It would be unfair to say that only men are subject to conditioning by socially constructed myths. It’s time even the women rethink and regroom their thoughts and perceptions.
A few days ago I came across an FM debate in which the RJ was asking female listeners in India if they are ready to marry stay-home husbands. Among 50 odd women, only 2 women said that they were comfortable with stay-home husbands….
The debate strongly provoked me to the thoughts..How advanced have we women become? Don’t we still desire to marry a man with fat pay package? Don’t we dream of financial security from our husbands? Can we comfortably accept a man as a prospective groom who is unemployed?
The answers, I believe are very obvious. The fact remains, irrespective of being a man or a woman, we all are still shaped by the traditional unconscious running in our blood since the beginning of human society..
It will still take ages to unfree ourselves of these notional shackles.

Yeah! men are not supposed to cry because men are tough and strong like walls. Often, you will hear the cliched phrase that “Don’t cry like a woman”. While a man grows up, he imbibes socially constructed myths such as a man does not cry, he is emotionally not weak and he is suposed to run a family. A man’s traditional unconscious gets imprinted with such biased myths ever since he starts understanding a language. As a result, a male adult gets imprisoned emotionally by these myths and suffers a strange sense of alienation in the society while struggling to match up the expectations laid down in his unconscious.
It is an uncanny game where a man fights his own humane traits and cages himself behind an iron mask to emerge as the mythical He-Man.

It is true that women are far more marginalized than their male counterpart in most parts of the world. And India is certainly not an exception. Just look at the street at night! It’s always men that you would see gossiping and bursting into laughter. I have never seen women playing cards in parks. Wine shops are always crowded by men. Hardly does one need to give any more evidence to show that the public sphere is dominated by men.

So you would think that men have access to all the pleasure. Pain is alien to them. Perhaps no. It’s the process of socialization, I think, that has forced them to feel so. Thus emotional isolation and the fear of losing one’s manliness are perhaps two important issues that are crippling the creative self of many men.