Two separate headlines describing the same phenomenon offer a quick study in what many people think of the tears of men:
The difference is immediately obvious, as is the reason behind it: The writer of the second headline was afraid of writing the phrase “grown men cry,” while the writer of the first was not. This is illustrative of the current cultural moment we live in.
There are a great many people today who believe we should be encouraging men to cry more—not just more but lots more, like regularly. Debates surrounding men and emotions are centuries old, of course, but the current attitude seems to have its roots in the sort of sentimentalizing zeitgeist of the 1990s, where sensitive, quick-to-tears men were kind of a cultural meme, especially on network television sitcoms. But of course as with everything else the days, it’s transformed from funny joke to dead-serious cultural value that you have to accept unless you want to be labeled a Nazi white supremacist Trump/DeSantis supporter or whatever.
Here’s a well-known weatherman from the south with a premier example of this new sensibility:

As with a great many modern cultural conventions, the people coming down on the one side of this issue are missing the point entirely. We’ll get to that in a minute, but we should first note that, in the main, even the most hardline, hard-as-nails retired Marine Corps major generals will admit that there are times it is perfectly acceptable for a man to cry. When your mom or dad dies, when your kid graduates high school or boot camp, when you give your daughter away at the end of the aisle, when you’re laying one of your buddies to rest at Arlington—when he’s overwhelmed by powerful emotions at meaningful and consequential points in his life, in other words, it’s not wrong for a man to shed a tear. This is normal.
The issue, then—and here we get into the sort of difficult contentions that can send family gatherings and workshop breakout sessions straight into nuke-strike territory—isn’t whether or not men should cry; it’s whether or not they should cry like women cry. This is the crux of the matter, though understandably, given the politics of the moment, not many people want to discuss it.
Women in general cry more easily, more liberally and more often than men do. This is of course an historical fact, inarguable and unimpeachable, as much a part of the record as is the Battle of Hastings. There’s been a weird attempt to deny this in recent years—there’s been this widespread insistence that men in fact cry, or at least want to cry, as often as women do. “Survey finds men actually weep more than women — 4 times a month!” declared one recent headline. Uh huh. Of course this is entirely false, just silly, ridiculous stuff, and you have to assume that these men only responded to this survey under duress of some kind.
To be fair, the men in question are likely only responding to many of the social cues with which they’ve been presented in recent years. “97 per cent [of women] say they find that men crying is considered either strong, natural or healthy,” one recent survey declared. But again we have the fundamental issue at play here: The contention isn’t whether we should encourage “men crying,” but rather “men crying like women cry.”
And nobody, I mean nobody, wants that. Even the most ardent, hardcore feminists would mostly find themselves viscerally repulsed by a world in which men were running around crying about stuff like women often do. Look, not to go on and on about it, but most husbands have at some time or another had an encounter of some kind like this:
(Husband comes home to find his wife on the kitchen floor sobbing next to a shattered bottle of strawberry preserves)
Husband: Honey, what happened?!
Wife: (Sobs) Oh, I just…it’s been a really hard day…I went for a run and this guy totally cut me off when I was crossing the street and he gave me this like angry look as he drove by…then at the Kroger the cashier was really rude, and practically threw the change at me, then I backed into the curb getting out of my parking spot and it made this huge bang and I thought I had broken the car, then when I got home the jar fell out of the bag and just broke and it’s just been a really hard day…(continues to sob)
Husband: Okay. Okay.
It happens—in one form or another it happens. It’s no big deal. Men have their very weird and mystifying foibles too. But for a great many women, female physiology often manifests itself in this way. And not to belabor the point, but if the sexes were switched in the scenario above, we’d all be deeply weirded out (okay, I guess I’m gonna belabor the point here):
Wife: Honey, what happened?!
Husband: (Sobs) Oh, I just…it’s been a really hard day…I went for a run and this guy totally cut me off when I was crossing the street and he gave me this like angry look as he drove by…then at the Kroger the cashier was really rude, and practically threw the change at me, then I backed into the curb getting out of my parking spot and it made this huge bang and I thought I had broken the car, then when I got home the jar fell out of the bag and just broke and it’s just been a really hard day…(continues to sob)
It doesn’t sit right, does it? The average wife who came home and found her husband in such a state would probably be on the phone to the nearest Kirkbride. We innately recognize that the normal neural/physiological pathways of men mean that they are simply less overwhelmed by pure emotion on a regular basis than are women, and when we see it happen it’s at the very least odd and concerning.
And women, overwhelmingly, don’t want it. No matter how much they say they want a man “who cries,” what they don’t want is a man who cries like them. Some writer or another, I can’t remember who or when, wrote a while ago that she would feel distinctly burdened if her husband cried as easily as she does—he would, in effect, be asking her to shoulder his relative lack of emotional discipline compared to the more cumbersome emotional weight she by necessity must bear.
“Men should cry more” is as much a political slogan as it is a misinformed one. No, they really shouldn’t, and also they don’t really want to, and also women don’t really want it either. Of course we need to teach both men and women healthy and practical ways to cope with, and manage, the feelings we all have. That’s just common sense. But we need to not do it in a way that runs counter to anyone’s own innate inclinations, and we need to not destabilize the delicate and important relationships between men and women, certainly no more than they’ve already been destabilized. If you don’t like that, well, go ahead and cry about it.