I’m aghast of all this “sensitive man” bullshit. I get it. You’re man enough to cry like a little girl, order drinks with little parasoles in them and watch Sandra Bullock movies (other than Speed…that movie rocks!).
I believe we said it is ok for you to scream, curse out God, and then take a few months off to wallow in alchoholism and poor hygene.
ponders
This thread makes me wanna become a transsexual. I can now, however, say without shame or regret that I am no man. I am not macho, nor am I strong, nor do I wish to be completely rational and stoic. What I am, however, is me. Maybe you could beat my ass up in a bar fight. Actually I’m almost certain you could do that. Lord knows my fellow classmates did it on the playground when I cried. But you know what? I DON’T CARE. My life is my party and I’ll cry if I want to, bitch! If I’m making you desperately uncomfortable, either leave or confront whatever issues you’ve got in your head which are causing such an aversion to my expressing strong emotions because that sounds strongly like a phobia.
No I don’t cry much at all. No I’m certainly not doing it to play the “in touch with his feelings” card with women (snort). I’m not even doing it to get attention. I’m doing it because by God I’m hurting inside and yelling just isn’t enough to let it all out. I’ll yell when I drop something on my foot. I’ll yell when I stub my toe hard. I’ll even yell when someone pisses me off. There are moments for me when yelling works and there are moments when crying works. I yell when I’m mad or in pain. I cry when I’m sad or stressed/upset. I certainly don’t break furniture, which strikes me as erring on the side of excess and posturing. I’d much rather wash a hankie than patch a hole in the wall.
Having problems with this? Tough. Its life and sometimes folks do things you don’t like. So long as I’m not pouring my snot on your burger I certainly am not harming your quality of life. Take a small secret pleasure in feeling superior to me and move on. Or, perhaps, find out why the hell I’m sobbing and try to help. This especially behooves you if you’re calling me a friend.
Some wishes do come true!
Bravo. Author, author!
“Decorum” and “dignity” (both good things, mind you) each have their place. And that place stands directly behind my connection with my own feelings. Due to massive amounts of irrational programming and piss-poor role models, I used to idolize the character of Leonard Nimoy’s, Science Officer Spock. It took me quite some time (~20 years later), to realize that logical and rational emotions really did exist and there was nothing wrong with experiencing them in the full. I’ll give you an example of how in control of my own feelings I was back then.
It was seventh grade swim class, winter quarter and (blessedly) in a heated outdoor pool. I managed to misbehave just enough where the gym teacher overcame his fear of my father being the past PTA president and ordered me out of the pool. (For some perspective, the gym teacher was so ill-respected that he was “pantsed” on the playing field by a group of students in my class.) I climbed out of the pool and into some rather chilly and windy winter air.
My skin tightened up like dried rawhide under a sun lamp as I scrambled to assume a cross-legged sitting position at the pool’s edge. Fortunately, I was studying transcendental meditation at the time and immediately put myself into a near trance state. Only the yells of students from the pool that my skin was turning blue (even though I wasn’t shivering), broke my concentration (or lack thereof).
Trust me, I know all about what it takes to suppress and block out feelings.
Permitting any sense of social obligation or superficial motivation and appearance to contravene your own rightful sensations is a stepping stone on the path to Hell. It’s what (necessarily) permits a warrior to slay and (in it’s most pejorative sense) a murderer to kill. To voluntarily suppress valid and honest feelings allows one to move on and repress even more vital perceptions. Training oneself to not void your bowels in public (and the like) is a proper override of instinctive behavior. These elected modes of right conduct have solid behavioral and hygienic reasons that justify their existence.
As others have already pointed out, there are a lot of ridiculous social mores that need to be abandoned. While maintaining a sense of personal dignity is not one of them, allowing societal programming to completely suppress your own sense of humanity and internal emotion is. Suggesting that a man should feel emasculated for crying in public is exactly the sort of throwback Neanderthal machismo fucking garbage that has been poisoning gender roles since the stone-fucking-age. The sooner we let go of this outdated drivel and become real people with real emotions, the sooner this world starts to shed its cocoon of repressive and useless typecasting.
Oh, and there’s one or two more things that precede my sense of “decorum” and “dignity:”
LOYALTY
and
COMPASSION.
I could give a flying rat’s ass about “dignity” and “decorum.” If a friend of mine is in need of comfort and understanding, I’d stand there and hug him and hold him in front a Superbowl crowd if that’s what it takes.
DirtyKash, as others have noted, I can only hope that when the chips are down for you and there is only one friend in your life left to turn to, it’s “Ryan” that’s there. And I hope he drops you like a live-fucking-grenade the instant you start to leak around the edges!
One more thing, has anyone else noticed the complete lack of any response by this DicK? It’s almost as if he’s off fishing with a long line from a deep sea boat parked underneath a certain bridge we are all too familiar with.
I agree.
LauRange, my apologies for getting under your skin so deeply. I honestly thought there was a lot of raping and pillaging going on with the Vikings. I stand corrected.
I would argue that “relating to the human experience” does indeed require more than just being a person. Perhaps I should have qualified the term as “relating to the normal adult human experience”, which I mistakenly thought was understood.
As for sexual dysfunctions, isn’t it implicit in the name–dysfunction–that this means you are having trouble participating in the human experience? Same with physical abnormalities. I would hardly point to the elephant man as a good example of the human experience.
FTR, I’m not implying anything sub-human to any people that fall under these categories. I view Priests, fully human and normal as they may be, as falling short on the “relating to the human experience” scale.
But if you want to be celibate, then by all means, have at it. I never realized how radical a view it is to feel that adult humans should enjoy a healthy sex life.
What? Like everybody in the mall knows who you are? You’re that important? And you think people would look down on YOU for your friends crying?? It’s all about you???
I’m sure your friend didn’t want to cry in full view of everybody. I’m sure he held those tears down as long as he could. Nobody wants to break down in public. But the water broke through the dam at that moment, and dammit, you should have been there for him. That’s what a friend would do.
I cannot cry yet. I say that to my shame. I have something in my head that turns off tears and pushes them down before they come, even if I’m alone. It just serves to show how disconnected I still am to my emotions. I’m working on it. It ain’t easy. Something about it scares the shit out of me.
Yeah, gobear is right. It’s not courage or manliness or dignity that keeps us guys from crying. It fear. It’s weakness.
Fortunately, I have been around some male friends more in touch than I. They have been able to cry, and I was there to offer what help I could, if only to sit and listen to what they were going through. (Here’s the thing. It takes me a long time to walk through some kinds of pain. These fellas that cried, they were able to walk through it a LOT faster and caused a LOT less damage to those around them).
Of course, it’s disturbing to see a stranger cry in public. Mostly because they are strangers. We don’t know enough about them or their backgrounds to be able to help them if we could.
Boyo Jim
Huh? Syntax is a method for combining words into coherent sentences. Otherwise, you end up describing logic as a method making decision.
No, it isn’t. Falsification is the “underpinning” of the scientific methoc. And falsification is not falsifiable.
But that’s what you’ve done. I didn’t ask you anything about the scientific method.
You mean like the dogma of people fixated on logic?
You watch too much Star Trek. Logic and emotion are not opposites. It would be illogical for a human not to have emotions.
Well then, why don’t you just shut up?
I never said you are repressed. What I think you are is confused.
Funny, that’s how I feel about your posts — I wish you displayed them elsewhere. Are you willing to behave as an object of my wishes the way you want the objects of your wishes to behave?
Well, crying could be the reason, but might it not also be when he finally realized what the divorce actually meant for him? Something best expressed by slightly changing the words of a song in the Wizard of Oz. eg. “Ding, Dong, the Bitch is gone!”.
Or he could have gotten plastered every day and get in bar fights like a real man. :rolleyes:
From Zenster -
and a bravo to you to Zenster. Well put.
Excellent point! I’ll have to start a thread about the gross misconception that logic and emotion are incompatible.
Thank you, enipla. I am sick to death of machismo and all the harm it has done in this world. Short only of the massive damage done to society in general by religious intolerance and bigotry, machismo has perverted a proper sense of masculinity in the most disgusting and worthless ways imaginable.
Of course there was raping and pillaging. But to say that those activities makes them childlike is applying modern notions to historical people to a ridiculous extent.
Uh, where is it written that it’s necessary or even desireable to watch a stranger break down emotionally? That’s called gawking and it’s tacky. Strangers (note: strangers, not friends) have the right to tactfully pretend they don’t notice anything unusual.
Look, it’s possible to blind-sided by emotion when you don’t expect or intend it. After the death of my parents I walked around feeling generally flattened, coping but bummed, but once in a while some odd little thing would remind me and a stab of pain would hit out of blue. I remember more than a few times when I started tearing up unexpectedly. It impossible to be braced constantly.
When a friend loses it, the crucial thing is for friends to help weather it. The social compact says that polite strangers will pretend not to notice so the grieving one doesn’t have to worry about embarrassment. The friend can lend aid, comfort and sympathy possible.
IMO if someone’s in so much pain they break down, the first priority is to help them through the moment. They aren’t doing as a spectator event. Most onlookers aren’t so fragile that they’ll be traumatized by the mere sight. They can avert their eyes and go on about their business. At most it’s a passing blip in their day. The two things aren’t even relatively equal.
This thread is completely bizarre.
Of course seeing other people cry is uncomfortable. If you have the slightest shred of empathy, it should be uncomfortable. Ta dah! You’re human.
I hate when strangers cry in public only for one reason: There is nothing I can do to help. And I want to help.
If that person is a friend, hell, if that person is an acquaintance, you bet your ass I will be doing everything I can to comfort them, knowing that they are embarrassed because people like some in this thread are standing around judging them.
Bah.
Julie
I am sick to death of judgemental types because, really, they are the ones who have done the most damage in this world.
Such as making a judgement about someone else based purely on a passing show of emotion? I agree, the words I put in your mouth were very well said.
I was that “crybaby” kid in school, it wasn’t beaten out of me, but they sure as hell tried. Did it help? Nope.
Now I’m that “crybaby” in the neighborhood. Has anyone hit, insulted, or even teased me because of this? Nope. And I hang out with some pretty macho motherfuckers, none of whom I’ve seen cry even once (except for the one who was doing welding without a mask, he fucked up his eyes and was weepy looking for a couple of days afterwords). These facts lead me to think that the taboo against crying is a somewhat locational thing, even if the likelihood of crying yourself could be anything from hormones to genetics.
Y’see, I was born ultra-fucking-sensitive. When I was a baby my mother couldn’t understand why I seemed to be consistently uncomfortable, pained, even. When I got a bit older she realized it was because the very sensation of the cotton against my skin was too much for me, and I was constantly feeling chafed. As I grew older I became desensitized, but I still cry more often than anyone I know.
I cry when I’m really sad, I cry when I’m really sympathetic, and in fact, the only time I ever attacked another human being (beat the living shit out of him, to be more precise) I was crying while I did it. Crying while I strangled him. Crying while people were trying to pull me off him. And crying while I tried to rip out his jugular with my teeth. I was very, very angry. I cry when I’m angry. So when you see me cry, it may mean I need a hug. It may also mean that you’re about to die (I’m very big, and very strong as well.)
So, if any of you “macho men” would like to test your sissy theory on me, do insult my teary-eyed nature while I cry. You have my weird with words that I’ll weep for you after I put you in the fucking hospital. I think I’d probably feel kinda guilty.
P.S. For all of you “stoicism is rationality” assholes, I’d like to point out that, amongst my friends, I’m considered to be one of the most rational, logical, and intelligent people they know. When I was told this by a few of my friends, I almost wept with pride.
P.P.S. What the fuck is the point of living without emotion? Isn’t that the only thing that makes it interesting? Being a Vulcan might make life easier, but would also make it extreeeeeemely boring.
I haven’t expressed a single opinion on the subject at hand, so I don’t know why your panties are in a knot. Frankly, I think that someone who prefers to show self control isn’t any worse than someone who shows emotions in such a way. “Machismo” isn’t the problem. People telling others what they should do, or shouldn’t, is. I was responding to that attitude.
Yep, except of course the term ‘cry like a little girl’ only really contains meaning in the context of it being forbidden for anyone else to publicly cry, but If I want parasols in my drinks (a thought which doesn’t often cross my mind) then parasols I shall bloody well have. Sandra Bullock I can take or leave.
It’s not self-control we’re talking about here. No one has bad mouthed self-control. The machismo thing was some posters calling men who cry ‘sissies’.
And the culture that tell men repression of feelings is better than expression of feelings.
True, it’s better if we not cry in public in front of strangers. It would be preferable if we could just cry alone byourselves. Also, in the presence of close personal friends and family. But darn it, sometimes emotions won’t cooperate and it would better still if we didn’t feel shame in expressing that emotion, even if it made passers-by uncomfortable for a brief moment.
I’ve cried in public - once at a funeral, once at a road traffic accident. On both occasions, I felt completely justified.
As such, in regards to the OP, I would argue that it’s perfectly ok for men to cry in public, if the occasion warrants it.
As for this sort of shite:
Fair enough. And in the spirit of this sort of victorian-era sexual stereotyping bullshit let’s just remove female voting, and get you into a corset. Be a woman, for god’s sake. As far as I’m concerned this capable, look after themselves female equality thing is the worst thing to happen to mankind.
Who are all you “men shouldn’t cry” fuckers? And what is your problem?
Get off your fucking high horses, you cowboys and cowgirls, you he-men and she-women, you troglodytes, you throwbacks, get into the 21st century and get some fucking perspective.
You sad little wankers.
I reserve a special fuck you for the OP, may all your “friends” (do you even understand the word?) treat you with the same courtesies you show them.