Sex Trafficking: What do feelings have to do with it?
I’ll never forget when I was in my late teens and I finally dared to ask my Grandpa to tell me stories about WWII. At the young age of 17, he was a soldier jumping out of planes in Europe. I knew it was a big part of his life, yet he rarely spoke of it. On this day, for whatever reason, he was willing to talk with me and I didn’t shy away from the hard questions. He shared harrowing stories that amazed me but when he started to tell the story of watching his best friend die the tears began to well up and he left the room in a rush.
I could hear him sobbing in his room, alone. I desperately wanted to go to him and comfort him and yet some unknowable training kept me rooted to my spot. Somehow I “knew” I was supposed to leave him alone with his pain. It was a terrible moment.
I know I am not the only one with stories like this. Whether you had a similar experience with an older family member or friend, or whether you have been the man to retreat to a room to cry alone.
When was a time you remember thinking that feelings were bad, or needed to be hidden? Maybe as a young man, you were told to “quit your cryin'!” or that “feelings are for girls.” Regardless, the message has been clear: feelings make you weak and should be avoided.
“Men are suffering from a significant lack of emotional awareness and expression which is contributing not only to our lack of thriving but is also creating untold levels of pain in others”
While not a universal truth, men are suffering from a significant lack of emotional awareness and expression which is contributing not only to our lack of thriving but is also creating untold levels of pain in others. This pain is also contributing to the endless expansion of human trafficking.
As a kid, I had a wild temper. I once kicked a hole in my bedroom door while wearing ice skates because I was mad at my sister. I still have a scar from punching a kid with braces in middle school. If I felt misunderstood I would fly into a rage.
My mother would tell you I was a handful. But looking back I can see clearly that I had a powerful cocktail of ingredients that created this undesired outcome. Most of the men in my life were routinely derisive of feelings saying things like “I don’t subscribe to those feelings bullshit”. Well, except for anger, that was allowed, unless of course it was directed at them. My father was explosive, and incapable of emotional connection when sober and while he didn’t believe in “showing” his emotions, anger was prominent.
Yet at the same time, I can’t think of a man I looked up to or wanted to be with more. I desperately wanted to be close to my dad, to be like him. He could be showing me how to fish or hammer a nail one day and the next day screaming or punching walls.
That’s a lot of sorting out for a kid who simply had a natural spectrum of feelings. There was a secret code and to survive or feel like I belonged, I was supposed to figure out that code and act accordingly. That just never made sense to me. I couldn’t understand why the men in my life didn’t want to feel the things I felt: love, sadness, being scared. Now I can see that all of us in my family were playing out a script we’d been given about how men ought to be.
“Gender Role Conflict” as a Condition
So what are emotions anyway? According to the APA “emotions are conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings… and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.”
You’ll notice in that description there is no mention of anything moral. No separation of “good” emotions and “bad” emotions. Emotions are simply information signaling a response to something in our environment.
So why and when did they become a boogeyman to masculinity? When did we decide that feelings make men weak like kryptonite? While the true answer is unique for every person and likely goes back a long way, about 30 years ago a guy named James O’Neil might have stumbled on an answer. O’Neil created the “Gender Role Conflict” (GRC) scale that has been validated in hundreds of subsequent research studies.
GRC “is a condition in which rigid or overly restrictive male gender roles conflict with incompatible situational demands and lead to negative consequences for men and those around them”. This leaves men “struggling with intimacy and self-disclosure with women and other men because of their gender role socialization”.
O’Neil goes on to conclude that operating according to a prescribed way of being “significantly relates to men’s lack of intimacy, self-expression, and connection with other men” and that it “significantly correlates with lower self-esteem, anxiety, depression, stress, shame, marital dissatisfaction, and negative attitudes toward women.”
In other words, us guys often behave according to the way we’ve been taught to see ourselves instead of according to what is needed (or not needed). Unfortunately, this has resulted in a lot of pain for a lot of men. I know it has for me.
Restricting our emotionality as men has significant personal and social consequences. We miss out on the full spectrum of human experiences from joy and happiness at times of celebration to the deep healing that can come with typically “negative” emotions like sadness.
Up until my late 30s I was still hungry for ways to connect with my distant father. However, once I recognized the way men have been scripted by countless social norms, I was able to understand my father more clearly. I know now that he simply didn’t have the tools to connect in healthy ways. Sadly, he, like so many other men, is living out the conflict of being limited in who we’re supposed to be as men.
He’s not alone. Here are some of the symptoms we are seeing societally:
A male loneliness epidemic
Men suffering a mental health crisis
Men are 4x more likely to commit suicide
We are also seeing a link between struggling men and an increase in sex trafficking.
At Epik Project, we have spent the last decade speaking to sex buyers and observed that men who lack healthy connections and outlets for their anger and loneliness act out in incredibly hurtful ways that often cause trauma to other human beings.
In doing anti-trafficking work we say that if you’re not addressing the demand the best you can hope for is to get good at treating victims. If we, as men, don’t embrace our emotions the best we can hope for is to get good at treating the devastation in our wake.
So how do we move forward with emotions?
Theodore Roosevelt, in his famous quote about the “arena”, talks about men who bloody themselves daring greatly for some cause they deem worthy. (Naturally, women shed the same blood, sweat, and tears in pursuit of worthy causes.) No one questions this sacrifice when it comes to pursuing some new business endeavor or personal adventure, but why do we scoff at the willingness to bloody and expend ourselves in the pursuit of emotional and relational depth? I want a world full of arenas where men can practice emotional maturity and be socially rewarded for their courage. Here’s what that could look like.
First, we must challenge ourselves as men to understand that deepening our emotional intelligence is a worthy pursuit. One that might leave us bloody and battered as we blaze new trails within ourselves but that ultimately has value.
Second, we must reconsider our definitions of vulnerability and empathy. Yes, vulnerability is a buzzword, but do we truly understand it? Vulnerability is not about telling everyone all your problems or inappropriately oversharing. It’s about allowing others to participate in the important parts of our lives. Vulnerability is being seen.
For example, a friend of mine who recently had a cancer scare sent me a message one day and said, “Hey man, just want you to know I’m scared.” That example of vulnerability allowed my friend to be honest about his feelings and to let me in. It allowed for connection. That text might have been difficult for him to send, but I am so glad he did. It provided me the opportunity to reinforce that he wasn’t alone in his feelings.
Empathy is crucial to emotional maturity because it allows us to use what we know about our own feelings to cultivate meaningful connections when others have the courage to be vulnerable. There is nothing weak about that, it takes great courage to open up and enter in.
The Feeling Wheel - John Gottman Institute
Lastly, remember that there is a rich and diverse spectrum of humanity to experience and men are being told to live on a very narrow patch of that spectrum. Life is filled with love, grief, serenity, sadness, boredom, loneliness, fear, elation, joy, and so much more! Emotional intimacy allows us to be seen for who we are in our entirety. Humans are fundamentally wired to belong and we cannot do that well without emotions. Emotional intimacy sustains our relationships. And honestly, who doesn’t want that?
Sometimes emotional maturity can actually save lives. Check out this incredible story of a company building the world's largest offshore oil rig using vulnerability as the foundation for worksite safety. A story where some of the toughest men said, “I’m glad the old ways [of masculinity] are gone. It was no fun whatsoever.”
Imagine a World
Imagine a world where men on opposite ends of the political spectrum can share their different ideologies, even strongly disagree, without stripping the other person of worth. Imagine a world where men care as much about untested rape kits as they do about their favorite sports teams. Imagine a world where men who are struggling with depression and grief have at least one close friend whom they can honestly share their troubles with.
A world like this will have fewer sex buyers. Fewer absentee dads, less domestic violence, less Incel violence, fewer mass shootings, less suicide, and much more joy. A world like this will allow men to find their worth in the full spectrum of humanity instead of the size of their paycheck, status, or who they have sex with.
I wish my Grandpa could have lived in this world. I wish he didn’t have to hide away in a room just so I wouldn’t see the deep sadness he felt from losing his best friend to the horrors of war. I wish my father could have grown up in a world where he didn’t have to punch walls and drink just to survive the day.
For me, I imagine a world where my son, who is 7 years old and loves to hug, can continue to come to me for comfort when he is 17 and beyond. I hope the love my son has that prompts his many spontaneous hugs never goes away. I hope he possesses an emotional intelligence that helps him understand and honor his feelings. I hope he has deep and wonderful relationships with people around him as a result of his courage to share those feelings. And I hope he grows up in a society humble enough to accept that a man can be both a loving hugger and someone who would run into a burning building to save someone. It’s not either or.
We can make this society a reality by creating arenas to normalize emotional maturity in men and that starts with each one of us.
Bonus Questions:
Do you think men are weak if they acknowledge or express their emotions? How?
At what age do you think boys should stop paying attention to their feelings?
Why do you think feelings exist?
Think of a time when you were dealing with something difficult. What did you need from someone else that you weren’t sure how to ask for?
Think of a time when something fantastic was going on but you couldn’t fully experience it because you weren’t sure how to express your feelings about it. What would you have wanted to do?
