Are we men 'allergic' to our emotions'?

Jazz Emu has a point, which he makes through a howlingly good song.

Meet this guy. He’s a musician who writes short, funny songs and shoots music videos with an eighties sense of style. He calls himself Jazz Emu, and on his YouTube channel, you will find a rabbit-hole worth descending into.

He also happens to have a pretty hilarious and totally on point music video about men and emotions. In the music video for his song, “Allergic” (below) he plays a character who discovers that each time he needs to process his emotions, he tends to get sneezy or itchy or break out in rashes.

At the beginning of the video, Jazz Emu is “curled up” on the couch with his girlfriend and watching the sad scene in the classic Disney film Bambi. He sings:

We've been watching Bambi
It's come to the sad scene
You feel my limbs tense up
I thank God I'm manly
Don't need to show empathy

You ask how I feel, I come out in a rash
How can this be, I ate no shell-fash
You say just open up, I sneeze right in your face
Don't speak another word, girl
I'm allergic to my emotions!
(Achoo)

And so on for a couple of verses.

Towards the end of the video though, Emu’s partner suggests that it’s not his inability to process emotions that’s to blame for his symptoms — it’s the pollen count which are “off the charts”.

He asks, incredulously:

Wait you're telling me my feeling hay fever
Is caused by actual hay?

Emu concludes,

I'm so relieved
That my immunosensitivity
Is unrelated to my shitty
Communicative abilities
(Achoo)

There is yet one more twist to the tale but I’ll let you explore this wonderfully odd music video and song by yourself. Warning: you might break out in laughs.

Allergic is catchy and funny precisely because the problem of men being strangers to their own emotions is a real thing (and quite possibly the root of a lot of the world’s evil).

When I saw it a couple of years ago, it struck a chord within me because I was in the middle of a years-long journey of digging deep into my own emotions after a lifetime of wandering around without being able to access them. It was so bad that at times I couldn't tell if I was angry or unhappy.

As kids and young men, we aren’t really encouraged to pay attention to our feelings. In the heteronormative spaces I grew up in, doing so was referred to as being ‘girlish’. Another line I heard often is mard go dard nahi hota (translation: men don’t feel pain. In Hindi, the word for ‘man’ is mard and the word for ‘pain’ is dard; the rhyme makes it more memorable).

Even in films, the only emotion men are legitimately allowed to access is anger. Contrast this with the emotions—some 87 of them—described in Atlas of the Heart, the new book by writer and academic Brené Brown!

We men have a lot of work to do.

I intend to write more on this topic.

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