I find the """man up""" school of thought generally works for me when faced w a tough situation but 97% of the time it's presented as an obnoxious show of bravado. What are better ways to phrase this?
like, if i’m feeling bad but force myself to do something, i usually feel better. how to maintain the usefulness of this advice without presenting it as ‘fuck your feelings’, in that usual arrogant right wing sort of way
I don’t remember the details but there was an Internet story about a dude who’d say “man up” and people explained why that was a problem and he updated to “fortify”. And I really like that, because it kinda suggests also getting help where you need it to build up your defenses in order to face the thing you need to face.
(This is not an idiom, just something I realized as a parent.) Sometimes, being an adult means “reaching into the shit.”
Shit has to be dealt with. My kids - as babies - could not deal with their own shit. It was my job and responsibility as their parent to clean up that shit. And sometimes something would get dropped in the shit. And you gotta reach in.
Nobody likes dealing with shit. Everyone tries to take as little shit as they can. But some days, no matter how I feel - it’s on me to reach into the shit.
I think part of being a man is not caring what other men define your manliness as.
If you have an idea that “manning up” involves some change in machismo, I think that might be a little toxic. But, if in not caring that your behavior made other men think about, caused friction, and was then interpreted as machismo, that’s better in my book.
If you like the sense of machismo and that phrase helps you as an imaginative aid, then why not. But I think it can be more constructive if you can interpret manliness independent from machismo
I worked with a stunt coordinator once who told one of his guys that he was going to drop him, lying parallel to the ground, from the ceiling. He wouldn’t be able to brace his fall (as he was supposed to be dead), so he told his guy he’d just have to “cowboy up.” Not sure that’s a better phrase, but it’s got more color.
The issue is the “man” up aspect. There are ABSOLUTELY times when you have to… Well, man up, nut up… Whatever. That’s a fact of life - some situations require you to stop being a child, and instead face it like an adult would.
We run into issues with it being ‘man’ or ‘nut’ - these are gender-loaded terms, which imply that females aren’t able to do the same thing. Do I think anyone actually means that when they say one of those things? No. Do I think a lot of reactions to them are overblown? Yes. We should still be cognizant of what the language we choose to use may say subtextually though.
There’s another parallel issue to the advice to man up. That’s that a lot of times, the people who get that advice HAVE BEEN manning up, and the advice giver is seeing them in a moment where they’ve been worn down and just need a quick whinge fest before going back to manning it up. Situations like that imply that having any emotions other than “git er dun” is a bad thing and you should just STFU and work.
As far as giving others advice goes, generally speaking unless they ask you for advice, don’t. If someone’s just coming to you with some venting about a thing and you tell them whatever version of “man up” you want, even if it’s applicable, it comes across as dismissive. The person may not want advice, they may just want to unload a bit. If you can’t do that without offering advice, then it’s best to state that.
While I don’t have an exact answer for you I do have two rules that I try to live by that had helped me deal with being an adult:
To be an adult, you only need to know when it is apropriate to be childish. - This implies a shitload of stuff, it implies that you know what being childish means, as well as being able to read a situation. I treat it as a reminder that it is ok to keep playing and as long as you do it apropriately you can ignore critics.
Don’t paint the devil on the wall unless he stands in the hallway, but it won’t harm you to have some paint available. - Basically don’t constantly prepare for the worst, but should the worst happen, take notes and analyze the situation, and be somewhat prepared to do so.
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