A womans tears

by Maverick 131 Replies latest social relationships

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  LittleToe

  Flying:I couldn't agree more.
  You express the realities of the situation well.
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  FlyingHighNow

  Flying:I couldn't agree more.
  You express the realities of the situation well.

  Thank you, Ross. A manly man in a kilt who lets himself cry? How could this be a bad thing?

  Flyin'
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  StinkyPantz

  Okay.. I keep feeling this need to explain myself. I am taking the "detrimental to society" comment personally.

  I was raised to believe that a man that cries is weak; therefore it bothers me. I was also raise to believe Halloween was bad.. it bothers me too. I do not advocate these views, and hope that I do not perpetuate them with my kids.
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  SheilaM

  I understand SP, I was raised by a bigot and EVEN though you know that the teaching is wrong you still feel this moment of discord within yourself....with me I just thumb my nose at my past and embrace my future full of more than just white people. Like Dr. Phil quotes "you gotta rise above your raisin' " LOL
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  ballistic

  Male crying: now it's mandatory
  by Robert Fulford

  (The National Post, May 7, 2002)

  Thirty years ago, Edmund Muskie's campaign for the U.S. presidency was cut short when he violated political decorum by weeping in public. During the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the Manchester Union Leader published a story describing his wife as "emotionally unstable." Outraged, he mounted a truck in front of the newspaper office and defended her with such passion that (The New York Times said) he "broke into tears."

  Today his tears would attract sympathy and votes, but in 1972 they ruined him. Tears can change their meaning in a single generation. Crying may be natural, but the way we think about it reflects our culture. No man now hesitates to weep over the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan or the passing of the Queen Mother, and we can even weep with joy. Michael Jordan, no less, cried when the Chicago Bulls won the NBA championship in 1996.

  The change in men's crying habits was completed by 1995, as Jeffrey A. Kottler explains in The Language of Tears, a how-to book about emotions. That was the year when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murder and his unsuccessful prosecutors faced a press conference: "There stood Marcia Clark, the woman and mother, stoic and restrained, while her partner, Chris Darden, an African-American male, choked on his tears." Male crying, far from being shameful, has become almost mandatory. Phil Donahue recently remarked, "I think that people who never cry are like people who never laugh: There's something wrong with them."

  Snow was falling as Edmund Muskie spoke, and he claimed that the drops on his cheeks were actually melted snowflakes. That did him no good. The Union Leader declared that crying proved he "lacked stability," like his wife, and Senator Bob Dole agreed that he was unstable. Of course, what was unstable was the status of tears, as Dole demonstrated 22 years later when he sobbed copiously at the funeral of Richard Nixon.

  Muskie's feelings were obviously genuine, but the subject of tears often raises questions of authenticity and evokes the phrase "crocodile tears." Only humans cry: Animals, while possessing lacrimal glands that lubricate the cornea, don't shed emotional tears ("psychogenic lacrimation"), just as they don't blush. But crocodiles, uniquely, can look as if they're crying because their jaws, while opening to swallow prey, squeeze the lacrimal ducts and produce excess moisture. As early as the Middle Ages, weeping crocodiles reminded European commentators of human hypocrites. A metaphor was born, used by Shakespeare and everyone since to describe ersatz sorrow.

  Bill Clinton, a virtuoso of the tear ducts, was often accused of fakery. Tom Lutz, in Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, recalls a videotape from a cabinet secretary's funeral, which showed Clinton joking until he realized a camera was observing him. Then he turned serious and tears filled his eyes. "Rush Limbaugh ran the tape in slow motion on his TV show numerous times ... sending his studio audience into howls of laughter."

  Clinton's friends could have called on Émile Durkheim, the great sociologist, to explain that those responses were grounded in ancient practice. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim argued that among preliterate tribes, mourning was seldom spontaneous and grief was often expressed purely as ritual. Then Durkheim described Clinton's actions, eight decades in advance: "If, at the very moment when the weepers seem overcome by their grief, someone speaks to them of some temporal interest, it frequently happens that they ... take on a laughing air and converse in the gayest fashion imaginable."

  The Bushes, it has slowly become clear, constitute a special case: an entire political family given to public crying. They raise the possibility (otherwise unknown in the medical literature) that tears may run in clans, like red hair or blue eyes. After President George W. Bush visibly fought back tears during his inauguration last year, his father, also teary, explained: "We Bushes cry when we're happy, we cry when we're sad."

  Last week, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida broke down in tears at a conference on drugs when he thanked addiction treatment professionals for their support after his daughter's arrest on drug charges. He apologized. "Bush men always cry," he explained. "It's a little genetic problem I got from my dad."

  Certainly the many splendid lacrimal performances of George Herbert Walker Bush lend credence to that thesis. A piece in Time magazine, while acknowledging he was never a match for Clinton, nevertheless classified him as a "frequent weeper." He cried when he heard Dixie Carter sing the national anthem, cried while listening to the Oak Ridge Boys perform on Air Force One, cried when Paula Coughlin (a victim of the navy's Tailhook sex-harassment scandal) told him about her ordeal. And, uh, he cried when his dog Millie's first litter was brought to him.

  The authenticity question provides the emotional climax to a famous 1987 film, Broadcast News. Holly Hunter plays a TV news producer who often checks her watch to make sure she has a free moment and then breaks into violent sobs. But when she discovers that her lover (William Hurt) shed artificial tears on camera to intensify an item about rape, she drops him. Her own tears, while produced on schedule, expressed wretchedness; his were no more than a dishonest performance.

  As crying grew more popular, two decades ago, not everyone welcomed it. Nora Ephron, in her novel Heartburn, has her Ephron-like narrator claim that tears are overrated, especially male tears. "Beware of men who cry," she says. "Men who cry are sensitive, but the only feelings they are in touch with are their own." She wrote that in 1983. Ten years later, she wrote and directed a paean to crying, Sleepless in Seattle, a notable event in the history of culturally induced sobbing. The characters confess to crying over Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember while the movie audience cries over Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Ephron wasn't inconsistent, just selective. Certain tears are appropriate in some eras, not others.

  Public tears get discussed so often that someone from another planet might believe we cry mainly before an audience. But most people know from experience that we cry when alone, for various reasons. A friend of mine once said, "In real life I never shed a tear, but alone in the darkness of a theatre I often weep." He guessed that his tears needed a clear focus, and life was too chaotic and contradictory. I agree. My own tear ducts respond most often to stories shaped by expert novelists, scriptwriters or journalists. They especially react when confronted with acts of kindness, fictional or factual, that are intended to modify a calamity in some redeeming symbolic way.

  In Saturday's National Post, Christie Blatchford's piece on the sentencing of Randy Dooley's stepmother and father for his murder provoked my tears by describing Randy's Grade 1 teacher, who had tried her best for him in vain and was still there, loyal to the end. Kottler's The Language of Tears describes a woman who sounds like me, crying when she hears about teenagers who shaved their heads to express unity with a friend who lost his hair in chemotherapy.

  Even in a story like that, pleasure accompanies tears. In 1880, in The Principles of Psychology, William James depicted the difference between "dry sorrow," a dead feeling experienced without tears, and psychogenic lacrimation. Dry sorrow is totally unpleasant, but actually crying brings excitement and "a certain pungent pleasure." Pain and pleasure normally stand at the extreme ends of human experience. Only tears bring them together.
• 

  Maverick

  SP, you feel how you feel. Who can say what is or is not a detirment to society?

  Other people crying has a powerful effect on us. I hate seeing a man cry over a relationship, I see it as weak, so do you apparently. I love seeing a woman tear up when I do something very right, conversely, I can think of few things that bother me more than knowing I caused a womans tears because of some bone-head thing I've done.

  It unnerves me when I see my daughter cry. I am very uncomfortable with seeing people in general crying. As a man I don't know what to do, or how to respond, or if I should even do anything. Many of the ladies brought out the John Gray points on us guys being Mr. Fix-it. I liked the Hug suggestions, but as you, SP brought out, if the lady is pissed and that caused her to cry, my trying to hug her is gonna get me slugged!

  There is no right or wrong answer, this is an open question and I do appreciate all the responses. This gives me a baseline to reference from. Men don't talk to each other about this kind of thing. We are generally clueless about this sort of thing.

  Edited to add, Great stuff ballistic! Mav
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  LittleToe

  I feel the need to clarify a few things too:

  Should I begin worrying about the longevity of my future relationships??

  That comment might look like I'm expecting [plural] future relationships.
  It was a hyperbole on behalf of men in general (at least those who wish to express their emotions).

  I was just addressing those attitudes that I feel are detrimental to the human race.

  This should have read:

  I was just addressing those attitudes that I feel are detrimental to the evolution of the human race.

  Maybe hiding emotions had it's place in society in the past, where macho-men were hunter-gatherer types. Nowadays lots of things are changing, and it appears to me that it's hampering proper communicaion. I've done the macho stuff, I know how it works, and I also know how it makes me feel inside. B*gger that for a game of fish-sticks...

  Counterwise, as was also brought up in this thread, women are finding that they can express themselves on a more even playing field. They don't have to hedge how they say things, for fear of reprisals or being demeaned. I can't tell you how pleased I am to hear that (though I fear that the pendulum may swing the other way, as is oft the case during such times of paradigm shift).

  It's a slow process, but I do think that we are slowly but surely getting towards more equality.
  I don't see that as a bad thing.

  I was pleasantly surprised to see the positive comment on this thread. All I've really been addressing in these last few posts are the more negative ones regarding guys freedom to express themselves. But heck, it's only my personal opinion, so if it's too far off-the-wall, feel free to sling the book at me - guilty as charged...
  

  I'm discomforted, as much as the next person, to see folks blubber. I frown at over-emotionalism, and I detest manipulation.
  ~flexes muscles a few times~
  ~yells "SEMPER FI"~
  Can I rejoin the rest of macho-man universe again, now, or am I condemned to be the pitiful outcast of the 21st Century - Nineties man reject, that I am?
• 

  FlyingHighNow

  and I detest manipulation.

  I detest it, too, though I have seen people use it for good. In my current relationship, my fiance is the manipulator. His mother is admittedly the same way. At least they know they are and they let you know it. They are still good people. They are just good at psychology and they know how to watch others and see what makes them tick.

  I am a "Lay it on the line and take it from here" kind of person. I don't have the patience to plot out a manipulation. "Let's not play games," I say.

  If you see me crying. You will know it's because I am genuinely happy, sad or in pain. I am not trying to get something from you.

  Flyin'
• 

  StinkyPantz

  Apparently there was a wrong answer.
• 

  LittleToe

  SP:

  Apparently there was a wrong answer.

  Aye, but which of us expressed it?
  

  Mav:Great thread. Thanks for airing it, even if it did veer off of your original intent.

  ~shuts up and gives the gals a hug~((((group hug))))