I could never get back up when the future starts so slow

In order to make my doctor's appointment this morning, I slept about an hour last night. I am very proud of myself for keeping both eyes open and focused at the same distance throughout. Afterward I met my mother for lox and bagels at S&S, dropped by the library to request some novels, and came home intending to use the afternoon to write about at least one of the three movies I've seen since last weekend, but instead I passed out for four hours solid. That's more sleep than I've gotten some nights this week, so even though it makes me feel I've done nothing with my brain all day, honestly I'll take it.

Yesterday, as rushthatspeaks and I passed the Somerville Community Growing Center, we saw a pair of musicians with guitar and accordion leading an audience of children and parents/adults in a chorus of "Wild Mountain Thyme." The weather has been nice and all, but that's how I believe we have a solstice coming.

I know I have very particular tastes, but I expect more from a poem titled "In the Drowned Bookshop."

I saw my tears in your eyes, you saw your tears in mine

So this evening I encountered, in Porter Square Books, an anthology entitled Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them (2014), edited by Anthony and Ben Holder. (There is a companion anthology by the same editors, Poems That Make Grown Women Cry (2016), but it wasn't in stock.) In the preface, I ran into the following:

Despite the male tear duct being larger than the female, studies have consistently shown that from around the age of ten a divergence occurs and thereafter boys cry far less than girls. Whether that is down to cultural or biological reasons (or, as is likely the case, both), the sad truth is that the male of our species has not always been allowed to cry. Tears may have been venerated in European cultures during the nineteenth century as a sign of high moral character but, these days, they are all too hastily wiped away.

Which got my attention partly because I had run into a similar statement in Chris Walsh's incomplete but interesting Cowardice: A Brief History (2014):

Current research indicates that girls and boys cry with the same frequency until puberty, when both sexes begin to cry less, but the decline in male crying is much sharper than the decline among females. This gap may reflect a physiological cause, or it may be that cultural expectations of manhood assert themselves powerfully at adolescence. Or perhaps nature and culture converge to powerful effect. Men may be naturally less inclined to admit and less able to display fear than women are, and society reinforces, to a lesser or greater extent, this natural tendency. Whatever the case, and despite increasing acceptance of soldiers' tears in recent years, the idea that real men don't cry is stubbornly persistent.

My instinctive reaction to a nature/nurture debate as regards male expression of vulnerable emotion is: nurture all the way, see also toxic masculinity. Since most poetry anthologies do not contain a scientific bibliography, however, and I returned Walsh's book to the library last week without making a note of the citation, does anyone have pointers to research with a more convincing case than "men and women do things differently so obviously it's biology"? Or is it just customary to hedge the question so as not to sound either gender-essentialist or totally performative?

(There were entire stretches in my life where I could measure in years, plural, from the last time I'd cried. That changed after 2006, when I was in too much pain and unhappiness not to. It was not that my life until then was an unbroken string of contentment and delight; it just wasn't the reaction I experienced for almost anything other than grief. It's generalized since then. I know I spent much of 2014 and 2015 in tears. They are still more strongly associated with physical and mental exhaustion than I think is healthy on my part, but at least I know it's counterproductive to beat myself up for it.)