I live a less constrained masculinity than fair ogged, but he's right that the block quoted bit is false. I'm a fairly ready cryer, but I don't think I've ever (since adolescence) cried in response to physical pain.
I mean, I can't even picture an adult male in physical pain who's crying, unless he were, like, dying and processing those emotions at the same time. But mostly screaming, cursing, and moaning. I wouldn't shame a guy if tears came out also, but if he were sobbing like he just watched Old Yeller? That would be weird.
I cried when Luke, Han, and Chewbacca got their medals.
Actually, I've watched Star Wars few enough times that the opening--that burst of fanfare and then the screen text--still gets me verklempt. But I'm *very* susceptible to film. I watched Asteroid* for some reason, and thought it was lame and dumb, but I still choked up at the appropriate moment at the end.
Same deal with masturbating, of course.
*no, that's not right. That stupid Bruce Willis movie
*no, that's not right. That stupid Bruce Willis movie
The Sixth Sense.
This is why John Boehner's resignation was a tragedy.
I can almost get there to crying at emotional events like watching an ECG go flat, but that's about it. My models were all "Men don't cry. Ever. No matter what."
I'm with JRoth re physical pain. Screaming, cursing, or moaning depending on circumstances, but preferably cursing to maintain macho cred.
For dealing with chronic pain, the best solution is to be unreasonably peevish around others.
I have no problem crying and I get weepy a lot at watching certain films, I'm not ashamed. But a dude who cries when he's physically hurt needs to be punched. Hard.
If the [car door|butcher knife|harvesting combine] actually severs the fingers, tears are acceptable.
Are you surprised at my tears, sir? Strong men also cry.
Strong men also cry.
13: Only after the tourniquet is improvised, the fingers packed in the lunchbox, the drive to the ER completed by steering with one's knees, the medical stuff finished, and the door to one's room firmly shut. Maybe then, if one is a weakling.
Lately I've been tearing up when I practice the fiddle. I think maybe a minor rosin allergy?
I mean, I don't play that well, or that poorly.
Can you cry if someone yells at you and you're under pressure to stay composed?
18: Only if you're also chopping onions.
Scientific fact that women cry more, huh?
"ophthalmology and (crying or weeping)" turns up nothing relevant in Pubmed for 2009. I claim bullshit, that this is a description of pop culture, not worth attention. While I had conversations with female friends about despair and worse when I was under 25, as an adult I mostly talk about it with male friends and relatives, no shortage of guys there, nobody gives me shit.
To 2, I reliably cry while watching "It's a Wonderful Life," I basically enjoy other well-made manipulative tearjerkers. I'd respond to being mocked for this either with generic contempt if it came from a stranger or with an insult hurtful enough to terminate conversation if I knew the individual.
What if you're super tired and no one understands you?
Lots of people have trouble understanding me, but usually not my insults.
OK, now I read the rest of the comments, I see we agree about movies, good.
Do women cry in response to physical pain? I doubt general validity of this claim also, personally.
21: I cried at that comment! You looked into my soul, heebie!
(wait! that means there is somebody that understands me! (more weeping))
I wouldn't endorse the view, but I think you're right. The circumstances under which I'd expect that a man would be "allowed" to cry are much more constrained socially than are the circumstances for women.
21: I cried at that comment! You looked into my soul, heebie!
It was like a clown car in there.
Compare the reactions to Muskie's and Hillary's alleged tears. In the one case the man was condemned for supposedly sincere tears. In the other case the woman was condemned for supposedly faking tears. In conclusion, the media suck.
20. 1: apparently the research has been done. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11339610/No-more-tears-men-really-do-cry-less-than-women.html
Women cry more often and for longer. Not really a surprise surely?
20.2: I almost mentioned IAWL earlier. A local theater shows it for free the week before Xmas, and I always take the kids. Iris especially loves the whole experience, but is also (mildly) upset at how weepy I get.
18 and 21 are unrecognizable to me. Well, 21, I basically never, ever get tired like that (that is, tired to the point where I have trouble coping). And 18 would make me angry.
It's pretty clear that we're socialized such that a lot of circumstances that lead a woman to cry will lead a man to rage. Violence aside, I'm not 100% convinced that one is more real or honest or healthy or whatever. You're basically talking about an all-consuming burst that comes with a loss of control and capability. I cry when I'm happy or sad, not stressed.
The underlying issue is that men are not allowed to be sad. Bummed, yes. Depressed even. But not sad.
The exception, as noted above, is when someone or something dies, either on film or in real life.
My kids never cry in response to physical pain. It's only in response to them not getting what they want.
Rosey Greer taught me and my age cohort that it was perfectly fine to cry, even if you're a big boy. Some of us may have taken that lesson a little too much to heart at various points in our lives, or so I hear.
Also I would have thought "welling up" in response to physical pain is far short of crying, especially as the author expressly contrasts it with "sobbing openly". Maybe I'm just insufficiently masculine (of course I am) but I think if I slammed my finger in a door my eyes would probably moisten a little to accompany the requisite obscenity-shouting.
(One of) my kids never stops crying in response to (mostly fictitious) physical pain.
28: Now that the research is out, we should have contest for who can come up with the most inane back-on-the-veldt evopsych explanation of the result.
It's pretty clear that we're socialized such that a lot of circumstances that lead a woman to cry will lead a man to rage
Are women less prone to rage? That doesn't match my experience.
It's all about different socialization of children. If a girl cries at you, you've done something wrong. If a boy cries at you, he's doing something wrong. If crying reliably gets you what you want, why would you stop doing it?
If you would just put the damn dishes away.
30.1: Wow, I didn't realize what a rebel I was. No wonder nobody likes me.
Sad.
Here's the list of when it's acceptable for a man to cry: his kid dies; his daughter gets married; his buddy dies before 50. Anything else will be reviewed by the Committee on a case-by-case basis.
29.3 to 28: surely we're discussing a socialized behavior, not an innate one? I cried like a Boehner as a kid*, but my lack of doing so as an adult isn't a conscious effort. I try to minimize my tears most of the time, because I don't want to make a spectacle** of myself, and because I'm likely crying about something inconsequential like a movie, but things like 18 and 21 are situations where crying would make no more sense to me as a response than dancing.
I cried through much of Iris' 5th grade graduation ceremony, but that's largely an expression of my love for her school community. I'm a little misty just typing that.
*I think I was a cryer when I was little, and then I kept crying all the way through 7th-8th grade, partly because I was miserable and sad a lot. Once that stopped, I pretty abruptly shifted to adult male crying norms, per 1
**as in, I don't want people looking at me. I don't care about the crying as such, but basically the only times I try to draw attention to myself are when I'm trying to be clever. It's the New England part of my upbringing
28. I do not find any mention of the Telegraph's 37-country scope in Pubmed. Is their science reporting reliable?
There is this which looks interesting, both for the classification of crying as for frequency comparisons. No easy fulltext, unfortunately.
Socialized responses, OK, maybe. But for territory like this I am not inclined to wing it and go by either my hunches or those of a journalist who is possibly stressed to tears from a deadline.
I claim bullshit, that this is a description of pop culture, not worth attention. While I had conversations with female friends about despair and worse when I was under 25, as an adult I mostly talk about it with male friends and relatives, no shortage of guys there, nobody gives me shit.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Does anyone cry in any of these conversations you have with men and women?
3: I cry (or tear up really) every night, mostly in positive uplifting or sentimental situations like this. Of course, alone, and in response to movies or anime. Used to be books. Every single night, multiple times.
As far as not crying in response to pain, I don't allow the release for the sad stuff or tragedy apparently. Very rarely. Cry for happy always and very easily...
Farewell My Concubine this week, in three nights. Overrated, but still a great epic, with three top-level performances. It got me several times.
Blake:"Sorrow laughs. Joy weeps."
Everyone give their salary, SAT scores, and whether there are currently tears streaming down your face.
39: Death of spouse didn't quite make the list, huh?
Crying at physical pain is weird. I don't think I've ever seen a woman do it. Yelling, sure. Maybe sniveling a bit. But actual tears?
I did not cry at the Aylan Kurdi photo itself but lost it utterly, on public transit, reading the father's account of his survival. That was pretty awkward, really. No one is supposed to cry in public among strangers and it seemed to give mild offense to people around me. I guess it's all gross bodily fluids, not just the tears but the sniffling.
This past weekend a four and a half year old slammed (really squeezed) my finger in a door. I did not cry. Punched the kid out, though.
30.2 With regard to film it needn't involve death, and often doesn't.
30, 39: Wow, I didn't think junior high kids would be interested in this forum.
As counterevidence against 39, here's a Liz-Phair centered discussion of guys crying:
http://www.spin.com/2013/06/liz-phair-exile-in-guyville-oral-history-best-1993/2/
In my limited experience FWIW, in those times of serious grieving, what sets me off is the positive remembrances, in a kinda gonna miss them so much way. But it is the happy stuff I'll miss that makes me cry I think, rather than the direct loss or pain.
After Obama's "Beer Summit" with Prof. Gates and Officer Crowley, I remember some guy texting to the effect that it wouldn't be a success unless they ended up drunk, hugging, blubbering crying, and yelling "I love you, man."
I don't think that happened.
54: It didn't happen, and so once again the Race Problem was not solved.
35: if someone were giving me shit and I couldn't laugh it off, my only response is rage. Women clearly (sometimes) respond to such shit with tears, QED. I suppose you could argue that women get unjustified shit more often, and the tears fill in the gap, but I'd prefer to view it on a percentage basis.
I should addovershare here that I have a quick, hot, brief temper, such that things will leave me seething that merely annoy AB, so it's possible that my perception is (quite) skewed.
A couple years ago, when I hit some gravel at 30 mph and debrided myself, I immediately leapt up and started screaming Fuck at the top of my lungs (sorry, lady with preschooler 50 feet away). I was mad that I'd wrecked and was in pain (and was going to miss a meeting and fuck up my day/weekend), and then I found a guy who could help bind my wounds, and then I biked to the hospital. At no point were tears in any way relevant. When I finally got home ~6 hours later, I had a shaky moment as the last of the adrenaline left my system, but at no point did I have that overwhelmed, weepy feeling. Hmm. Maybe I welled up a bit when my dressings were changed? That hurt like a MFer without being traumatic, and definitely required the sort of deep breathing one deploys to avoid crying. But that's still very, very different form the car-slamming example.
I wonder how much of the difference here has to do with what we actually call crying, and how we present it generally.
I mean, there's the physiological reaction (usually one or more of: eyes watering, lump in the throat, shortness or unsteadiness of breath, actually making sobbing sounds of some kind; etc.) that I think almost everyone has to certain kinds of extreme emotions*. But that's not always something people call crying - you certainly see some of those in people who are really really angry, people who just gotten punched in the face or been pepper sprayed, etc. Whether or not we call something that looks like that crying in some kind of situation or other, and where we draw the lines, seems to me to be a more gendered thing than the actual reaction itself.
*Including pain - I don't think there's anything strange about some of those things showing up when you slam your finger in the door, but at least in those cases we don't tend to call it crying unless sobbing (instead of cursing, gritting teeth, etc.) is involved.
I can recognize and understand 18 and 21 but haven't experienced it much. Frustration crying...release of tension...
"It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault."
This was being recognized and accepted, joylove crying, not pain, right?
Some French theorist, I can't remember who, mentions in a footnote somewhere that most people have a particular thing that reduces them to tears, and I think that's right. For him it was something like a wife's devotion to her husband (creeepy (but I might be misremembering)), and I find that what gets me closest to crying (not to actual crying, lw, you weirdo) is strangers helping each other. Most death and despair is a bummer, sure, but if I see someone offer his coat to a stranger, or help or stand up for someone, particularly at some risk to himself/herself, that gets me. Cody Pines for president.
I mean, I know men are supposed to bottle up their feelings and so on, but I don't really think that happens. We just kind of all agreed to pretend that some behaviors aren't 'being emotional' like shouting or being angry (and then men use those), and others like sobbing are, and men don't do those (as much).
42. 1: I admire your determination but the guy does exist, and he has been widely quoted as saying that's what his research found. Except, interestingly, at work: male psychotherapist are far more likely to cry while working than female ones.
Huh, I totally cried when I crushed my hand in a boat winch. So, yes, this woman cried in response to sudden, severe pain. That's pretty much the only time as an adult that pain has warranted sobbing for me, though.
I'm thoroughly conventional in most respects, but have found myself unable not to cry when someone stands up for me
A really vivid memory of this was from a junior high day when a teacher berated a class, including the basic masculinity of the perpetrators, over repeated bullying of me. I'd held up under the bullying itself, but couldn't control my feelings when being defended.
And it's happened several times since, when a man or woman speaks up for me, when I'm under attack—verbally these days—I have a hard time controlling myself.
I cried when I told ms bill and our kids that my mom had died (not quite two years ago). Not original with me - my dad sobbed a few times when he told my sibs and me that his mom/our grandma had died (way back in the macho 60s).
I cried when Old Yeller died, partially because I lost a bunch of money on the fight, but also because I remembered that movie. It made me wonder why a guy would give a fighting dog that name.
65 before I saw 64. Now I feel bad.
66: It's ok to cry because you made an insensitive comment.
Umm, under universal conditions of ageless Patriarchy (or racism), would we expect the most conditioned socialized un-natural physical expressions of emotion to come from the oppressors or oppressed?
Also thinking of domesticated animals, when it hasn't gone so far as to turn to a violent response, and when they can't run, they respond to pain with the seeking of affection and attention. Submission.
Also...hysteria has made something of a comeback in rarefied Lacanian circles.
The Hysteric's Discourse Lacan.com
Hysteria is an elementary effect of language. As an intelligible phenomenon it follows from the structure of the Demand. This structure, in fact, is identical with hysteria. Immersed in language, the subject is hysterical as such. While Freud took hysteria to be the nucleus of all neurotic disorders, Lacan has revealed the speaking subject as fundamentally hysterical: the only subject of psychoanalysis is the barred, unconscious, hysterical subject.It then appears no longer sufficient to conceive of hysteria as a fact of language among others; it is the fact of language if we admit that whoever speaks is hysterical. We can go further and say that the subject demands to be recognized as a fact of language (see the formula "Tell me who I am --> I am what you say.") The hysteric not only requests that language be used as a means for explaining her, she also insists on being acknowledged as a being of speech. Freud fulfilled this demand, and so did Lacan.
A lot more gendered than it needs to be. I consider the immobility/paralysis of men in pain/grief to be also hysteria. In fact, as said above, all expression is hysteria.
Finished the N Katherine Hayles on embodiment, moving on to Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind and Edwin Hutchins on distributed cognition.
Upload the mind into a mainframe, leaving the body behind? Sheeeet.
There ain't no fucking minds, only bodies in a world. Mind, subvocalised expression, is hysterical.
And more generally, with the shift away from men crying: I wonder if there was less micro-behavioral differentiation between genders when there was much bigger situational differentiation, i.e. separate spheres. Maybe I should read the belittled link from the OP?
I heard a trans man (Ben Barres iirc) say that the biggest change for him after transition was that he just didn't cry at all. I found that pretty intuitively credible. Hormones seem to have huge effects on crying, IME. I assume that's trivially true but type type type I am still typing.
60
Correct. Men are socialized early on to replace crying with anger. Hence the need to curse violently when hurt.
I learned it well. I am basically immune to crying at pain and at movies. What still gets me sometimes: when I realize I've hurt someone I like (usually a breakup), or extreme exhaustion (finishing a marathon).
It's pretty clear that we're socialized such that a lot of circumstances that lead a woman to cry will lead a man to rage.
These aren't necessarily different things. It's alluded to a few times above, but not quite spelled out that crying can be an expression of rage for a lot of women. It's hella true for me and the most goddamn frustrating thing in the world. "No, I'm not upset and I don't need consoling. I'm mad and you need to take me seriously even though I'm sniffling and hiccuping." It's bad enough with partners or family; it's the absolute worst in other settings.
I replace crying with peevishness because I'm a feminist.
You know you're a replicant when you cry watching c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
Example: Other Than Big Tearjerkers Like Clannad... what anime you never expected to make you cry
Author of the OP piece apparently hangs around the wrong crowd, wrong kind of guy. Which is interesting.
Are the basement otaku who cry at anime disgusting loosers, and what she really wants is to break the well-socialized manly strong silent types?
I even mentioned this the other day, from an anime Zetsuen no Tempest, guy's old girlfriend had died, new girlfriend is all why won't you talk about it, why won't you show your feelings, why won't you cry, guy finally breaks down to his knees and bawls, new girlfriend gives a big hug and smile.
What would it mean for a guy to say:"Sure, I cry, I cry a lot. Just not in front of you."
What is the socialized response?
I'm basically a fountain at the movies, and nearly a desert in life. And shedding no tears about that. I take a lot of shit from wife and kids about how involved I get in movies. (Hey, if you're not going to suspend disbelief all the way, and get in to the story, what's the point at all?)
Have not read thread, but: In the most-used schoolbook Latin edition of the Aeneid there is actually a footnote explaining why Aeneas bursts into tears (because otherwise, OMG, faggot? I dunno). The explanation is that in "Mediterranean cultures" even very butch men cry. Ok, then!
I've cried from pain, but that was when passing a kidney stone, and was more from frustration at pain that was not going away goddamnit than directly from the pain. (Pain can get really boring when it doesn't go away.)
it is my lived and observed experience that men sad-cry more readily than women and women frustrated-cry more readily than men. many more frustrating things happen than sad things, so women cry more. it must be that until the early modern era, way more sad things and fewer frustrating things happened.
79 are you sure it was frustration and not sadness
The explanation is that in "Mediterranean cultures" even very butch men cry.
Also Aeneas really was a whiny-ass titty baby.
82: Well, yes, definitely that. Turnus 4eva!!!
82 related: Have we done this here? But the 9/11 Memorial quote being about Nisus and Euryalus is sort of boggling/hilarious to me BUT ALSO I totally get that like 100 nerds on the planet understand that, so who cares?
A friend of mine alleged that his father had often told him "Quit pissin' with your eyes!" in all seriousness when he would cry as a child.
I tried not to cry too much at the funeral for my friends' kid, as I didn't want to odiously compare my own grief to what they were feeling.
Immigrant narratives were making me cry just from thinking about them, let alone talking about them, for several years, but that seems to have passed.
It was very upsetting to see one of my current orkers tearing up when she found out she'd missed passing a test by one point. She was definitely crying with rage, but it was still scary.
I cried most recently after losing my temper and yelling at a kid, who apparently got over it much faster than I did. I used to cry when I lived with Lee and cry much less now that I'm not in a horrible relationship. There are definitely times I wish I could have a cathartic cry and can't, but usually I've had to put it off and it just doesn't work anymore.
Wait, no one directly addressed the permissibility of make masturbation not bracketed by crying? Who are you people? (Except maybe JRoth, but I couldn't tell what he meant.)
Not bracketed by crying? What's to address?
85: The memorial has a quote from Virgil, "no day shall erase you from the memory of time", which sounds nice if you think of it addressed to the 9/11 victims; but in the Aeneid, it's addressed to Nisus and Eurylaus, who ho died carrying out a really gruesome night-time sneak attack/slaughter.
Pwnd. It sounds OK out of context, though.
89: I'm just saying no one's confessed and it seems like a telling lapse.
I, too, started to cry at the fanfare and opening scroll of Star Wars, when the original only trilogy was back in theaters. I had not expected that I would be quite so overcome by the rush of childhood memories, but in order to avoid repeating the occasion I shall flatter myself by comparing it to the narrator's reaction when visiting France after V.E. Day in A Dance to the Music of Time: "I was briefly in tears."
So the quotation commemorates the dead and the killers. It's perfect!
Male crying is much more accepted in17-19 centuries, especially among upper classes. It marked one as refined and sentimental (in a good way). This all changes around turn of the century with homosexual panic. Then crying gets labelled effeminate. Hopefully, our changing attitudes about homophobia will mean that crying gets more widely accepted. Personally, I weep like crazy at books, movies, commercials where kids are in danger, die, are sad, etc. I also cry when super angry.
||
Moby: have you heard of this
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The Lark Ascending, Du Pré playing the Elgar concerto, Ferrier singing Die Kindertotenlieder - there are certain pieces of music that I and all three of my better half's children know will get the waterworks going, to just leave him in peace with a good supply of hankies. It's a bit tougher for the deaf kid to know when we are in the no go zone, but we all look out for when he needs a heads up.
A man who cries in response to physical pain should be told "I'll give you something to cry about!" and then punched in the face or made to watch a sad movie. Seriously, men, what is wrong with you? Pain is weakness leaving the body, you pussies.
As I've mentioned, the final scene of The World of Apu reliably makes me cry, plus some other film scenes and music. Generally, though, life has diminished my sensitivity.
Flatulence is dignity leaving the body.
All y'all candy-asses bragging about how you never cry from pain- you clearly just need to experience more pain. Try longer lasting pain, if greater intensity doesn't do it for you. If you're not crying, you're clearly not in very much pain, you wusses.
I'm too old to laugh, and it hurts too much to cry.
Mostly, I only have pain for about the first hundred steps after I get up. That's probably normal.
Aeneas cries because he knows he's just a pale shadow of an imitation of Odysseus.
I feel like I see males athletes crying from injuries pretty often. Nowhere near as much as from losing, though.
They're crying because they have to be removed from the field of battle.
Or because it's a contract year and they stand to lose millions. I should probably add that to the list in 39.
Guys also used to hold hands in friendship, right? Homophobic panic getting into the culture explains a lot.
Homophobic panic getting into the culture explains a lot.
Most guys also totally freak out over getting assfucked, too.
I bet Jian Ghomeshi cried when he disappointed Big Ears Teddy.
99:
Also moving recordings for me. I've got all three on my iPod. I seldom tear up but often quaver. Also KF's Richart Lieder.
When men do it, it's not crying, it's ocular ejaculation. It's really embarrassing when you don't get it all over your face.
I'll give you a reason to cry, I was up till after 3 last night and had to get up at 5:20 AM for work. It's a good thing this week has only 2 working days in it because of the Eid break.
All y'all candy-asses
My god, Messily's gone native!
I don't know about Eid, but this isn't a very good week roofless huts in this area.
I can see tearing up in agony because of super serious pain, but does that count as "crying"? I was imagining someone just balling their eyes out because they got hurt, which does seem quite wussallicious, but thinking about it I think most men do tear up some while in serious pain, MAYBE including me.
224: step kid.
idp - check out the St Petersburg Philharmonic (or Symphony?) proms concerts, they're both great. Should still be available on BBC i something or other, but not to much longer. They play The Enigma Variations all to bits in one of them.
I've got Leonard Slatkin's Proms Enigma.
The Wikipedia page doesn't explain much, and there doesn't seem to be a simple pain/tears connection. There's a nice picture of a crying toddler, though, and an explanation that Twelver Shias view crying as a religious obligation.
YES, "tearing up" counts as crying, you lachrymonster.
I didn't cry during unmedicated childbirth but even so I have exactly zero opinion as to whether men who cry from pain are betraying their manhood or whatever. Seems an odd thing to fixate on.
I reliably faint at the site of blood of a loved one, tho.
just balling their eyes out because they got hurt
You have a problem with makeup sex?
I reliably faint at the site of blood of a loved one, tho.
That's quite the tell.
102
Longer lasting pain makes me want to whimper like a dog (though I manage to control that urge), but it's even less likely to make me want to cry than acute pain.
Yeah, I was thinking of the suppressing the dog whimper thing, but isn't that likely to be accompanied by some slight tearing, if only because you're clenching your eyes? Not full-on crying, that's clearly no bueno. I dunno, maybe it's just me.
126 -- eyes are not for fucking, as the children's book says.
I cry at pain only if I'm also simultaneously startled. I've cried from an unexpected electric shock, even when the pain wasn't really terrible. Other pain, even very intense pain, doesn't make me cry. If I faint, I find that when I come to I am crying and disoriented, which is possibly related also shock of the temporary disorientation.
When I was really depressed, I cried a lot (like, hours in bed weeping), but now that I'm medicated I almost never cry. When I was less depressed but unmedicated, I would cry at night in bed but not during the day. I also find that weepiness tracks very closely to monthly hormonal changes, in a way which makes me feel like a bad feminist. As a kid I was prone to crying easily, which was considered shameful and awful, pretty much on par with bedwetting. I think had I had a different upbringing I would probably cry a lot more, but now as an adult I'm pretty good at holding back tears. I used to cry a lot in anger/frustration as a kid, which really made everything worse. My grandmother thought it was a sign of weakness, and my parents told me I was being manipulative, which in retrospect was kind of manipulative. I cry more when I'm tired/sick/hungry, maybe because in those states I am inherently weepier, or maybe because it breaks down my willpower to not cry. As a very feminine-presenting person, I've cried a few times in public and always been rewarded for it, but the rewards have never outweighed the humiliation I felt.
I don't think I have ever seen my one grandmother (not the one I write about) cry, which now that I think of it is kind of odd. My other grandmother cried at my father's funeral, and she would tear up talking about him after his death. I also didn't cry after the one grandmother died, and neither did my mother. It's been over a year and maybe it's delayed grief, or maybe it's just I didn't feel that emotionally close to her even though I grew up around her and saw her all the time. The last time I saw her, she told me that she would be dead the next time I came home, and that I shouldn't be sad or cry because she was tired of living and really was looking forward to dying. On one level it feels disrespectful to have not cried, but on another level, it is what she wanted.*
*She also didn't want a funeral, memorial service, or any money spent on her burial. She used to say that if possible we should fling her body into a ditch on the side of the road.
129
Dunno. Maybe so, but I'm a little distracted at the time. My eyes tear up from coughing fits and eating extreme hot sauces too, but I wouldn't call those events crying.
I can't say I really feel particularly proud of this ability anymore, it's just a testament to the fact that a lifetime of conditioning can do amazing things. Also, that pain seems to be becoming less intense and easier to ignore as I get older, while painkillers become even more useless then they already were.
I also find that weepiness tracks very closely to monthly hormonal changes, in a way which makes me feel like a bad feminist.
Much of the world seems unable to grasp the idea that some women have strong emotional reactions to menstrual cycles and others do not. Impossible! Either PMS is a myth or it's universal! Maybe constructive discourse on the subject in another 10-15 years will be possible. (Not judging your remark at all, which reflects this crazy state of affairs.)
It's reported that I didn't (memorably) cry during childbirth, which was by a big margin the worst pain I've had. However, I can imagine crying after getting my hand stuck in a boat winch, JESUS. Full recovery, I hope?
On women's pain and Planned Parenthood. The author is an acquaintance (but I had no idea of all this stuff), and man, she is the kind of virtuous person where you'd make unwise bargains with the gods to spare them suffering like that. I don't think I actually cried, but it was very affecting. I need to donate to PP and shit. I also had a solitary very good experience there.
127: yes, there was that awkward moment when the guy who'd asked me to get hitched and I'd decided instead I'd move to another continent but hadn't told him yet nicked himself shaving and - no tears. Cat was out of *that* bag!
134
Thanks for that article. That + the Guardian's article on endometriosis have made me so blindingly angry (not helped that I've been dealing on and off with my own women's health issues over the years, with very uneven treatment from medical practitioners.) This seems like an area where the gender discrepancy is so blatantly and nakedly present, mostly unmitigated by class and race and all the other factors complicating feminist issues in general.* Baldness and erectile dysfunction are far better treated and researched than like, 99.9% of women's reproductive issue problems, even though they can cause infertility, crippling, debilitating pain, and can lead to cancer. Doctors assume everything is either 1) an STD/yeast infection or 2) throw birth control pills at it. It's really great that a 50 year old treatment works for 80 bajillion different conditions, with no advances over the years. This also applies to non ladypart diseases disproportionately affect women, like migraines and fibromyalgia. The only women's disease that gets taken really at all seriously is breast cancer, which I'll avoid any cynical reading of.
*Like, obviously, healthcare in general has huge class and race disparities, but women's conditions are so underresearched and so little is known about them that not even the best health insurance and treatment at the top treatment centers in the world will necessarily know how to diagnose or treat lots of not-that-uncommon lady conditions. Getting any diagnosis at all can be a decades long crapshoot of eventually seeing the right doctor,** and then treatment is an entirely different issue.
**As per the article, I've found that expensive doctors are if anything more likely to dismiss pain as psychosomatic issues rather than having an actual medical cause.
The only women's disease that gets taken really at all seriously is breast cancer, which I'll avoid any cynical reading of.
Why don't you ♥ boobies, Buttercup?
Most guys don't have the language or even the awareness to discuss their own feelings
Excuse me, but baloney. You could say "some", if you wanted to express an opinion, but when you say "most", you should have evidence to back the claim up, and you have none, and I strongly suspect that's because there isn't any.
Some men are inhibited about expressing some emotions. Some women are too, but it appears there are fewer such women than men. This may be because stoicism is a culturally prized value associated with normative ideals of masculinity. To assert, because of this, that a majority of men are mentally impaired, is to go way too far.
138: you must be new here. This is an ogged post.
As I said in 36: men get angry because they learn as children that getting angry (with the implicit threat of violence) gets them what they want. Women cry for the same reason. If we started mocking small girls for crying, and instead socialised them to be violent, you'd get lots of angry women and lots of crying men.
My son kicked me solidly right in the nads, point of the shoe right in the tenderest of all possible tender spots, just a few days ago, while I was carrying him. The physical effort required not to drop to the floor myself, or drop him, did bring a tear to the eye. The last time I remember genuinely crying from physical pain, I got my head slammed in a revolving door. Huge metal and wood thing. Pure accident, but it's a miracle I wasn't really seriously injured. I think I was 15.
I used to cry fairly readily when younger, though, mostly in situations of stress/anger when punching someone would have been unacceptable. I remember tearing up slightly in an argument, even with a male friend (late teens, early 20s) when it threatened to get violent, and that wasn't because I was scared (I'd have won the resultant fight)* but because the whole fight-or-flight reflex had kicked in, and neither was an option.
I cry much much less often now, although my eyes will get moist at the appropriate moment in tear-jerking films. Cued much more by music than anything else.
* not because of l33t ninja skilx0r, but because this particular friend is definitely not a fighter.
I think you do have to make a distinction between tearing and crying. Unless you want to argue that you're actually feeling upset about the tragedy of the onion that you have to dismember in order to feed yourself.
Yeah, actual crying from pain, not so much. Eyes getting slightly moist while swearing, more common.
Most guys don't have the language or even the awareness to discuss their own feelings
"He always cried like a baby during and after sex, and it was a real turn-on."
There is a lot of evidence in the reddit threads linked above that men, at least a limited sample of men, are open and honest about their feelings.
What "express their feelings" almost always means is "in a way I approve of and enjoy, to me or in social, public, or interpersonal situations."
IOW, public and interpersonal expression is always conventional and socialized, and was so in previous eras. That conventions or practices or fashions have changed should not lead us to assume or accept that our new social rules are progressive or enlightened or "healthier and more natural."
There is a lot of evidence in the reddit threads linked above that men, at least a limited sample of men, are open and honest
That's the real lesson of reddit, surely.
I endorse 142. Tearing up a bit because you just took a boot to the yarbles is not the same as getting weepy because you just took a metaphorical nut shot. Which is in turn distinct from crying because you want to kick somebody in the crotch but can't.
Magical Girl by Carlos Vermut, is very good, but very challenging and difficult, and not necessarily recommended. It is discomfiting personally in the way it deeply and knowingly interrogates some tropes of globalized Mahou Shoujo consumption.
In one scene, a couple visits another couple, and one wife ask a childless couple if she would like to hold a young infant, maybe six months old.
"I'd really rather not."
"C'mon, you want to hold the baby."
"No, thank you"
"C'mon, hold the baby"
"Okay.
Starts laughing loudly while cuddling child.
"Why are you laughing?"
"I'm just imaging the expression on your face if I threw the baby out the 10th floor apartment window."
Her expression of feeling was not accepted graciously.
Marilyn Ferdinand on Magical Girl. I like her reviews.
"In sadomasochistic relations, it is the submissive who controls the action. Magical Girl shows just how much two seemingly vulnerable and submissive females control and bring about the ruin of the men in their lives."
Is bob reading /redpill or whatever?
Blue? I always get my pills mixed up.
The end of World of Apu made me cry even before I had kids. I'm afraid to find out what my reaction would be now that I have kids. Though I might think, "eh, what's the big deal."
Guys also used to hold hands in friendship, right?
Still do in some places. I had a Haitian friend in the States who said he really missed platonically holding hands with other men. Though now that I write that I think it was more walking with arms linked in that elbow-to-elbow way, IYKWIM.
(He had the amazing name of Marx Aristide. This was in the '90's when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was president. No relation. He was also one of the straight-up nicest people ever, so of course he was killed when a 14 y.o. crashed into his car because world.)
One day lazy opinion writers will get past the habit of dividing everything into either male/western/artificial/rational/technological/scientific or female/eastern/authentic/emotional/artistic/natural, but obviously that hasn't happened yet. Until it does, I'll be over here, repressing my emotions and ruling the world.
That happens all the time around here, except usually not to Haitians and usually the driver is an adult. The roads were set-up before cars were a thing and the houses are closer than is safe given how shitty the average driver is.
The roads were set-up before cars were a thing
That applies to basically every road in Europe.
It's rare enough here that when somebody drives into a house, people will often respond with "Why is that house there?" instead of "Why can't you control your car?"
Both father and son cried in this case but it was a tearjerker for other reasons:
Aristide's mother joined the teenager's family in asking a D.C. Superior Court judge to show mercy.
"Nothing is going to bring Marx back," Andre told the court. "What [Claire Aristide] is going to lose, she lost already, and there's no reason for another mother to have to lose her child over this accident."
Thanks for sharing that, SK.
On a not-quite-related note, does anyone here have any experience with mental health courts? Rowan's attorney has asked me to write a letter supporting their request that he be released on probation (unlikely?) and switched from regular court to mental health court (sounds like a really good idea and could actually be rehabilitative) and I'd like to talk to someone with experience if I could.
That Aeon article has a lot of interesting facts. I don't think the conclusion that "maybe men should cry more" is supported though.
It was interesting that men cried about sad stories in the past. Tearing up at a media is embarrassing for me because I am never really sure that I would appropriately tear up at some bad thing in real life. Maybe syncing up peoples emotion with narratives has some veldty explanation.
The cry/tear-up distinction is a real one but if crying were culturally acceptable for men, men could cry when they now tear-up.
I also find that weepiness tracks very closely to monthly hormonal changes, in a way which makes me feel like a bad feminist.
But you shouldn't. The feminist claim isn't (or shouldn't be) that hormones don't affect women, but that hormones also affect men, and no one's saying they shouldn't have jobs due to levels of testosterone that will prejudice them toward making rash decisions.
hormones also affect men, and no one's saying they shouldn't have jobs due to levels of testosterone that will prejudice them toward making rash decisions.
er...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=if+women+ran+the+world
158: I have no experience, because I never do anything, but I was involved in research related to this. I'm sure it varies by state and I'm over a decade out of the loop, but I don't think that kind of offense would get sent to a mental health court.
162: Here "minor felonies" qualify and I'm not sure whether this is one, but a history of mental health problems can be a mitigating factor that gets you bumped to mental health court regardless of offense. It wasn't something the prosecutor was willing to offer as part of his plea deal and he falsely claimed not to have any mental health problems when being sentenced, so I have no idea where any of this will go but it seems like something I could actually do....
As I said in 36: men get angry because they learn as children that getting angry (with the implicit threat of violence) gets them what they want. Women cry for the same reason.
I don't think that's right re: getting them what they want, at least not if you mean what they literally want to happen at that moment, though that certainly can happen. I'd say it's accumulated social and emotional rewards and punishments (plus role models) that ingrain those kinds of behaviors.
Yes, that was a bit oversimplified - I'm not suggesting that it's a conscious strategic decision made at the time! As you say, it's a question of training and conditioning.
It was interesting that men cried about sad stories in the past.
There was a change in the expected performance of masculinity from the beginning of the 19th century, at least among the British ruling class (the common people, as usual, remain largely undocumented), when the whole "stiff upper lip" bs started as part of the cult of "muscular Christianity". As recently as 1790, when Fox and Burke publicly broke off their friendship over the French Revolution - in the House of Commons, no less - both men had been in floods of tears that would make John Boehner look like a Stoic by comparison. In the Victorian age that would have been frowned on, a point which the linked article seems to miss. And that prejudice seems to have been successfully exported to at least to America and Germany by the end of the 19th century. (Latin peoples were well known to be "over-emotional")
As Gita Mehta remarked, it was an article of faith among the imperial elite that "the noblest muscle in the human body was the sphincter, which was to be kept tightly clenched at all times." No doubt the exigencies of world war helped to prolong this ideology, but I hadn't realised it was still expected of current generations.
I blame Thomas Arnold for the whole.
166: probably a good thing. It's not a one-way street from experiencing emotion to displaying it; numerous studies have shown that people who force themselves to display signs of emotion will actually end up experiencing that emotion. If you tell someone to frown during a minor surgical operation, they'll report feeling more pain. If you paralyse a woman's frowning muscles with botox, she'll report less anxiety and unhappiness. If you force yourself to smile, you'll actually feel happier.
So the Victorians were on to something; a stiff-upper-lip Englishman not only appeared less unhappy than his demonstrative Mexican counterpart, he actually was less unhappy.
Not to mention the other obvious benefit: it is distressing to witness other people in distress. We're empathetic creatures. So letting your negative emotions rip is actually harming other people. It's basically psychological passive smoking.
he actually was less unhappy
Less happy, too, though, right?
Obviously, because only the Mexican had mole.
166.last, from Wiki
A. C. Benson once observed of Arnold that, "A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion"
Now I hope to holy fuck that the Strachey is online. Other things researched today:Alexander Bogdanov and the Shang-Shu
I hadn't realized until 169 that ajay was Minnesotan.
I blame Thomas Arnold for the whole.
Likewise, chum!
demonstrative Mexican counterpart
Non-Commonwealth Mexican equivalent
170: maybe less effusively so, but I think they were allowed to feel the Two Acceptable Emotions (righteous anger, as felt when confronting beastliness, slack discipline or scruffy foreigners, and quiet satisfaction, as felt on receiving a knighthood, eating a pie, scoring a six or breaking wind).
The end of World of Apu made me cry even before I had kids. I'm afraid to find out what my reaction would be now that I have kids. Though I might think, "eh, what's the big deal."
Inorite. There are days when, if I'd been Satyajit Ray, the last line of that film would have been, "Scram, kid."
151, 178. Indeed, Satyajit Ray brings it on.
I don't recall tears ever getting me what I wanted and indeed they would provoke rows where I would be ordered to stop crying and couldn't. One thing I miss about smoking is that having a cigarette was a reliable way to suppress tears.
Nowadays apart from actual sadness I notice that trying to suppress anger (eg at work) leads to crying instead. If I could stomp and rage I'd be fine.
When I first visited Egypt in the late '90s it was very common to see men walking arm-in-arm in the city. I two guys doing this in Cairo recently and realized that the practice has really dropped off in the last decade+.
181 is true of Greece as well. You still see it, but in the late 80s/90s it seemed like it was pretty much mandatory for especially the older men to stroll arm in arm around the square before dinner.
Grey Twilight was better than Golden Dawn.
181: and up to the early 20th century in Britain. Lots of references to men walking arm-in-arm in novels of the time. I suspect the practice dropped out of fashion after it became permissible for men to have friends of different heights, with whom walking arm-in-arm would obviously be impractical (Victorian Britain was ruthlessly height-sorted).
181 I saw the same thing when I was in Cairo in the mid-90s and I did the same thing with a friend of mine, on occasion arm in arm and on occasion holding hands, in Morocco. I have yet to see this in the Gulf.
The NYT comes to the rescue, telling us it's okay for a man to cry. Often. Of course the author seems to have been in suspended animation for at least a decade, so there's that.
1. indonesian, indian, and bangladeshi dudes are still palling it up around town with their arms around one another in my recent experience.
2. ogged's list fails to mention "you have to put your hunting dog down." before the advent of widespread veterinary euthanasia this was accomplished with a shotgun blast to the head. poor brandt. we never told the people to whom we sold my grandfather's property where the dog cemetery was; we just took down the bronze plaques affixed to the wall behind the poolhouse. it is permissible in my view to become slightly misty when recalling the dog's having retrieved a duck from icy water in a really impressive way, if you are drinking a manhattan or something in the days immediately following the dog's death. I am deeply committed to the idea that my grandfather never did anything unmanly, so I'm required to add this.
3. having your eyes water involuntarily from pain is a real thing and is different from crying because you are hurt. I got a nice jolt from the 220v electrical socket behind my drier last year, and while my reaction was to curse wildly, my eyes also teared up slightly without my having any inclination to cry. it's a thing that happens. I'm with ttam here.
I've had to install new plugs on two different dryers. I managed not to shock myself or start a fire. That's not on topic in the least, but I'm inordinately proud of being able to attach a plug correctly.
In Germany several months ago I saw many Middle Eastern-looking men walking arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand, in twos, threes, fours, etc. The quartets reminded me of the bus ads for Sex and the City.
188.1 No shortage of Indian or Bangladeshi men here. Maybe my powers of observation are waning or there's something distancing about the local culture here. I suspect the latter, it goes along with a number of other things I've noticed that are different about Gulf Arab culture here (and I miss the way it was in Morocco).
Samoa was another hotbed of same-sex platonic affection (and non-platonic as well, but lots of platonic). I don't remember handholding while walking, particularly, but male friends sitting around, at least teenagers and men in their twenties, were draped all over each other like puppies. Girls too -- in theory I support the natural human need for physical contact, but in practice it used to make me claustrophobic: trying to tutor the kids through their math homework, I'd be sitting next to one girl and would have three others reading over my shoulder and leaning on me.