So girls become more specialised in reading other people’s emotions and seeking felt significance and meaning in this kind of communication.
Boys become more specialised in reading their own emotions.
This is often not recognised because they do not name them and talk about them so much, and if they do, they do so in ways that sound simpler and less discriminating if not recognised for what they are. But the interior recognition of aesthetically named emotions becomes highly discriminating. They do not think of this sort of thing as something that can be communicated, since it is not obvious that there is any way to translate it into words.
Boys’ emotions are nurtured in games with other boys and shared adventures, often imaginary or boosted by imagination. But they know that the others have a similar interior life because they resonate similarly to the same sorts of things. They enjoy doing things together because it provides an affirmation of their own feelings. They recognise in shared interests a validation of their own feelings.
Since most of this interior emotional terrain cannot be communicated in any direct way, they do not feel any reason to try and share it verbally. This is not felt as a loss.
If they are asked to share this the request is often not recognised as meaningful. Sometimes they will try but it can come out as imaginative and somewhat incoherent sounding enthusiasm. By the fact of sharing in the common activity they have ‘named’ their common feeling.
This is what most deeply underlies men’s lack of inclination to talk about their feelings.
They simply do not see how this kind of emotionality can be put into words. If they did ‘translate’ some of it into words it is not felt to be ‘real’ but only a dim reflection of the interior experience. So men find it hard to take this kind of sharing seriously. Its communication carries so little of the emotional significance felt inside it seems hardly worth the effort.
When trying to describe and explain boys’ and mens’ kind of primary emotionality it could sound to some readers that what is being spoken of is not emotion, but something else. In this context it would be helpful to read the series What Is Emotion? This defines emotion in relation to its function in consciousness, how emotion connects body and mind, rather than a more descriptive approach based on the visibility of more overt emotional signs. This latter approach tends to privilege women’s primary emotionality while making men’s less visible.
9.0 The Aesthetic Mode of Emotion
9.1 Introduction
We go on now to a more detailed consideration of the aesthetic mode of emotion. The term ‘aesthetic’ is more commonly used to refer to the explicitly developed products of aesthetic creativity and the manner of perception attuned to their appreciation. The realm of the aesthetic deals with beauty, with art and music, for example, and more broadly with any more self-conscious apprehension of the beautiful.
These more prominent manifestations are only possible because there is already a general underlying dimension of aesthetic awareness characteristic of consciousness. This can be consciously fostered and cultivated, or remain less developed.
9.2 The Emotional Character of Aesthetic Perception
The emotional character of aesthetic perception tends to be subtle and easily overlooked.
The sensory character of the aesthetic tends to be more noticeable, being easier to identify. It is easier to distinguish the visible attributes of an object for example then to pay clear attention to the emotional quality accompanying the sensory experience. It is also easier to identify ethical values and associated feelings regarding an object that is symbolic of good or bad. So a painting including ugliness signifying evil evokes more clearly recognised feelings related to values. The descriptive clarifications of emotion focus on feelings as expressions of matters having an ethical weight, so the realm of the interpersonal is more easily clarified as to its emotional character.
Between sensation (sensory) and feeling (value) lies emotion (meaning), which can seem more subtle and be easily overlooked.
This is the case especially with objects that do not have any apparent positive or negative value as such, and are simply neutral. Such objects have some aesthetic effect but have not been constructed for a deliberate aesthetic purpose. They are simply natural phenomena or practical artefacts, but they are still apprehended with an emotional undertone.
However, objects, places, visual impressions, sounds, movements can become imbued with meaningfulness and a certain emotional tinge to the sensory. We can develop an attraction or aversion to all sorts of things and phenomena. We come to perceive subtle shades of beauty or ugliness in all sorts of everyday things.
We can identify some common examples of men’s kind of emotional preoccupations by considering the role of hobbies and interests. Take the example of cars. Many men find great emotional resonance in the culture shared among car enthusiasts. They can talk excitedly and at length about different models of car and their various attributes, and enjoy tinkering with engines and the various embellishments of style. Others become immersed in military history, in a particular sport, in boating and fishing, and numerous other fields.
Women are typically bemused at the strength of preoccupation men find in such things. They can relate to it up to a point, but are not quite sure why it would be so strongly at the centre of men’s emotional lives. They can be disappointed that men somehow don’t recognise women’s emotional concerns more clearly and sympathetically.
9.3 The Role of Imagination and Memory
Emotion is not only evoked in relation to the perception of external objects, but these are retained in memory and come to form images we manipulate in our imagination. This makes possible the cultivation of an aesthetic mode of emotion.
The exterior perceptions or interior images and memories become like ‘levers’ we pull to produce emotional effects. This is important because the elusiveness of the interior movement or meaningful sensation makes it hard to operate directly on some ‘pure’ emotion.
We use objects to evoke emotion. We are more easily able to get back in touch with these feelings by focusing our sensory apprehension on an exterior or interior object. So we often find it difficult to distinguish precisely between what is the ‘current’ of emotion from what is the image or experience that ‘carries’ it.
Looking at a painting has a stronger effect than having to conjure it up in the mind’s eye. Hearing a song can call up an emotion that otherwise might remain unremembered or elusive. The same is true of smells. We can find a particular scent comforting because of remembered associations.
9.4 Interior Language
Sensory experiences distilled and organised by familiarity come to form a kind of a private language. We use this language interiorly to communicate our feelings to ourselves.
We use these ‘aesthetic names’ to identify emotions through a link with the sensory unity. When this capacity is developed it makes possible the intrinsic exploration and moderation of the meaningfulness that suffuses emotion. This can happen largely independently of language in the normal sense. Internal meaningfulness is interiorly communicated without becoming explicit. The more elaborate and systematically developed this interior ‘aesthetic language’ becomes the harder it can be to communicate it externally. It is not only an inner emotional ‘lexicon’ but a ‘grammar’ as well.
9.5 The Need for Amplification
Aesthetic emotionality is more subtle and elusive and not as palpable as affective emotion.
Men can find it hard to deal with the strength of women’s emotions and not know how to ‘hold their own’ in the emotional space. They can feel as if they are pushed on the defensive without quite knowing what happened or how to respond.
Men need more interior space to hold open enough room to feel like themselves.
They also need ways to amplify this distinctive kind of emotional life so as to retain a strong enough grasp on its personal meaningfulness. Men help each other to do this by developing rituals and games, both informal and formal, that outwardly express and concentrate the meaningfulness of their characteristic kinds of emotional perceptions.
Men seek ways to engage and calibrate the strength of emotion more so than the shades of different socially relevant emotions.
They seek the company of other men to strengthen and validate their own way of being in the world, and to make more visible and subjectively tangible the kind of emotional life they prefer.
Men’s affective emotionality is their secondary mode, so they tend not to have as much fine control over it, and can be prone to ourbursts when threatened or frustrated. They need a well developed connection to their aesthetic emotionality so as to be able to readily centre themselves in an interior space which is calm and serene. Many men do in fact develop such a capacity for calmness in the midst of turmoil.
At the same time this could become a one-size-fits-all response to any situation, which women find hard to deal with.
Women are looking precisely for visible and tangible fluctuations in men’s feelings to help them gauge where their relationship stands. Mutual misunderstanding can aggravate this situation, with the woman trying to provoke a response and the man doubling down on trying to stay calm. Each is doing what comes naturally, but without sufficient understanding of the other’s kind of emotional life.
10.0 The Affective Mode of Emotion
10.1 Introduction
We turn now to a more detailed look at the affective mode of emotion. The term ‘affective’ is a reference to feeling, and here it means feelings having a more prominent link with values.
Values depend on meaning but go beyond it by adopting positions. The need to do so is grounded in the ethical, those meaningful aspects of life centring on its deeper or more significant essentials. A greater strength of feeling is appropriate for more important matters. A greater consistency would also be appropriate since there is more reason to cleave closer to a greater good and not deviate. So feeling has stronger and more consistent patterns by contrast with emotion which is more volatile and variable. This is not to say that feeling is necessarily stable, but that reactions tend to be clearer, more pronounced and readily identifiable.
10.2 The Emotional Character of Affective Perception
The emotional character of affective perception tends to be more obvious than that of aesthetic perception. Since feeling is more oriented to value, affectivity as a mode of emotion tends to focus on persons, since the personal is the core measure of value.
Other values are subordinate to the essential good of persons. The sensory focus then tends to be on the prime indicators of personhood, especially faces, and bodiliness valued for the sake of the ethical. To the extent that this affective mode becomes habitual, people develop a finer discrimination in perception of facial expressions, tone of voice, and bodily gestures as expressive of value.
The range of emotion tends to be wider and stronger and to fluctuate more because it feels as though more is at stake, since it is personal. And since other people are perceived as originators of feelings, and not being subject to one’s own internal control, the expression of emotion tends to be more exterior. There is a more pressing need to express emotion outwardly so as to try and influence others to restore the disturbed equilibrium of one's own emotions as well as theirs.
The regulation of affective emotion requires a more interpersonal approach, so its communication has a more apparent importance.
10.3 The Role of Imagination and Memory
The affective mode of emotion is also grounded in the sensory, but selects more characteristically to focus on facial clues and bodily gestures than on natural phenomena or inanimate objects.
Memory and imagination privilege personal memories and images resonant of personal interaction. This field of attention can still extend broadly to take in inanimate things, but more commonly to the extent that they are symbolic of the realm of personal value. Like the aesthetic mode, these memories and images can come to form a kind of internal language. It gives a person a greater store of remembered associations dealing with personal interaction, and these carry a greater weight of meaningful significance.
Yet because external communication is more important in this mode, this interior language stays closer to ordinary language than does the communication of aesthetic emotion.
There is a closer perceived correspondence between inner and outer language, enabling the interior emotional state to be more readily rendered into spoken language. This means that a person feels that more of what is felt inside has been successfully communicated to others.
11.0 Conclusion
We have looked at how boys and girls begin with some innate differences that have implications for their emotional lives. Boys tend to interact more with the physical world, and with other boys who are doing the same, while girls tend to interact more with other people, and with girls who are also doing that.
This line of development continues through childhood, as boys prefer to live in boy-world and girls prefer to live in girl-world. This helps to develop and clarify in each a preferred way of feeling and relating, and lays the groundwork for adolescence, when the new challenge of sexual feeling enters the picture. We have left this challenge of sexual feeling aside for the time being.
So we find that men and women have and develop some characteristic differences in their emotional lives. We will go on to explore this in detail throughout this series on emotional complementarity.