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

Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
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 both men and women’s emotional experience and related management or control, but this approach does not adequately illuminate on how gender and emotion work is considered dynamic social processes. Emotional work does not only vary under gender, but it is also implicated in the creation of gender identities.
The qualitative investigation may better advance a processual method, but studies on gendered emotion work tend to focus on how women’s emotion involves satisfying the ego and tending wounds, as they cope with life in subordinate positions (Vaccaro, Schrock & McCabe, 2011). According to the three authors, ethnographic evidence shows that men may bring socialization experience that shapes how they express and control emotions, .especially in the masculine approach. For example, male rescue workers will classify their work as exciting, or male lawyers being intimidated and strategic friendliness: this represents masculine lines so that when things go wrong, it will be easy to manage emotion. When studies view men’s work along gender lines in the management of emotion, it underestimates the role of emotions works in gender identities.
Mixed martial arts competitors present cases where fear of injury and loss is imminent. The fear of winning and losing makes the competitors nurture the manhood act or masculine to overcome fear. The manhood acts are achieved through various. The first is to be attained via scripting game schedules. Second, there need to ensure the framing of the fight as another day in the gym. Finally, there is a need among the fighters to keep the fear under control. These approaches are achieved through personally and interpersonally through suppressed fear and evocation of confidence. The available micropolitical environment is used to instill fear on opponents through the use of language and bodies that intimidate an individual.
Studies might have focused on gendered emotion on how women control emotions that reinforce subordination, and men tend to show emotion work by depicting domination (Vaccaro, Schrock & McCabe, 2011).
However, fighters’ experience influenced how they controlled emotions despite their best efforts, a...