Madonna - Express Yourself

Repress Yourself: A Field Guide to Not Saying the Thing You Obviously Need to Say

In which a man who has spent considerable time in therapy still finds the concept of emotional vulnerability vaguely offensive, as a bit

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Here is something I have never said out loud, because saying it out loud would require a level of emotional honesty that is, frankly, an affront to my entire brand: Madonna was right.

Not about everything. I have no opinion on the Guy Ritchie years. But about Express Yourself — the 1989 feminist anthem that essentially asked men to articulate their inner lives like functioning human beings — she was correct in ways that took me approximately thirty-five years, two wars, and a rotating cast of VA-approved therapists to fully appreciate. And even now, knowing she was correct, I find the whole exercise deeply suspicious. This is the contradiction I live with, and I’m going to talk about it.

Let me be clear about who “we” is here. I am a man. I drive a Nissan. Not a Nissan that goes very fast — just a Nissan that goes, mostly, in the direction I intend. I cannot afford diamond rings or eighteen-karat gold, and if I am being honest, I find the premise of fancy cars as a substitute for emotional intimacy slightly aspirational given my current financial situation, which is not bad but is also not fancy cars territory. So when Madonna sings about material compensation for emotional unavailability, I understand the metaphor intellectually while also thinking: must be nice to have that problem.

But here is where the Alpha Male enters the picture, and here is where things get genuinely interesting.

The Alpha Male, as a concept, has roughly the intellectual rigor of astrology but with worse merch. The Alpha Male does not express himself. The Alpha Male does not tell you how he feels. The Alpha Male processes his emotions the way your laptop processes a corrupted file — slowly, inefficiently, in the background, and occasionally just crashing entirely and needing to be restarted. The Alpha Male has watched Top Gun enough times to understand that feelings are the turbulence you fly through, not the destination. He communicates primarily through monosyllables, lingering eye contact, and a studied indifference that he has convinced himself reads as mysterious rather than what it actually is, which is terrified.

I know this man. I have been adjacent to this man for most of my adult life. In the Persian Gulf. In the Middle East. In the parking lot of a Chili’s in suburban Maryland at 11 PM on a Tuesday, which is its own kind of combat.

What I have learned, after years of actual professional therapeutic intervention — the kind where someone with credentials asks you pointed questions and does not let you change the subject to football — is that the Alpha Male is not performing strength. He is performing the idea of strength he absorbed from movies, from his own father who probably also did not know how to say I love you without following it with but and then a critique of your athletic performance, from a culture that decided at some point that emotional articulation was feminine and therefore suspicious.

Madonna understood this in 1989. She had synthesized the problem before I had even finished middle school.

The song essentially argues: make him tell you how he feels, because if he cannot do that, the relationship is structurally unsound — built on the same engineering principles as a bridge made of good intentions and vague gestures. She was not asking for a therapy session. She was asking for basic acknowledgment that the other person exists in your emotional universe. That is, when you think about it, a genuinely low bar.

And yet.

There is something in the male psyche — and I am speaking anthropologically, the way you might describe a species of bird that insists on building nests in extremely inconvenient locations — that experiences the request tell me how you feel as a kind of aggression. As though the feelings themselves are classified information. As though acknowledging them out loud will somehow compromise the entire operation.

Here is my theory: men have confused stoicism with silence, and those are not the same thing. Marcus Aurelius was stoic. He still wrote Meditations, which is several hundred pages of a Roman emperor processing his inner life with considerable eloquence. The Stoics were not advocating for emotional suppression — they were advocating for emotional management, which is a completely different enterprise. Emotional management means: I feel this thing, I have examined this thing, I have decided what to do with this thing. Emotional suppression means: I feel this thing, I am going to pretend I do not feel this thing, I am now inexplicably furious about something unrelated in a Buffalo Wild Wings.

These are different outcomes.

What my therapist — let us call her Dr. Someone Who Has The Patience of a Geological Formation — helped me understand, over the course of what I can only describe as a sustained excavation project, is that the refusal to express emotion is not actually protective. It does not keep the feeling from existing. The feeling exists regardless. It simply exists without language, which means it exists without any mechanism for change. You are just carrying it around. You are the Alpha Male and you are carrying all of it around in a duffel bag you will never open, and you are very proud of yourself for this, and your relationships are suffering in ways you attribute to external factors while the duffel bag gets heavier.

Madonna’s fix was simple: express yourself. Don’t go for second best. Which in the context of male emotional behavior means: do not settle for the cheap substitute of performed toughness when what you actually have access to is genuine human connection.

Now. Do I find this advice deeply irritating even as I intellectually endorse it? Yes. Absolutely yes. There is something in me that still reads express yourself as a kind of challenge — as though the song is calling me out personally, as though Madonna in 1989 somehow knew I would be in my living room in Michigan in 2026 with my therapist’s voice in my head, looking at the person I love and thinking: I should say the thing. I know I should say the thing. Saying the thing is objectively correct. And yet here I am, making a sandwich.

This is the joke. Not a mean joke, not a cruel joke, but the genuinely absurd cosmic joke of being a person who knows better and still feels the gravitational pull of but what if I just didn’t. Every man who has done real emotional work knows this pull. You go to therapy. You learn the vocabulary. You understand attachment theory well enough to teach a seminar. And then life asks you to apply it in real time, with actual stakes, and your brain serves up the Alpha Male subroutine like it was never even gone.

The difference, I think — the thing that therapy and time and considerable evidence eventually teach you — is that you say the thing anyway. Not because it’s comfortable. Not because it comes naturally. Not because some version of you from 2003 who was trying very hard to seem cool would recognize this person as himself. You say the thing because the alternative is a life where the people you love are left to guess, and guessing is exhausting, and they deserve better than your best impression of a man who doesn’t need anyone.

Madonna knew this. In 1989. Before the internet. Before the discourse. Before any of us had the language for it.

She made a fantastic pop song about it, which she performed in a suit.

I drive a Nissan. I go to therapy. I know how to say what I mean, even when I’d rather not.

That is, for the record, a better flex than the Alpha Male will ever understand.

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The author has been in therapy on and off since 1999. He finds it helpful. He would recommend it. He is fine.