Janese Johnson

In our culture, emotions definitely receive greater respect from women than they do from men —especially the emotion of sadness.

We saw a recent example of this with Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primaries. When someone asked her how she was holding up through all the stress, she responded with obvious emotion behind her words.

The media ate it up, and some of the other candidates put her down. The interesting effect that it had on women voters was that they could emphasize with Hillary a little more, and chose to vote for her to give her the support that they didn’t feel that she was getting from the world.

This solidarity changed the direction of the campaign. Many of the women who had already decided to vote for another candidate changed their vote at the last minute. Clinton was actually behind in the polls, and looked as though she would not win.

The difference between the polls and the results is so huge that Dennis Kucinich has asked for a recount. Many believed that her emotional moment was a strategy. If it was, then it certainly brought out the fighting spirit of women fighting for a woman’s right to feel.

When women who changed their vote were asked why, some described how hard it has been for them as women to be in a successful career while attending the rest of their life in a “man’s” world.

In essence, they could empathize with her emotion as their own, and they felt angry and protective when the media and other candidates put Clinton down for showing real emotion. I, too, found myself getting angry with some of the comments that were said about her, and she wasn’t even my preferred choice.

Is it fair that a woman can show emotion and get a positive response from other women, but if a man showed the same emotion, he would not have anywhere near the same response from his fellow men? The solidarity of men would not be there. In fact, they would probably not even consider him a qualified leader who can handle large amounts of stress.

I find this disparity quite sad. Perhaps if we could all show a little emotion when it is genuine without getting harassed or invalidated for it, then we would have more compassion for others, and it would be less of a “man’s” world — one in which men and women don’t have to be so pretentious.

Men have to hold back their sad feelings but are free to show a bit of anger, because our culture has an issue with men being sad. But they are acceptable being angry. Just look at the mud-slinging that is going on in any competitive arena, and you can see that anger to a point is not only accepted, but expected.

For a man to show his vulnerability and sadness, however — forget it! That seems to be a heavy burden for men to have to bear.

Up until Hillary had her “moment,” she was being accused of being too tough, and not soft enough. She has learned that in order to succeed in our predominantly male-controlled culture, she had to acquire the traits that are respected, and those are to be tough, strong, firm, and motivated.

It can be quite frustrating for a woman to rise to great heights in any field thanks to the attitudes that our culture holds about emotion. It is OK for men to be angry but not for women, and it is OK for women to cry, but not men. This can be quite challenging for women in leadership roles.

 I believe that, when people have to pretend to feel different then they really do, both genders are suffering from our cultural attitude about emotions. Of course we have to do that to a certain point, but this repressed emotion has to affect the person holding back. Addiction of all sorts has been on the rise — especially addictions that help people numb out and walk through life in an acceptable comfort zone.

Whether Hillary strategically showed some vulnerability or whether she let her guard down a bit, and is truly stressed out, doesn’t seem to be the point for me. I think we can all learn from this situation, and recognize that the great gender disparity in the world of emotions is truly keeping us from a deeper level of compassion.

We can try to be a bit more genuine with one another in the day-to-day world. Eventually that compassion can start to carry through to larger levels of community. Emotional acceptance and less gender disparity can bring a solidarity of acceptance for an aspect of our nature that we all possess. We all feel fear, joy, grief, love, and anger — whether we are male or female.

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Janese Johnson has been doing intuitive counseling nationally for more than 20 years. She may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .