Male Tears, For Sale, Never Cried

I have a secret list of illogical rules that I carry inside my brain, ideas that defy literally all my rational beliefs and politics, particularly when it comes to gender. Most of them are completely nonsensical: I’m surprised when a man drinks coffee, for instance, which is about as gender neutral as a hot beverage can ever get. I don’t know where they come from! And I make sure to suppress them and acknowledge my own weird internalized bullshit! But I notice the thoughts bobbing up and down and around my brain box, coming to the surface every so often, proving that I am maybe not as in control of my own prejudices and preferences as I like to think I am.

This morning, I read three — three!! — articles about the different ways our personal experiences with gender are learned, enforced, or otherwise dropped in our brains like “here you go, make sense of these conflicting values, lol,” even if we tend to think of them as inherent or, perhaps more hilariously, “normal.”

The first, by Sandra Newman in Aeon, asks what happened to the “noble art of the manly cry.” She cites numerous examples from literature, mythology, and religious texts where men are commonly observed crying or weeping.

One of our most firmly entrenched ideas of masculinity is that men don’t cry. Although he might shed a discreet tear at a funeral, and it’s acceptable for him to well up when he slams his fingers in a car door, a real man is expected to quickly regain control. Sobbing openly is strictly for girls.

This isn’t just a social expectation; it’s a scientific fact. All the research to date finds that women cry significantly more than men. A meta-study by the German Society of Ophthalmology in 2009 found that women weep, on average, five times as often, and almost twice as long per episode. The discrepancy is such a commonplace, we tend to assume it’s biologically hard-wired; that, whether you like it or not, this is one gender difference that isn’t going away.

But actually, the gender gap in crying seems to be a recent development. Historical and literary evidence suggests that, in the past, not only did men cry in public, but no one saw it as feminine or shameful. In fact, male weeping was regarded as normal in almost every part of the world for most of recorded history.

I’ve never had any strong feelings about men crying, maybe because for a long time I wasn’t a crier, and even now I tend to have intense periods of tears and then long numb droughts, so I identify more strongly with people who don’t cry. As I read, I thought about how many of the emotions we consider spontaneous are really just reflections of social trends, like flared denim or artisanal beers but for expressions of our innermost feelings. Our ideas about what are the acceptable ways to convey suffering and sadness become the acceptable ways, which raises questions like: what would my feelings sound like, when I spoke about them, if I truly believed there was more than one way to speak about them?

As well, in Michelle Dean’s essay for The New Republic, she talks about the clichés of the “literary drunkard” and how our assessments of writers who drink differ between men and women. Here’s a story that could, if I let it, move me to tears:

Both drunks, both writers who were actually famous in their own day, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker were friends, or so she thought. There was one night, though, in 1926, when Hemingway was at a party at Archibald MacLeish’s; Parker wasn’t there but friends were. At some point in the evening, Hemingway decided to recite a poem he’d recently written. It was called “To a Tragic Poetess,” and its 82 lines took shots at Parker’s “plump ass,” her suicide attempts, and her abortion:

To celebrate in borrowed cadence
your former gnaw and itch for Charley
who went away and left you not so flat behind him
And it performed so late those little hands
those well formed little hands
And were there little feet and had
the testicles descended?

The poem then goes on to contrast her situation to that of men Hemingway considers braver and more honorable in their suffering than Parker. “Thus tragic poetesses are made,” it ends, “by observation.”

How uncomfortable. Parker’s biographers have never been totally sure if she knew of the poem’s existence, though it made the New York gossip rounds. Hemingway’s biographers, if they bring it up at all, tend to skate nervously by. In both cases, people seem to think that Hemingway was being mean, but not…wrong. Here, for example, is how the introduction to Hemingway’s Complete Poems sums it up: “The poem is an attack on a writer who failed, in Hemingway’s estimation, to see, to feel. It is an attack on sham self-destructiveness, especially when it is coupled with a lack of sympathy for others.”

Hemingway may not have been slamming these women’s alcoholism directly, but those feelings of self-destructiveness are the diggers of our old friend the black pit. This idea of Hemingway’s — and let’s not pretend that it’s just his — is that there is a bright line between real self-destructiveness and the borrowed or observed kind, and that in the aggregate it favors men. So there are real black pits, and there are borrowed ones, and only the former are the proper subject of art.

Fuck you, Hemingway.

But yeah, again: who gets to decide which feelings are right, or wrong, or proper, or uncouth, and why? Hemingway’s idea about how Dorothy Parker should feel — just typing that sentence made me mad — are just the result of the world he grew up in.

Paul Ford, too, wrote an extremely intriguing essay for Elle about his decision to set up a “wage gap” fund for his daughter. This is a practical, quantitative response to the bullshit that, statistically speaking, awaits every young woman entering the workforce. The idea that you can buy your way out of a structural inequality so deep most people don’t even consciously realize they’re part of it is fascinating; as Ford points out, it’s not without its flaws, but it is the most he can do as just one man.

There’s another criticism here, one that no one has offered to me but that bothers me: Why don’t I take the money and put it back into the world? Help with basic literacy, fund a women’s health clinic, build a school somewhere? Why dump all this cash into a woman who will have access to education, who will be accorded many privileges — a decent public education, clean and even stylish clothes, as many books as she can read, dozens of digital devices and toys?

I hear that. I should do more. But this is…my daughter. This is the situation I can manage, the responsibility given to me, and it’s an immediate one. I am doing this because of a deep and abiding love for my children, and because I want there to be more fairness in their world. I hope that transfers to the broader world.

Same!! Let’s give each other the space to feel however we want to feel, ok?