Why Can't Women Write?

They say men are scared to show emotion. Not because they lack feelings, but because they’re terrified their vulnerability will cost them everything. A girlfriend, a wife, a friend, their standing among other men. Whenever I hear that excuse, I know the man speaking lives his life shackled to a fear he doesn’t even have the courage to name. Scared his woman will leave him if he dares to cry, or worse, to rage honestly. It’s pathetic, but more than that, it’s tragic.

A man who represses his emotions is a man who lives as a slave. His master isn’t just his partner, though she may serve as a convenient scapegoat. His master is the intricate web of expectations and fears that bind him to silence. He’s not scared of her leaving. He’s scared of being exposed as unworthy, as weak, as less-than. These are the thoughts that haunt him at night, even if he never acknowledges them.

Imagine the internal cost of hiding how you feel every day. It eats away at you. Each unspoken fear, every stifled moment of sorrow, becomes another brick in the wall separating you from yourself. And all for what? To maintain leverage? As though a relationship were a constant negotiation of power, not a shared space of trust. Deep down, men like this know the truth: they don’t actually hold any leverage. That’s why they cling to it so tightly. They suspect the other person doesn’t truly respect them. At least not as a full, complex human being. Not enough to stand by them when the mask slips.

I could never live like that. If I feel something, everyone around me is going to feel it too. My emotions don’t sit quietly, waiting for permission to exist. If I’m heartbroken, the room will drown with me. Some might call that self-destructive. I call it freedom. I’ll burn everything to the ground before I let myself rot inside, suppressing how I feel for the sake of decorum.

But this isn’t a story about strength versus weakness. It’s about a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to live. These men don’t see how much damage they’re doing to themselves by refusing to feel openly. They are like locked vaults, rusting on the inside, suffocating under the weight of all they’ve kept hidden. What they need isn’t more restraint; it’s release.

A creative outlet is one solution, possibly the only one that works. Anything that allows the internal chaos to spill out into the physical world. Men need this because, unlike women, they’ve been conditioned to fear direct displays of emotion. Women can cry whenever they need to; their tears aren’t weaponized against them as signs of failure or instability. Men, on the other hand, are taught that crying is surrender. So they don’t. And because they don’t, they need another way to express what’s inside.

That’s why the greatest works of art, the ones that endure for centuries, often come from men. Men who learned to channel their anguish, their yearning, their despair, into something external. Something real.

Emil Cioran captured this bitter truth when he said, “Why can’t women write? Because they can cry whenever they want.” (Cioran, Emil. On the Heights of Despair.) At first, it seems dismissive. But beneath the surface lies a profound observation: women don’t need to immortalize their pain because they’re allowed to feel it in the moment. Men, denied that outlet, are forced to transmute their emotions into lasting works of art.

This isn’t to say one method is better than the other. Women’s ability to express themselves freely may mean their art isn’t always forged in the same fire as men’s, but it also means they don’t carry the same burden of repression. Men, meanwhile, create because they have to. It’s not a choice; it’s survival. Without creation, their emotions turn inward, festering like an untreated wound.

The saddest part is that most men don’t realize this. They mistake their stoicism for strength, their silence for control. They don’t see the prison they’ve built around themselves until it’s too late. Until their relationships collapse under the weight of their unspoken fears. Until their bodies break down from the stress of carrying so much unacknowledged pain.

The truth is simple but unkind: to live without expressing your emotions is to invite ruin. A man who denies his feelings doesn’t escape them, he just delays their reckoning. And when that reckoning comes, it will be relentless. It will destroy everything in its path, starting with him.

So yes, men are scared to show emotion. But they should be more scared of what happens when they don’t. That’s the real tragedy. Not the fear of losing someone else, but the certainty of losing themselves.

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