Men’s backlash—individual and organized resistance to potential feminist progress—presents a significant obstacle to progressive gender change globally. Within the literature on gender change and masculinities, prevailing sociological and psychological theories hold that negative emotional reactions to masculinity challenges drive men’s backlash. Yet what that emotional process entails remains unknown. To address this gap, following processual insights from the sociology of emotions, this study asks: how do men manage their emotional reactions to potential feminist progress? In the United Arab Emirates, successful state efforts to promote Emirati women’s employment have been underway since the 1970s, but we know little about their impact on men and gender relations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 33 Emirati men, collected between 2016–2019 as part of a larger study of Emirati experiences of pro-women policies, I find that Emirati men experience emotional ambivalence about women’s employment, which they manage according to two salient masculinity schemas. First, they strive to embody the generous provider ideal which, enforced by cultural and religious expectations and codified in federal personal status law, demands men assume full financial responsibility for their families. Second, they attempt to enact modern masculinity, a global ideal rooted in Orientalist hierarchies and adopted in government discourse that involves not opposing women’s employment. Following feeling rules from each schema, Emirati men engage in what I call emotional distancing, ultimately pursuing an unaffected stance toward women’s employment. As generous providers, men feel but work to dampen their personal interest in sharing breadwinning. And as modern men, they rationalize, and therefore suppress, their frustration and fear of emasculation from what they experience as the state privileging women in the labor force over men tasked with breadwinning. The effect of this emotional distancing process is to suppress negative feelings as well as those that might generate more egalitarian behavior. These findings contribute to an interdisciplinary literature on men’s backlash by illustrating how negative emotions do not necessarily lead to backlash. Instead, whether men’s feelings result in backlash may depend on the feeling rules embedded in salient masculinity schemas. As such, this study highlights the importance of progressive schemas and institutions, including federal legislation, which shape whether men lash out against, support, or—as in the Emirati case—remain largely uninvolved in potential feminist progress.