PhronesisMasculine emotional suppression — the systematic prohibition on emotional experience and expression driven by hegemonic masculinity norms — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_MS in the landscape of full emotional range. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as full emotional range: the capacity to identify, experience, and express the full spectrum of emotion including vulnerability, fear, sadness, and tenderness, calibrated to context.
W_MS is a culturally enforced wrong attractor whose basin depth is a function of hegemonic masculinity norm intensity (Connell). The key mechanism is alexithymic drift: long-term W_MS produces progressive loss of access to one's own emotional states, moving from suppression through dampening to access-loss across a three-phase trajectory. The public health dimension is characterized: W_MS is implicated in male suicide completion rates, help-seeking deficits, relationship dysfunction, and mortality differentials.
Nine formal propositions characterize the hegemonic masculinity basin architecture, the alexithymic drift trajectory, public health costs, the vulnerability prohibition as identity-constitutive rather than merely norm-enforcing, the distinction from healthy emotional regulation, and return paths through emotional vocabulary building, adapted therapy frames, vulnerability scaffolding, and polyvagal safety.