Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts

Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts
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Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts
Introduction
The society expects men to hide emotions. Such expectations are anchored on beliefs that man should be seen as bold and not show certain emotions. In light of this phenomenon, men tend to hide the emotions by masking emotions in the form of masculinity. Masculinity carries personality attributes that are conventionally associated with men, which include assertiveness, boldness, aggression, and being fearless. The presentation of masculinity in the form of performance, primarily, where an individual performs in a company of others, the associated process, is referred to as identity work. Identity work encompasses how individual deflects and emotional work.
Summary of the article and Discussion: Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts
Scrutiny of martial arts can be used to interpret how fighters control fear and to understand how such a fighter strives to instill fear on the opponent. The author conceptualizes this phenomenon as ‘managing emotional manhood,’ which entails emotion management, with the symbolism of masculinity and dramaturgical sense (Vaccaro, Schrock & McCabe, 2011).
Emotion management entails the suppression or evoking specific emotions in a bid to get aligned to culturally defined feeling rules. Emotional work can be implemented either individually or personally. For example, an individual personal accomplishment of emotional work would involve a context where a student is doing exams; he or she will need to take a seat as she or she controls the existing anxiety. Interpersonal emotional management entails an attempt of one person to control the emotions of other persons or others in a unidirectional version. An example of interpersonal emotional control includes a case where a therapist tries to counsel the emotional wounds amongst the divorced or widowed.
Social psychologists perceive men as less skilled and less able to manage emotions than women: this hypothesis can be traced to the roots of emotional sociology. This hypothesis posits that men are less likely to nurture their capacity for controlling emotion because women are socialized into and more likely to assume positions that demand more typical emotional work of affirmations, celebration, and enhancement of status and wellbeing of others.
Gendered feelings indicate that men are not inclined to express shame, pain, fear, or love, and this creates an implication that men’s emotional lives are often muted. This observation would imply that keeping such emotion under control is quite a lot of work. Another survey showed that there is little difference regarding experience and expression of emotion between women and men, but women tend to report more on negative emotions. Study findings show that men are less likely to engage in emotion management to suppress anger and irritation at work and, also, men are more likely than women to transform one emotion into another (Vaccaro, Schrock & McCabe, 2011). Social surveys may help the social psychologist to compare b...