The Silence Men Are Taught, and Who Pays for It

She asks him what is wrong. He says nothing. Not “nothing is wrong,” which would be a claim; just the word, flat, the way you would say it to a shop assistant. She has been married to him for nine years and can read the set of his shoulders from across a room, so she knows that something is wrong, and she knows that asking again will produce either the same word or an irritation that will last the evening. So she stops asking, and runs the rest of the night on inference, and goes to sleep beside a man who is, at that moment, in some kind of pain that neither of them will ever name.

This scene is so common that it barely registers as a scene. It is the weather of a great many marriages, in Japan and everywhere, and the usual explanations for it are either biological, men are just like that, or moral, men are cowards about feelings. Both explanations let everyone off the hook, including the man.

This essay makes a different claim. The silence is taught. It has a curriculum, a set of teachers, a graduation, and a cost, and the cost is not paid mainly by the man who was taught it. It is paid by the people who have to live with a person whose interior has been sealed, and, in most households, that person is a woman. Understanding the lesson does not excuse the silence. It does make it something that can be unlearned, which the biological and moral stories do not.

The phrase 弱音を吐く, to let a weak sound out, is the Japanese for what a man is not supposed to do, and the phrase already tells you the rule: what must not be heard is weakness, and weakness is defined widely. Fear. Need. Sadness. Uncertainty. The wish to be comforted. The admission of having been hurt. A man may express anger, which is permitted and even admired, and he may express contentment as long as it is not too visible, and almost everything else goes inside.

It is worth separating this from privacy, because the two get confused and the confusion protects the silence. Privacy is a person’s choice about what to share, made from a full interior. A man who has a rich inner life and decides not to narrate all of it to his wife is being private, and he is entitled to be. Silence, in the sense this essay means, is not a choice about sharing. It is the absence of access: a man who could not tell you what he feels because the feeling has never been allowed to become a sentence, even to himself. The first man has a door he keeps closed. The second was never given a room.

And it is worth being specific about who pays, because the ledger is usually written as if the man were the only victim of his own condition. He does pay, in ways this essay will come to. But the daily cost falls on whoever is nearest: the partner who has to guess, the children who learn that fathers are weather systems rather than people, and the woman who does, in effect, the emotional work of two adults because only one of them has the equipment.

Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, from 2016, is the most exact film ever made about how the silence is installed, and it is worth understanding before it is used.

The orientation a viewer needs: the film follows one person across three chapters, each named for what he is called at the time. As Little, he is a small, quiet boy in a poor part of Miami, chased by other boys, with a mother, Paula, who is falling into addiction; he is found hiding by Juan, a drug dealer who takes him home, feeds him, and eventually teaches him to swim, holding him in the sea. As Chiron, he is a teenager, still slight, still hunted, with one friend, Kevin, and a single night on a beach in which the two of them touch; the chapter ends in a schoolyard with a chair and a decision. As Black, he is a grown man, muscled, gold-toothed, dealing drugs in Atlanta, a copy of Juan down to the car, and he drives to Miami because Kevin, whom he has not seen in a decade, has called him. The film is quiet, blue, and mostly unspoken; its recurring image is a body being held or refusing to be. The spoiler boundary for this essay is the diner in the third chapter, where the two men sit down.

What the film understands is that the armour is built, piece by piece, out of what happened to the boy. Every act of violence he receives teaches him what a body must become to survive: larger, harder, unreadable. By the third chapter the transformation is complete and it is terrible, because the man who has made himself impossible to hurt has also made himself impossible to reach. The one sentence he says about himself, near the end, is that nobody has touched him since that night on the beach. He is not describing a sex life. He is describing a wall that has kept everything out, including the things he wanted.

Classification: a film, fiction, about a Black gay boy in Miami, whose specifics are not Japan’s and should not be flattened into a universal. What it supports, precisely, is the mechanism: silence as a learned defence, taught by force, that succeeds so completely that it outlives the danger it was built for. What it does not support is any claim that every silent man was beaten into it. Most were taught more gently, and the lesson took just as well.

bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, from 2004, is the most direct argument in print that the silence is a wound rather than a trait, and its architecture is worth having.

The book’s central claim is that patriarchy, the system in which men are expected to dominate, demands its first act of violence not against women but against boys: the killing off of the parts of a boy that feel, so that he can become the kind of man the system needs. hooks describes a boy who cries and is shamed for it, who asks for comfort and is told to be a man, who learns in stages that the only emotion he will be permitted to show is rage, because rage is the one that looks like strength. The grown man who cannot say what he feels is, in her account, not deficient. He is obedient. He has done exactly what he was told.

The book’s second, harder argument is about women. hooks writes that many women say they want men who can feel and then recoil when a man does, because a man in pain violates the image of the protector they were also raised to want. She calls this a collusion, not to blame women but to describe the trap: the silence is maintained from both sides, by men who cannot speak and by partners who, without meaning to, do not want to hear. Her third argument follows: love, in the sense of care, respect, knowledge and responsibility, is not possible with a person who has no access to himself, and so the work of unlearning the silence is not therapy for men but the precondition of any intimate life at all.

Classification: a work of feminist cultural criticism and personal essay, American, polemical by design, not a study. What it supports: a coherent account of the silence as taught, as gendered, and as maintained by both parties. What it does not support: any statistical claim, or a direct mapping onto Japanese men, whose curriculum has its own textbooks.

Japan’s version of the lesson is unusually explicit, because for fifty years it was an advertising slogan. 男は黙ってサッポロビール, a man says nothing and drinks Sapporo beer, was spoken by Mifune Toshirō in a 1970 commercial and entered the language as a description of what a man is: someone who does not explain. The line was a joke and a boast at once, and the boys who grew up hearing it are the husbands in the kitchen now.

The rest of the curriculum is familiar. 泣くな, don’t cry, said to boys in a tone not used for girls. 弱音を吐くな, don’t let the weak sound out. 我慢, endurance, taught as the master virtue, in school clubs where the coach’s job is to make it hurt and the boy’s job is not to show that it does. The salaryman workplace, in which the expression of any feeling other than diligence is a career risk, and the 飲み会, the drinking session, which is the one sanctioned place for a man to say something true and which guarantees, by design, that nobody will remember it.

The cost to the men themselves is measured, and it is severe. Japan’s suicide statistics have for decades shown men dying by suicide at roughly twice the rate of women, with middle-aged men the largest group; the national loneliness survey finds men over-represented among those with no one to talk to; and 過労死, death from overwork, is overwhelmingly a male statistic. Classification: official statistics, orders of magnitude only; they describe a population, not the man in any one kitchen, and suicide in particular has many causes of which silence is one. What they support is that the silence is not free for the men who keep it. It is, for a measurable number of them, fatal.

The cost to the women beside them is not in any statistic, because it is paid in a currency nobody counts: the evening spent reading shoulders, the argument that could not happen because one party had no words, the slow conclusion that a husband’s interior is a place she is not allowed to visit and eventually stops trying to. This Journal has written about the woman who holds everything. One of the things she holds is a man who cannot hold himself.

It is worth being exact about the bill, because the silence is usually discussed as the man’s problem, and it is not mainly his.

The partner pays in inference. She has to reconstruct his inner state from surfaces, the way she would with a child or an animal, and she is often very good at it, which means the household comes to depend on her decoding and the man never has to learn to encode. Japanese has a word for this competence, 察する, and it is praised as a virtue in women. It is also the mechanism by which a man’s silence becomes permanent: as long as someone else is reading him, he never has to speak.

The partner pays in loneliness of a specific kind: the loneliness of living with a person who is present and unavailable. This is different from being alone, and in some ways harder, because there is no name for it and no permission to grieve it. A widow is understood. A woman married to a wall is told she has a good husband who does not drink and comes home.

The children pay by inheriting the curriculum. A son learns from a silent father that this is what a man is, and the lesson passes to the next kitchen. A daughter learns that men are to be read rather than asked, and carries that expectation into her own marriage, where it becomes the collusion hooks describes. Nobody in the chain chose it. Each of them was taught.

And the man pays, last and worst, in the currency the statistics count. He also pays in something less visible: he never gets to be known. The wall that keeps out hurt keeps out the one thing that would have relieved it, which is being seen by someone who stayed. Chiron in the diner is the picture of that: a man who built himself so that nothing could reach him, sitting across from the one person who once did.

For a woman from elsewhere living with a Japanese man, or a Japanese woman with a partner raised in a different school, the silence is complicated by being mistranslated.

A foreign partner may read Japanese male silence as rejection, coldness, or a verdict on the relationship, because in her own culture silence after “what is wrong” means something has broken. A Japanese man may read her request to talk about feelings as an attack, or as a demand for a performance he has never been taught, and retreat further. Each is behaving correctly by their own curriculum and wrongly by the other’s. The reverse pairing has its own version: a Japanese woman with a partner who narrates every feeling may find the flood as disorienting as the drought, and may not have a script for a man who says he is afraid.

The practical fact underneath is that the silence is not a personal message. It is a trained response, and it says almost nothing about her. Knowing that does not fix the evening. It does change what she concludes from it.

If the silence is taught, it can be untaught, and the untaught version has a shape that is not the one most people try.

It does not break under the demand to open up. That demand is itself a form of the curriculum, one more thing a man is required to perform on cue, and it produces either “nothing” or rage. It breaks sideways, in conditions the man did not learn to guard: side by side rather than face to face, during something else, walking, driving, working with the hands, in the dark, with no eye contact and no deadline. It breaks in the presence of another man who has done it first, which is why the teachers hooks describes are so often other men. And it breaks when the first weak sound is met with nothing at all, no fix, no alarm, no reward, just the ordinary continuation of the evening, so that the man learns the one thing the curriculum told him was impossible: that it was safe.

hooks’s condition for the partner is the hard one. She has to actually want to hear it. Not the idea of a man who feels, but the specific, inconvenient, sometimes unattractive fact of one: a husband who is afraid of his own father, or ashamed of his salary, or grieving something from before she knew him. If what she wants is the protector with an interior added, the silence will hold, because he will feel the recoil before he has finished the sentence.

An honest essay gives the other side its strength, and there are four objections worth making.

Some silence is dignity. A man who bears something without narrating it is not necessarily walled; he may be choosing to carry it, and the therapeutic culture that treats every unspoken feeling as a symptom has its own arrogance. The essay’s distinction between privacy and silence is meant to hold this, and the reader should apply it honestly rather than assuming every quiet man is a Chiron.

Not every silent man is suffering. Some are simply less verbal, or process things without language, or are content in ways that do not need reporting. The kitchen scene assumes something is wrong. Sometimes nothing is, and the woman’s reading of the shoulders is a projection of her own need to be needed.

“Men must open up” is one more demand made of men, often by women, and it can become a new failure to add to the old ones. hooks is clear-eyed about this, and so should the reader be: the point is not that men owe their partners a narrated interior, but that the men who cannot access their own are in trouble, and that the trouble is shared.

And the essay risks making women responsible for men’s healing, which is the oldest trick in the curriculum. hooks’s answer is that the work is the man’s, that other men are its best teachers, and that a woman’s role is limited to not recoiling. That is a real role, and a bounded one. It is not a job.

Moonlight’s position, stated after the objections, is unusual in that it is a position about the man in the room.

The Experiences are offered to women by a man, and the man is one who went through the curriculum this essay describes and spent years unlearning it. That is not a credential and it is not the point of an evening. But it changes what happens in one, because a woman who has spent a marriage reading shoulders is sitting with a man who says what he feels, asks what she does, and does not require decoding. Many women describe the strangeness of it before they describe anything else: the absence of inference, the fact that nothing has to be guessed. Some of them realise, in that absence, how much of their daily life is spent guessing.

The objection Moonlight must make against itself is that a paid man’s openness is a performance, and that a woman may learn to expect from a husband what she was shown by a professional. We accept the first as a fair doubt and answer it the only way it can be answered, in the room, by whether the sentences are true. The second we think is the point rather than the problem: she is not being shown a standard for her husband. She is being shown that the silence she has lived with is not what men are. It is what one man was taught. What she does with that, in her marriage or her next one, is hers.

He says nothing. She reads the shoulders and stops asking. The evening runs on inference and two people go to sleep alone in the same bed.

Nothing in that scene is natural, and nothing in it is cowardice. It is a lesson, learned early and learned well, with a bill that arrives every night at the address of whoever is nearest. The man was taught. The woman was taught to read him. Their children are in the next room, learning.

The lesson can be unlearned. It is slow, it happens sideways, it needs other men, and it needs a partner who can hear the weak sound without flinching. None of that is her job. But knowing it is a lesson, and not a fact about men, is the first thing that changes what she concludes when he says nothing.