Men Who Cry in Public
Shedding tears in public was once a sign of weakness and unreliability in men, but today the art of stoicism has been lost. Should we try to reclaim it?
A survey by the Social Issues Research Centre (in conjunction with Kleenex—who else?) found that fully 99 per cent of women and 77 per cent of men feel it has become more acceptable in the past 20 years for men to cry. This is, as far as I am concerned, a welcome rejection of the sort of stereotyping that damned men who cried, and sank Muskie’s presidential run. The ability to hold in tears is no longer seen as the tell-tale attribute of a real man. Quite the opposite. Many now take such restraint as an indicator of the sort of stiff-upper-lip emotional repression that distanced generations of men from their emotions and from their children.
