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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.)
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.)
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[1] I don't know about toxic masculinity or whatever, but every time my mom caught me crying, she mocked me or yelled at me. You would think that with that kind of motivation, I would learn to not cry anywhere where anyone could see me.
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So that answers my question of whether it could be an effect of your medications, but I'm very sorry.
I will very often stop crying if I think I've been seen or overheard, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
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Once I start crying in earnest I find it very difficult to stop whether I want to or not. The only semi-reliable way I've found to not start in the first place is to bite the inside of my mouth really hard so the pain distracts me. I actually have a lump on the inside of the mouth from spending my childhood doing that in the exact same place each time, which my dentist has noted (because she was checking for tumors or something, I don't even know).
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More generally, I think any interpretation of how physiology intersects with culture tells us much more about the person or society that's making the statement than it does about how physiology actually intersects with culture.
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I'm sure there's some important counterexample I'm overlooking, but I tend to agree with you.
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I get SO MAD at society for yelling at boys/men that "boys don't cry."
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You're welcome. It's the kind of casual statement about ways men are and ways women are that I look at and want either serious scientific substantiation or just calling bullshit.
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What has anyone whose field this sort of thing is had to say about it?
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That makes sense to me. I couldn't tell if you were describing a physiological or an emotional phenomenon. [edit] And it was not my intent to give offense by asking, so I am sorry if it was rude.
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I've seen the assertion that men's tear ducts semi-atrophy, but whether it's disuse or nature, I have no real idea. I also went through long non-crying periods, but now cry pretty much whenever, though there aren't always tears.
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Thank you.
I also went through long non-crying periods, but now cry pretty much whenever, though there aren't always tears.
"A harts ken benken, veynen on trern . . ."
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This. See also: numerous counterexample cultures where men are expected to cry {sensitive/manly/culturally appropriate adjective} tears and do so.
---L.
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Yes. Thank you for their mention.
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I forget the source, sad to say, but the gist was that it was not particularly accurate to talk about nature VERSUS nurture but rather to look at how the different factors interrelated.
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I agree that that's generally a more valuable way to think of it. I'm just trying to run down what, if any, the nature component is when it comes to men crying.