I’ve just got to ask.
Have you ever used your list? Has it been “Godzilla is attackig the city! Wolfman assemble a team to deal with it!”
For what crisis had you had to call on people that don’t cry?
Well, I disagree, but not having experienced either, I guess I can’t speak authortatively. And in any case, clearly this is a matter of opinion.
I wasn’t attempting to make a value judgement at the relative merits of either reaction, but rather show that there could be a hard-wired difference in reaction to stress - but thanks for reminding everyone that’s alright to be sexist so long as the males are taking the bashing.
I was merely providing an alternative interpretation of the evidence, not “bashing” anyone. Well, ok, maybe a little.
Ridiculous! My sister (who can be as emotional about things as any other) is a pediatric nurse. Several times a week she can be expected to deal with small children dying from leukemia, or being patched up after severe domestic abuse. If that doesn’t require stoicism, you’re crazy. Whether she goes into the breakroom and cries later, or doesn’t is completely irrelevant to her doing her job professionaly. You also can’t convince me that the low percentage of women in these jobs is due to some sort of gender-based risk aversion and not at all to do with sexist attitudes.
Gah.
To get back on topic, I sometimes feel like crying, but basically can’t. To quote lazz:
That’s generally how I feel. I once finished the novel “I Know This Much is True” (or as I refer to it, “I Know This Much Is Sad and Depressing”) on an airplane. I was sitting next to an attractive young woman, and I was terribly embarrased that I was sniffling and tearing up right there next to her and everybody else. Not that I wanted to impress her, really, I just didn’t want her or anybody to see me like that.
Ok, so I did want to impress her. 
Regardless, I felt (and I think I’m correct in this) that she would have been embarassed to see me crying, even a little.
I don’t explicitly remember being taught to hold back tears or anything. But as I look at my whole family, they are all very stoic people. This starts with my grandparents, who seem to have taught it to my father and all my aunts and uncles. My grandfather went through severe depression and eventually died, and my grandmother took it verry stoicly. I can’t think of much of anything that would make my grandmother cry, although I’ve seen her do the macho “tear up and sniffle a little” thing.
When I was about 12 or so, I saw my father start to cry in frustration over being yelled at about something, and he and my mother went off to their bedroom. He was obviously embarassed, and I was embarassed. That moment had a big impact on me. Moving around a lot, I was the new kid at a lot of schools, and I got my fair share of being picked on by bullies. I didn’t want to fight, and knew better than to try to rat people out, and I instinctively knew that crying from any treatment I got would make me look weaker to them. I won’t even begin to try to address why this is so, but it extends to all areas. Crying is weakness, weakness is to be avoided at all costs. Some rare few men do not internalize this message, or are able to overcome it.
I’d like to note that this is only in the US (and I assume some European nations and other countries as well). I spent some time in Africa, and don’t remember it being the same in their culture.
Final note (I swear). This inculturation happens a lot sooner than you would think. My girlfriend has noted that people will throw baby boys up in the air as a game - if they cry, you laugh at them, and they get the message that everything’s ok. People don’t seem to do this to baby girls, so they don’t get this message. I also remember walking down the street behind a 6 year old girl and her mother. The girl was crying, and said “why are boys so mean?” Her mother said “It’s ok, honey. That’s just how boys are sometimes.” Thus sending the message that the boy’s rambunctious behavior was ok, and the that girl has to just accept it. I’m sure similar patterning was happening with the boys and their parents. Boys and girls get many many little cues like this, along with reinforcement from their peers.
Well, you can make fun of it if you want, but if you’ve ever cut your finger off on a table saw, had a friend call from vegas on a bad meth and coke trip and wanting to kill himself, or been called by an panicky ex who had someone breaking into her house, it’s pretty good to have a mental queue of level-headed people around the country to call on.
Crying isn’t the major factor, but people who cry easily have a correlation to people who don’t have control of their emotions, in my experience, and are less likely be calculating when the shit hits the fan.
:rolleyes: Crying and banging your head against a wall are both absolutely useless as solutions to a problem. They’re the same reaction expressed in different ways by different people. The most you can expect from doing either one is that you’ll feel better after you’re finished.
Let’s have another :rolleyes: for good measure.
I think I’ve cried three times since I was nine years old. A few weeks after Hurricane Andrew, I asked my mother why dad never cried, and she said that he just didn’t. So I decided that I wouldn’t either.
I’ll still get choked up every now and then at a movie, or even a particularly good piece of music, but there’s a point that I just don’t go past. Sometimes I’ve even wanted to cry, but it just doesn’t happen.
As for other guys crying, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, but it definately shouldn’t be done in public. It’s terribly uncomfortable for the rest of the pack.
Tears show that we’re feeling powerful emotions. I respect that ability in both men and women. The freedom and courage to feel is important. Of course, modern Western technological society frowns on feelings, especially from men. Not much support for it! We have to pretend that we’re utterly rational.
I think we have to have the courage and freedom to feel, even if it brings tears. We also have to have the wisdom to act in spite of our feelings. Acting wisely does not preclude feeling.
You ought to be proud of your son.
Yes, yes, stoicism is a modern invention.
I wrote this several years ago regarding this very topic.
I do have some more to add besides the above link, however.
When I was a kid, I thought Dad was very brave. I saw evidence of this every weekend when he worked on the car (we rarely had cars that didn’t need something done on a weekly basis). He would bark his knuckles and he didn’t even cry!
I recall one time when I was four and I was outside playing. I fell and skinned my knee and I didn’t cry. I was very proud of myself for being a “big boy” about it and I went home to have mom spray it with Bactine and maybe put a Bandaid on it. I was just fine (not unduly distressed) until I got home and saw Mom. I opened my mouth to boast about how brave I was and I just started bawling. I think what happened was this: as a child, you don’t really know what to do about a lot of things, so the instinctive thing to do is to summon expert assistance (a parent or other adult) by crying. Since there were no adults around, there was nothing to trigger the “cry for help” reflex. When I saw Mom, instinct overrode my intent to say: “Look at this, Mom! And I didn’t even cry!”
Crying is not a weakness, but it does make us feel vulnerable. The second (final) time TW (That Woman) left me, I felt like crying a lot, but it just did not feel “safe” to cry in front of her. You tend to suppress crying where it is likely to make you even more vulnerable in front of an unsympathetic audience. Even an injured animal will maintain silence when it knows a predator is nearby.
Right about the time of 9-11, I was really stressed out already. I had three dogs to keep me company when I wasn’t at work, and the puppy, Dexter got sick. The day I decided that I’d better take this little guy to the Vet, he died in his sleep. Three days later the oldest dog Fluffy died (she was fourteen and had been blind for a while – I think the passing of Dexter made her give up). I had to take several days off work so I could grieve. I also got “counseled” for taking too many days off when I got back. They *were *only animals, after all. :rolleyes:
Last year I got a toothache. This was during a 3-day weekend and there was no hope of getting in to see a dentist. Even though I was taking Tylenol, naproxen sodium, aspirin, and ibuprophin like it was candy (yeah, I know. Bad for ya, but this was desperation) the pain varied from “Wow! This is bad!” to “MOMMY!” At one point the pain was so bad I was sobbing from it. I actually did call my Mom and she suggested I try to find a dentist who was open on a holiday, and worry about the expense later. I did so and luckily there was a dentist open who could see me. That was the only time in my life that it was an actual pleasure to get a tooth pulled, the relief was so dramatic.
for the last several years, I have been in an ongoing battle with TW over my visitation rights. She plays dirty. A few months ago I bought “Mary Poppins” on DVD so I could watch it with my son (if ever TW would actually let him come on a visit). One day I decided to go ahead and watch it by myself, since I hadn’t seen it since I was 7 or 8 years old. I was really surprised when the “Feed the Birds” music came up and I just started blubbering.
I think that part of why men in western society don’t cry as much as women is that men are expected to come to their own aid. “Help is here. Now shut up and deal with it.” Notice also how many of the responses above use the word “weakness” to describe males crying and you’ll understand why most men are very, very careful about making themselves feel vulnerable where they are not certain they will have a sympathetic audience. If “not showing weakness” has been unduly emphasized during a man’s youth, he is unlikely to cry even when he is the only person present. His own superego is unsympathetic to his urge to shed tears or express inarticulate emotional pain.
To the few women who feel distain for men who cry, I suggest you are helping to perpetuate this unrealistic expectation of male behavior. Perhaps it is because it makes a man seem less likely to be the strong protector you want him to be?
–SSgtBaloo
Birthing is as traumatic as battle? I don’t think so.
Hear hear, SSgtBaloo.
And I have to say, I’m pretty appalled at some of you. Emotions are a human response, regardless of gender, and their presence in both males and females should not be viewed as an anomaly of any kind. If they manifest themselves in tears from time to time, it’s a perfectly normal, physiological response.
As I said before, part of being an adult is knowing that it’s okay to cry sometimes. However, part of adulthood (or, at least responsible adulthood) is also recognizing that crying can be disconcerting for others or socially inappropriate behavior depending on your environment, social background, and occupation.
Your mileage may vary, but I’m sick and tired of you “men crying is pathetic” types. Get over yourselves. Not all men and women are hardwired the same, and it’s pretty damned immature to suggest that your way is the right one. :rolleyes:
wolfman, you have no idea what sort of stress other people are enduring. It may just be that circumstances you don’t see have front-loaded these people with so much stress that their ability to “keep a lid on it” has been exceeded. Their own ideas of how much emotion to display in public may also be different. It seems to me that you are at the upper end of the stoicism scale.
In my own case, I tend to react a bit like Barney Fife (sometimes) before and (often enough) after crises. Oddly, when it’s time to act, I become emotionless, detatched and rational. Afterwards, when there’s nothing more to do, I quiver like a paint shaker from the unused adrenalin, but that’s just me.
Having had to act in the clinch several times in my lifespan, I suspect I’d trust myself to act at least as coolly and rationally as you in an emergency, if not more. How someone reacts to stress in non-emergency situations has little bearing on how they’ll react when they know “this is it”.
Pitch the scorecard unless it makes you feel safer to keep it. You sound like the sort of person who’d be handy in physical emergency (scene of a car crash, fire, earthquake) but I don’t think you’d be the first person I’d want to talk to if my dog had just died. You’d benefit from having a bit more “dynamic range” in your social skills toolbox.
–SSgtBaloo
i haven’t all out cried in a long time. When i do cry it is only half ass crying with a few tears and some sound effects.
I am not opposed to it, men have feelings like everyone else. I also don’t really consider it a sign of weakness, just inability to cope at the moment. Everyone has a breaking point. If someone (male or female) were to cry all the time like Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriend in one of the Seinfeld episodes i would dislike that.