The "strength" of men; Inertness

Light needs darkness and strength needs weakness. Since men can be weak and that prevents strength what is it that approximates strength for men in our world? 

being Inert. 

Men are expected to be inert, reactionless, emotionless and unfeeling. Unfortunately the measure of a man in the modern world is:

"how miserable can you be in the inside without letting it show on the out?"

This isn't a choice its a cultural expectation that has whittled down the modern man to a shell of a human being. Then somehow we have the gall to be angry at men when we can't answer:

 "how do you feel about that?" 

In this episode we challenge the myth that stoicism equals silence and show how emotional inertia masquerades as strength while damaging love, health, relationships and purpose. We trace how patriarchal male conditioning shuts men down and offer practical steps to feel, speak, and connect without losing stability.

• strength defined as range, not stillness
• how suppression becomes repression and inertia
• why “dude bro” stoicism misreads philosophy
• links between vulnerability and intelligence
• relationship, mental health, and burnout costs
• data on stigma, suicides, and permission
• small daily practices to express emotion
• spotting shutdown signals in the body
• building male friendships through shared goals
• balancing thinking with embodied awareness
• partners setting limits without shaming
• unlearning cultural rules that block feeling

Thank you for listening. Stay curious and stay uncomfortable.

Transcript

Setting The Stakes: Strength Vs Weakness

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I am your host, Owl Medicine, and I am here with another episode topic for you that I mentioned a little bit in my last podcast, and I made a short on recently. And I really want to talk about this because it's the single most frustrating thing about the relationship that I am in and about like men in the world. And it started off as a silly little thing of like, why are men so dumb? And it's not that we're actually dumb, so I changed it to why do men seem so dumb? Because a clickbait or it didn't happen, apparently, in 2026. That's the way the internet works. But I'm here to talk about strength and why male what we want to call uh generously stoicism creates inertia and not power. This is a real problem I see, especially in the Jim Bro Dude Bro, like cold plungy thing. These people, um, they really love reading about the Stoics, and they love talking about the Stoics and their Stoicism, and what they don't seem to get about the Stoics and their Stoicism is that they're not the same. That what the the philosophy of Stoicism isn't quite exactly what they are doing, because what they're doing is actually just being inert. What they're doing is perpetuating a deeply, deeply pathological psychology among men that perpetuates everything that is wrong with the patriarchy. So, in today's episode, we're going to talk about why the opposite of strength is weakness and why that prevents men from being strong. So, just like light requires darkness, strength requires weakness. And if there is one thing men are not allowed to be, say with me, it's right, weak. We are not allowed to be weak under any circumstances for any reason for any stretch of time. And don't tell me that this is just the way men are, because the overwhelming, and I mean overwhelming majority of women that I know want a quote strong man. I don't give a shit what they say. They want a man to be less emotional than they are, to be less reactive than they are, to not show their their frustration, that that is the measure of a man. The measure of a man in the modern world, if you actually look at it, it's not strength or weakness. The measure of a man, how much of a man are you, is actually measured by how miserable can you be on the inside before you let it leak out on the outside. And the more miserable you are on the inside, and the less miserable you look on the outside, well, goddamn man, you're a man, that's a man's man. Do you know how miserable that motherfucker is? And he still walks around not smiling because that's gay. Can't do that, that's gay. But if you're walking around stone faced, resting bitch face, isn't that funny? How like for women that's like a thing, but it's actually men who walk around with resting bitch face all the time. And this is why. Like you're when you're not allowed to have any any weakness, which means any emotions, because if you show emotion, if you if you react, that can be interpreted as weakness, especially when your whole job is to just not react. That's our that's our that's our job as men. And why? This is like do you see how this is all just big one circular clusterfuck? The answer is because the opposite of strength is weakness, and if you can't be strong, because you can't be weak, what can you be? What is left? The option is to be inert. This is why it feels like talking to a brick wall when you're talking to a man who is stressed being confronted, especially about anything emotional, because men have had to learn to cut off their emotions from every single other part of themselves and shut it down completely. Otherwise, they're just not a man. And this is why men seem dumb, is because we're not allowed to have an internal world. Smart people have a rich internal world that we're bouncing ideas off of, and intelligence is a dispersed property. The more people that you meet and interact with, especially in a meaningful way, but like, see, in a meaningful way, what I mean by that is there needs to be some vulnerability. There needs to be some vulnerability to learn. You need to understand that you have something to learn, which puts you in a which puts you in a place of less power than the person that you were learning from. That's vulnerability, that is weakness, that is not allowed. Since intelligence is a disper is a dispersed property in everything that we've ever learned, we have learned from someone, something, or some event other than ourselves. Men are dumb. We're dumb because we're not allowed to be vulnerable enough to even admit that we don't know something so we can learn something. That's why men are dumb. We're not actually stupid. That's the thing. Our society has made us stupid. And don't tell me that it's just the men. I, my sister, when I love her husband, she's with now, he's an amazing man. Before she was with him, she had just split up from her last husband, and there was a guy that she was seeing at work, one of her work boos. Um, where I'm from, everybody has a work boo or three because you spend a lot of time at work. So you get your favorite people, they're just called work boos, and it's like that's it's a thing. Um, she had a work boo, and he was a really awesome guy. He was like, he seemed really cool. I actually got to meet him and spent a little time with him. He was an ex-junkie who started like the first halfway house in the small town that I'm from and was like sponsoring these dudes and worked so hard and like worked at the factory with my sister and ran the halfway house and had his own like fam and craft and was um coming over to help my mom prep the house to sell, like doing quarter round and painting and we're like repairing the ceilings and doing this, that, and the other because he was super handy. And do you know why my sister didn't like him? She said he has too many emotions. I love my sister. She's amazing. And that's fucked. That is deeply fucked. That is deeply, deeply fucked. And Brene Brown, she tells this story of a man coming to one of her book talk things, came with his family and asked her if she studied men, and she said, No, I don't really study men. And he laughed and said, convenient. And that kind of hurt her a little bit. And she was like, Oh, why? And he was like, Well, it's convenient that you don't study men. That you talk about vulnerability and the power of vulnerability, but you don't study men. And she said, Why is that? She goes, Because the women that I came here with, the women that drugged me here, they would rather see me die on my high horse than watch me fall off of it. And if you don't recognize that that is the truth for the overwhelming majority of women in this country, you're an idiot. You need to wake the fuck up and recognize that that is the subconscious expectation of almost all women in the country to some level or another. And that's not because women are programmed to be that way. That is because the societal pressures for women to be a certain way requires that the men they're attracted to, the men who are supposed to be their partners, have to be a certain way because women are also shoved into this little box and can only do certain things, which means they have to find a partner attractive who does the things that they're not allowed to do, which means they have to do the anger part. Because women aren't allowed to be angry. If women were allowed to be angry, the world wouldn't be in the situation that it's in right now. If women were allowed to be angry in the West, we wouldn't have any of this shit. If women, if women had their anger instead of anxiety, because anxiety is a stand-in for anger, like I was gonna say we'd be fucked, but no, Trump would be fucked. We'd be great. It'd be it would be awesome. It would be really, really fantastic. Unfortunately, women are not allowed to be angry. They have to outsource their boundaries. They have to outsource their own protection, and they outsource their protection to men, and men have to outsource their emotions and their internal world to women and their decision-making processes to women. I don't know if you know this, but women have always run the household. Always. Even when the man was, quote, in charge. They were like in charge because there was like what they they they signed up for the things that had bills on certain days and they paid the bills. But who can who actually kept the books? Who actually made sure the bills was paid? Who actually did all of the things around the house? It's always been the women. But this is the problem. When you have these really hardcore gender roles and women are only allowed to be a certain way, that means that men also have to be a certain way. And that inevitably leads men to being kind of dumb. And it's not actually that we're dumb. I'm going to move on from that because that's just the clickbait thing to get people to listen to this because men are shut down. Men are shut down on such a level. There is a thing called suppression, there's a thing called repression. And if you're unfamiliar, when something happens to you and it or that makes you uncomfortable, you can choose to try to ignore it. That is called suppression. And if you choose to ignore a thing long enough, your body will get really good at it because the body is always trying to shortcut its way to everything. So if you suppress something for long enough, your body will start doing it automatically without your conscious input, and that is called repression. And men have been emotionally repressed for so long that we don't have access to our inner world. We can't really tell you what we're feeling because we can't feel it. And we can't feel it because of this whole having to be inert thing. And that's a really, really big problem. So the conditioning begins really early. Dr. Summit Grover, a clinical psychologist, explains that from the age of six or seven, boys begin receiving subtle and overt cues that their feelings are too much, too dramatic or unnecessary. By adolescence, emotional suppression becomes a survival skill, not a personality trait. Boys hear man up more often than open up. They're ashamed for crying, or they're made to be ashamed for crying, they're mocked for showing fear, they're dismissed for expressing vulnerability. The message is consistent and it is relentless. Weakness is literally unacceptable. By adulthood, this training has become an internal neurological law. Men learn that emotional expression isn't just risky, it's literally forbidden. The result isn't emotional absence, it's emotional imprisonment. Feelings don't disappear, they because they're suppressed, they accumulate, building pressure behind a wall that must never crack. And the only time it does crack is in our most intimate relationships, in the places where we feel the safest, and then the cops are beating their wives. And ICE is beating their wives. And racists are beating immigrants and beating brown people because they've got all this crap so locked inside of themselves, just like I was talking about in the last episode. With the the people who are recruited into the military in the pipeline from the military, in the recruitment um incentives, they're basically handing out socialism to the poorest people in America in order to get them to uh to sign a contract and join the military and then shock all the veterans. They don't give a shit about veterans, they only give a shit about if you're active duty. And you're treated better when you're under contract, so that's a pipeline straight into ice. And these people are quintessential. They're they're they are not just like they are the textbook version. They're like the look in the dictionary, find a photo of what we're talking about here, where that pressure must never crack the containment that it's in. And the conclusion is that inertia is a survival strategy. Being non-responsive is a survival strategy, which is devastating. If a man can't be weak, if any display of vulnerability, uncertainty, or emotional need is forbidden, then what what option remains? Authentic strength requires capacity to move along the full spectrum of human experience. But if half that spectrum is completely off limits, the only like safe position is immobility, inertia, not movement, not responsiveness, just stillness. A rock isn't strong because it resists pressure. A rock is strong because it has no choice but to be immovable. It can't bend, so it must break, or appear unbreakable until the force exceeds its limits. This is the trap that men are in today. They find approximate strength by becoming non-reactive, unreadable, emotionally still. They learn to say, I'm fine, when they're anything but, which is funny, because that's what they get so mad about women doing. But men are doing it way more, like way, way more. I'm fine. But they're not. They learn to smile at dinner after crying alone in traffic. How many men listening to this have cried alone? Like literally just like a single tear on your way home from work. Because that is your one moment. Your one moment where you won't be judged. I remember doing it. I remember doing it on my way home from the clinic in Texas. That was the only time I couldn't do it on the way to work, I'd be messed up. I do remember learning to cry in the pool for PE. This performance is exhausting and it's pathological and over time lethal. There is a cost to emotional suppression. Everything has a biological cost, and suppression and repression have some of the highest cost. The consequences of this cultural script are like it's insane. Indian men account for o for approximately 71 to 72% of all suicides. A statistic that functions as a mirror reflecting the cost of the collective silence. Only 50% of men, Indian men, feel comfortable seeking help from a mental health professional. The stigma around vulnerability creates a treatment gap that contributes to all of this suffering. Dr. Ashish Bansal, a consultant psychiatrist, said that across cultures, men are conditioned to suppress emotions, handle problems alone, and prioritize resilience over vulnerability. Most men don't lack emotional depth, they depth, they lack emotional permission. Which is how we gain depth. We need permission to dig deep and to excavate, because that is the truth of all of our emotions. There is nobody born better at emotions than anybody else. We are like, we we have we all have to learn those things. We have to excavate, build those skills, learn to access the emotions, learn to name them. But when you lack emotional permission, you never get a chance to. Like definitely never taught them, never even allowed them, let alone taught them, how to express emotions, just endure them. So a peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers and Psychology examined diff uh gender differences in recognizing emotions from body language, and the findings are really fascinating. Researchers presented participants with uh point light displays showing knocking actions performed with different emotional expressions, happy, neutral, or angry. They found that gender affects accuracy rather than speed in reading body language. Critically, males surpassed females in recognition accuracy of happy actions, while females excelled at recognition at recognizing angry and neutral actions. Which is kind of odd, so what does that tell us? Well, it suggests that men are not emotionally blind, they're emotionally tuned differently. Their capacity for emotional perception exists. It's not lacking ability, it's lacking the permission to access negative emotions. We can't see the negative emotions, we can't differentiate what's angry and neutral, but we can see what's happening because we're allowed to be that. The philosophy of Stoicism has been hijacked by Dude Bros. And it's fucked. The original version of Stoicism emphasized emotional balance and self-control and the dichotomy of control, distinguishing between what we can and cannot influence. But this is like a truly, really nuanced philosophy that has been flattened completely by short reels, by short-form media. It's been like it well, it's basically been shut down into men don't cry. They think that that ancient Stoicism is the equivalent of men don't cry, and that's just so stupid. That absolutely contradicts the original stoic principles of managing rather than denying emotions. Stoicism said that you should feel your emotions and you should let them be in you and you should observe them and manage them, not repress them. You can feel anger and learn to use that anger. You can feel fear, a jealousy, and learn to harness that excess energy to do things that the emotions are trying to get you to do, because that's what all emotions are are are here for. I don't know if you know that, but emotions are just motivators. That's all it is. Emotions pop up because we suspect something, and that suspicion makes us want to act. Whether that suspicion is like there's something to be afraid of because something bad might happen, maybe that's the suspicion. Um, or maybe we're gonna have to defend ourselves and so we have to get angry, so we can be big and have lots of energy. Maybe it's that one. But flattening everything into just men don't cry is horrible. And that's what all of these like ice like ice dipping dude bros are all doing, and it drives me absolutely insane. And to any of those dude bros who want to talk about weakness and the whole strength and weakness being two counterparts, and the that means that men are supposed to be strong and the women are supposed to be the weak one. Um one, you're an idiot. You're an idiot. Um, I hope you listen to way more of these podcasts because you need to learn some shit. Um, because women are far from weak. Women are so far from weak, and it doesn't take much education or much time with uh women to uh learn that they're not weak. Maybe get out of your little tiny, like redneck bullshit hometown where women are trained to be small and weak and pathetic, so their emotional. Inert um men that they are around with an like emotional intelligence of three will somehow feel strong and powerful and pick them because they're like you don't have to be that strong if you're just protecting the weakest thing around and there's no threat. You don't have to be that strong, which is why all of these this small town pairing works so well with the the girl playing princess, playing victim, like oh poor me, oh and then you have this guy playing the strong part, popping in and going, Oh look, I can protect you. No, you can't, because you have no idea what's going on inside her world, and you have no idea what considerations are happening in her mind because you don't have access to yours. So the consequences of inertia. When men become emotionally inert, the costs go way high and they accumulate across every single dimension of life. Relationships suffer, mental health deteriorates, physical health deteriorates, and burnout becomes absolutely inevitable. In relationships, when you can't be vulnerable, you can't deeply connect. Men often rely almost exclusively on romantic partners for emotional closeness, making any relationship disruption absolutely catastrophic. How many emotionally avoidant males do you know who, if there is anything that goes wrong with their with their romantic partner, like if there's anything kind of off, they just they can't handle it. This is why. Because our emotional partners are the only ones, our romantic partners are the only people that we're allowed to even come close to touching any of that stuff. Friendships always remain surface level, and intimacy becomes transactional rather than like transformative, and this is why men die sooner than women. It's literally because women have friends, and there's some neat little um survey studies done on if you ask married people if they um who their best friend is, men almost always say their wife is their best friend, and their wives will always say that some other girlfriend is their best friend. And that's why men don't live as long. Uh but this is all because it's it's born, these relationship issues are born from this same having to be inert bullshit. The mental health deteriorates, suppressed emotions don't disappear, they get shoved deep down inside, like we were talking about. They emerge as irritability, anger, chronic stress, anxiety, and eventually depression. The body remains in a state of constant tension, unable to discharge any of the emotional load that a healthy expression would release. But healthy expression is not allowed because expressing emotions means that you are showing reactivity, which means you are what? Weak. Physical health declines. Loneliness functions like slow trauma. It dysregulates sleep, affects immunity, it alters stress hormones, and contributes to both mental and cardiovascular strain. The mind-body connection isn't metaphorical, people. Like literally, your mind lives inside your body. I don't know if you know that, but your brain lives inside your skull, which is inside the rest of your body. So there's no way that your body doesn't affect your brain, and obviously vice versa, but like your brain lives inside your body, people. The fine-body connection is such an annoying phrase for me. It's like you you mean you mean the mind-body? You mean the body? Because the body includes the mind. Lastly, burnout, inevitable. In high pressure roles, uh, men especially love high-pressure roles, and they're disproportionately vulnerable to burnout because workplace cultures rarely allow room for vulnerability or self-reflection. This is why men rule the world, is because we have created the world to reward sociopaths, and we have con we have conditioned men to be sociopaths, because that is closer to strength than the anything else is that we can do. Because again, can't be strong if you can't be weak. We have to redefine strength because inertia is not strength. Inertia is doing nothing, and the emerging consensus across psychology, philosophy, and everybody's lived experience is pointing to like strength is the courage to be real. It is the capacity to acknowledge weakness without being defined by it. It is the willingness to feel fully, to feel grief, fear, here's a big one, uncertainty. Can you handle uncertainty? How are you with uncertainty? Especially dudes. But all of us, how are you with uncertainty? How are you with joy? How are you when you start to get that warm, fuzzy feeling of deep, powerful love? Is that uncomfortable for you? Being able to access those things unashamedly, that is strength. And to respond thoughtfully rather than to react automatically to things. That is strength. And men can't do that right now because we have such little experience with our emotions that of course we are essentially toddlers. And when they hit and they become overwhelming, we react immediately and poorly. The idea is to be able to feel them, express things. Not re expressing and reacting are not always the same thing. They're usually not the same thing. Um we can we can express how we feel without being reactive in our expression, and that is strength to me. Bobby Thakur, the psychologist, puts it like this. He says, Real strength lies in emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and the courage to seek help when needed. Strength is not the absence of emotion, but it's the courage to own and express it. So if you are a man trying to get through this, or you know a man who is trying right now, because right now the world is full of good men who are trying really hard to figure out how to be better. They're trying really hard to figure out how to be emotionally available and to be better partners. There's a lot of really good men who are trying to do that right now. And here's a few things for you if you're one of these really good men. Express your emotions regularly. Little ones. Do it regularly, do it little, do it often. You don't need to share your darkest secrets. That's a terrible idea. Express the little things. Express your little bits of frustration, express your little bits of joy, express when you look at something and you're like, oh, that's pretty. Oh, that's neat. Oh, that's interesting. That's a you can express that. Did you know that? You probably didn't. But you can. You can see a thing that's interesting and you can say that's interesting out loud instead of just thinking it to yourself. And somebody else in the room might be like, oh, that is interesting, and now you have a connection. And that opens up a thing for dudes to bond. Dude bonding is very different. We're not touchy-feely because of our culture, the way that um other cultures um and dudes in other cultures are. But we do have this other thing called vasopressin bonding. And oxytocin is usually like familial, um, romantic bonding, but they're um and and friends and whatnot, but it uh comes from physical contact and things like that. Whereas vasopressin bonding is a bonding that happens more among hetero heterosexual and heteronormative men, where you bond because you built a thing together. People who worked on, like all the trade dads, who worked on house together, worked on the deck together or whatever, that type of doing a thing together to achieve a goal together, that is vasopressant, and that is a type of bonding, and that can provide men a sense of safety and a sense of belonging. And that is where I highly suggest that you like put your efforts toward because your romantic partner shouldn't be the only person who has um the ability to make you feel safe or has access to any amount of your internal world. Maybe save the the the deepest stuff for them because they are the safest, but express emotions regularly, make that make them small and do it often. And then recognize emotional signals. And what I mean by that is pay attention to when you feel tense or irritable or you feel shut down. Like you pay attention to your own emotional signals. And as a man, the primary emotional signal that you're going to get is to shut down. You're going to feel a moment where literally the world gets a little bit darker. There's it's everything's just slightly less bright, things get slightly less loud, everything becomes kind of flat, as if you took a big marvelous concert and then you sh tried to shove all of that sound through a phone speaker. That's how it feels to be a man when your emotions get big and your body represses them for you. Because this is not a conscious thing anymore. We're not doing this on purpose anymore. This is what happens because of our conditioning and because of our biology. So recognize first and foremost when you are starting to shut down. After that, you can learn to recognize frustration or joy or pensiveness or whatever, what the hell ever. But you have to figure out when you are shutting down and be able to call that out for yourself because that's step one. The next one is challenging old beliefs. Ask yourself, where did you learn that men shouldn't show emotions? And is that useful for you? We can spend a hundred million years on the where and the whys and the wherefores, and I just call that mental masturbation. It is helpful for a lot of folks to go, this is where that came from, because then they can let it go. Um for some of us, we don't know where it came from. It's everything. It came from everything, everywhere, everyone, all of the time. And if that's the case, you don't need to know where exactly where it came from. You just need to know whether it's useful or not. And if it's not useful, then get rid of it. Because you're a man, right? You should be you should be able to do that at least. We are usually pretty good at that, being like, well, that's not useful. Um, unless it's like tools, then we have to keep that around forever, because it might be useful one day. Then I want you to balance like your rationality with your emotions. And these the these these come later. Um, but when you are feeling really when you're overanalyzing things, stop and see what your body feels like. Just do that, and that will be close enough to balancing your rationality and your emotional stuff. If you find yourself and your head is spinning and your like your mind is just go barreling down a rabbit hole, um, maybe check in with your body and see how tense you are. Because it's probably emotions driving that compulsive thought behavior. And lastly, engage in cathartic activities or, aka, like d do fun shit that feels good. Like the physical activity is really, really, really, really important. Emotions are motivators, like I said, and they are physical motivators by um by definition. And we really want to do things with our emotions, and men have been trained to not do anything at all. So it is really nice to move your body. If you start to feel shut down, go for a walk. And like maybe don't stand the door on the way out, but go for a walk, move your body, find a way, do some push-ups. I've done I've I do that. Like, I'll get to start feeling some type of way, and I'll I'll get into like deep squats or do push-ups while I'm like in a conversation with Michael, because I can feel that my body is like, eh, like wanting to do stuff. I'm like, okay, I'm I need to move this chi and I'll move the chi and I'll be in like mid-sentence doing really like slow push-ups, trying to think while I'm doing the push-up, not like breathing hard, doing a bunch of push-ups, but like enough to, I don't know, move some of that strain that is in my emotional world to my physical body. Um, and it, I don't know, works for me. So this is the problem that I see with being a man in the world and men in the world, is we're not actually allowed to be strong. We have to be inert. And inert is not strength. The real strength is the ability to feel and admit your reality, whatever it is, and adjust appropriately for it. That's not being inert. So if you've ever wondered why men feel or seem so dumb or why it feels like talking to a brick wall whenever things are emotionally important, this is why. This is how we've been conditioned. It's been this way for a long time, and it's up to us to change it. So, help your men, help your men express their emotions regularly, which means if you're nagging them about it, even though you've been trying to get them to express their emotions for 25 years, if you bring the frustration of that 25 years into the conversation, you're not going to get it out of them. And I know how annoying that is. It hasn't been 25 years, it's been eight years with Michael, and it's so annoying. But unfortunately, when you are the more emotionally mature of the two, and then it is up to you to be emotionally more mature every single effing time, and I hate that. I hate it so much. Like so much. But whatever. I hate that Trump is president too, so fuck it. If you made it this far in the episode, thank you. I hope you enjoyed this one. I didn't think this one was gonna go that long, but it's a thing for me. I really am annoyed by the inertness and the non-reactivity of men, and I do find it to be deeply problematic, and I find it to be perpetuated by both women and men. And if you are one of those women who just immediately went, I don't, I guarantee you are. I can guarantee fucking tea that you are. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, all of us men, women, trans, gay, cis, whatever, all of us are so deeply conditioned by our culture that we have subconscious expectations that we haven't looked at. And those subconscious expectations, if we look closely enough, we will realize that we are we have the same expectations that the world that raised us had. And it's up to us to find them and to undo them. So look deep. See if maybe you're perpetuating this in one way or another. Especially you ladies. Because us men we know we are. We're trying to do better. Thank you for listening. And remember, stay curious and stay unhelpful.