Be a man! For Christ's sake! (there's that constant contradiction, right?) You, me, Duncan, and all the other cry-baby bros out there have been blessed with a strong feminine influence. This culture has always been about maintaining those Christian roles. Men are here to procreate, provide, and protect. Showing emotion shows vulnerability, and that is a dangerous state to be in for a man, a sentry, a leader of the pack and instrument of the angry-God of the Old Testament. That's our tradition, particularly in the west and the Bible belt. I think most men in the arts have a strong feminine influence. Plenty are gay which we associate with the feminine usually. So, bro, anytime you want to get together for a bawl-fest let me know (no I'm not talking a ball-fest like the Borat naked chase scene). Things are changing, but they change so slowly. We are examples of that. I think balance is the ideal. My mother was just as strong as my dad, and she had the other power, the power of love, the power of the erotic. My dad had it, too, but he suppressed it, medicated it, and isolated it. The old culture taught us to conform or drop out because it would make an example of you if you didn't. Power doesn't like change, but change is inevitable. Slow but inevitable. Cyber hugs, dude. It's a lonely life to not know and love the feminine. God is obviously a mother. It's the only thing that makes any sense. Peace and love, man.
I also see the crying issue for bros as (generally) gendered, and a parallel to that is dismissing women, when they cry, as "weak." (If Hillary had dared to cry like Kavanaugh!!!) My personal parallel is that I always used to find myself apologizing when I sweat. Like, it isn't ladylike and ohmygod what if people see me sweat or smell me, even worse. But I've stopped that. I have stopped adding smiley faces to my emails and texts because women's smiles tend to be defensive (a display of the teeth to show we mean no harm) (to men, so they won't kill us; to women, so they won't shun us). I've stopped saying "I just...(verb)" because I've been diminishing my own wants and needs for decades. Little things like that are positive steps I've taken to reclaim the space I deserve to hold on this planet. Cry your way through readings if you want, because fuck it.
Now, on the other hand, I am not a crier (except when facing down my rage-a-holic dad, or watching animal videos), because I learned before speech, before memory, that life was terrifying and that crying did not get me anywhere. When I do cry, I am riven with shame. I feel so small and ugly and gross, it makes me hate myself. But I feel the pain deeply. I FEEL it. It comes out of me in different ways -- my writing, my skin erupts in a rash, my hands shake -- I have all the feels, but few tears. Maybe one. Maybe two. But that's about it. Because 1. childhood trauma. 2. PTSD 3. meds. 4 needs more therapy.
So I admire your tears and see how they cleanse and bond. I look coldhearted, perhaps. But I'm crying on the inside.
I don’t know if I have any good answers, but as the mother of a sensitive and non-sportsy boy in his young teens, it’s something I think about all the time. The push against men having space to be sensitive and emotional is definitely perpetuated in schools, especially gym class and the locker room, and it can be very hard to get even well-intentioned administrators and teachers to see it and its effects. But finding other people to spend time with, older role models who give the boys permission to be their whole selves, helps.
Specific to our area, I find a lot of good both male and female adult role models in Backcountry Hunters & Anglers people. They can do all the stereotypical bro stuff (women as well as men) but are caring and kind and make room for being whole people. Though to your point about Rinella, reading the varieties of comments on his social media posts was always really interesting! His followers seem to run the whole spectrum.
Not a man here, but the joke (not only a joke) in our household is that I was "raised as a dude." It was a kind and mostly gentle version of the patriarchy I grew up in, and maybe harder to see over because I grew up venerating and believing in it completely. I was not exactly taught by the men in my family not to cry. But I was shown that public tears were usually embarrassing, uncomfortable for everyone, and a symptom of a lack of self-control. They were ok if someone died; they were excusable if they were kept quiet. Nobody would make fun of you or tell you off for crying, but they might not respect you quite as much.
I am a CRIER, and I used to hate when that happened in public. I used to not actually be able to do it, unless I was injured. (Even then, I would try to suck it up.) I would just hurt until I could go somewhere private and cry. Even if the reason for the tears wasn't a sad thing. It hurts to hold your vulnerability so tightly.
It's taking years, but I can look back over the past decade or so and see that I'm now (usually) able to let my tears fall when they need to. I'm still embarrassed by them. I still don't really know how to just let them flow, without explaining or justifying or apologizing. I still feel that sharp whisper of the patriarchy every time. I just tell it to shut up, mostly. I've learned better. I'm still learning. And it does feel better. An acquaintance of mine (a man) said recently: "crying is like breathing." I keep circling back to that: it's natural, it goes in cycles, if we can't do it, something might be wrong.
This is perhaps tangential, but this essay made me think about how I've seen masculinity operate in fandom spaces. (I've written fanfiction for years, participate actively in forum spaces on Twitter and elsewhere, etc.) There is this very distinct pattern in fandoms where the "popular ship," or the romantic relationship that garners writing/art/etc., is almost always two men. But they usually are not characterized as "masculine" men in the traditional sense -- a fanbase, largely made up of women, will portray the characters as sensitive, emotional, maybe they have a hard time communicating their feelings for each other but eventually they get there. Even a show like Supernatural (which ended recently) that bills itself as a very macho monster hunter show is now perceived as a decade-long love story. You can see this kind of transformative art as a pushback against bro culture, and I think there is some inherently revolutionary act in rewriting a story like Supernatural (or other ostensibly macho works ranging from sports anime to the WWI movie 1917) as a love story. But at the same time, it's almost always women writing about men, characterizing relationships in a way that can sometimes feel divorced from reality. (Or in a way that is literally fetishizing, see: A/B/O.) Often queer men who actually operate as creators in these fan spaces are pushed aside, especially when they criticize content or behavior that makes them uncomfortable.
I don't really have any kind of conclusion here, just parallels and questions. It's something I have struggled with a lot myself. Why do I, a lesbian, keep writing stories about men? What do these stories mean? I will say, though, I know from my comment sections that I have made a lot of my readers cry, and that always feels like a deep accomplishment that I don't quite know how to understand.
I cry too, unapologetically nowadays. This was a good read. I’m going to check out Wyman. I see you are no longer on Twitter. Not sure why, but I hope it’s nothing too bad. I need to cut back, myself.
Excellent post. I testified at the 12/16/2020 MT Legislative Rules Committee mtg regarding the in person session. After my personal story about how Covid has effected my family and business, my voice broke on “We see your humanity in all its glorious strengths and weakness, will you see ours?” It’s all people remembered and kept asking me if I cried during my testimony.
Sent here by AHP's newsletter! I am non-binary (AFAB), but deeply embarrassed by public crying, especially in a context where I am being watched by an audience. I think this is because I was relied upon from a young age to self-soothe: public crying is a sign that not only can I not handle my emotions, but also that I'm (selfishly) burdening others with them. These days I find myself longing for more good crying opportunities -- I feel very numb to the goings-on of the outside world most days -- but I think I will have to make do until I can start seeing other humans again.
To me a man is a guy whose comfortable in his own skin - whatever that skin brings with it - and secure enough to be what he is in most any crowd come what may. He he does is own thinking and doesn't bow to peer pressure. Which is the opposite of course of what those "meathead" clone dudes you are talking about are. Why they are clones. I have long been chagrined at how few people there seem to be marching to their own drummers out there. On the other hand, it isn't easy to be one of those people. Men in general won't "get" you, and if they don't get you, they will probably fear you, and if they fear you, they will perhaps not hate you, but for sure they will dislike you. So it's not an easy path, being yourself. Unless "yourself" is genuinely one of the cookie-cutter boys.
I am an Albertan, by the way. You've never seen a more homogenous bunch of dudes in your life. They pass you in their pickup trucks and they are all exactly the same. Cropped hair, meticulously shaven face or at most one of those little circle beards that is just an apology for wanting to grow a beard, ballhat, sunglasses. Interchangeable. If they are hook and bullet types (like me) they carry plastic guns in .300 winmag or 6.5 creedmore, scoped.
Women are more interesting in my experience. More accepting, less stunted, more open mentally, more curious in general. A lot of men could learn a lot about functioning properly as a human being by having more woman friends. But don't get too down on the meatheads. I've been surprised by them. More of them may be thinking like you do than you realize. They may even be looking for an outlet. You give them one opening and it starts coming out. And they're usually pretty grateful to you for that.
Living in "American West" I have been exposed for years to the macho image and the manly image. They are not the same, but they do converge from time to time, and what I believe is that there is emotion and there is emotion. The man, the rancher, who sublimely smiles at the birth of a new calf after a long night of delivery, and sheds a tear at bringing forth life - that's real emotion. Then there is the macho dude who emotes to get attention and nothing more. One is real, the other is not. Where they converge is where you will find the truth. The macho dude who bends down and helps the newborn to their feet - that is when the macho dude becomes a man.
The "crying at your own readings" element is interesting to me, as I have problems sharing my work without getting misty (I have to take time to coach myself through it, I find it so embarrassing!). And there's not only the toxic masculinity angle to it: I'm ashamed of how conceited/self-involved I must be to be emotionally affected by my own work. But that's ridiculous, right? If it weren't moving/affecting, we wouldn't write it or want to share it. It's very wrapped up in self-assessment for me.
I wouldn't consider this to be a half-assed newsletter, but if it's a little half-baked I appreciate the opportunity to finish cooking it with you.
I think it's very interesting that uncontrolled expressions of some emotions by men are very "manly", like yelling or fighting from anger or outrage, while others are described with slurs, like crying or weeping from sorrow or empathy. I've done a lot of work to try to grow from that projection of white American toughness and individualism, but it is still always a bit weird at what I feel shame or embarrassment at emoting over. Weeping like a damn willow while reading Ady Barkin's book on a plane? Totally fine. Get a little misty over some touching scene in a garbage TV show in the comfort of my own home? Mortified.
This is beside the point, but my thoughts on crying, as a woman, is that an apology before crying is usually because the crying interrupts the flow of conversation, it forces a pause in the thought, and the apology is for the pause, not the crying. If someone were telling a story, but was having a hard time getting through it due to uncontrollable laughter, there would probably be an apology there too.
However, if the crying is taking place when there’s no conversation, just witnessing something sad, there’s no need for an apology. Same with laughter; as an audience member at a comedy show, there wouldn’t be a need to apologize for laughing when it’s not interrupting anything.
I cry when I read too. I don't know why. But it's really hard not to. Some of it comes from fear. Some of it comes from the fact that what I write comes from an emotional place. It's intimate, and intimacy makes me cry. It embarrasses me too. I have this idea that I'm supposed to be cool when I read, but that's probably because I grew up around and amongst the male writers around here, and none of them ever cried when they read.
Be a man! For Christ's sake! (there's that constant contradiction, right?) You, me, Duncan, and all the other cry-baby bros out there have been blessed with a strong feminine influence. This culture has always been about maintaining those Christian roles. Men are here to procreate, provide, and protect. Showing emotion shows vulnerability, and that is a dangerous state to be in for a man, a sentry, a leader of the pack and instrument of the angry-God of the Old Testament. That's our tradition, particularly in the west and the Bible belt. I think most men in the arts have a strong feminine influence. Plenty are gay which we associate with the feminine usually. So, bro, anytime you want to get together for a bawl-fest let me know (no I'm not talking a ball-fest like the Borat naked chase scene). Things are changing, but they change so slowly. We are examples of that. I think balance is the ideal. My mother was just as strong as my dad, and she had the other power, the power of love, the power of the erotic. My dad had it, too, but he suppressed it, medicated it, and isolated it. The old culture taught us to conform or drop out because it would make an example of you if you didn't. Power doesn't like change, but change is inevitable. Slow but inevitable. Cyber hugs, dude. It's a lonely life to not know and love the feminine. God is obviously a mother. It's the only thing that makes any sense. Peace and love, man.
I also see the crying issue for bros as (generally) gendered, and a parallel to that is dismissing women, when they cry, as "weak." (If Hillary had dared to cry like Kavanaugh!!!) My personal parallel is that I always used to find myself apologizing when I sweat. Like, it isn't ladylike and ohmygod what if people see me sweat or smell me, even worse. But I've stopped that. I have stopped adding smiley faces to my emails and texts because women's smiles tend to be defensive (a display of the teeth to show we mean no harm) (to men, so they won't kill us; to women, so they won't shun us). I've stopped saying "I just...(verb)" because I've been diminishing my own wants and needs for decades. Little things like that are positive steps I've taken to reclaim the space I deserve to hold on this planet. Cry your way through readings if you want, because fuck it.
Now, on the other hand, I am not a crier (except when facing down my rage-a-holic dad, or watching animal videos), because I learned before speech, before memory, that life was terrifying and that crying did not get me anywhere. When I do cry, I am riven with shame. I feel so small and ugly and gross, it makes me hate myself. But I feel the pain deeply. I FEEL it. It comes out of me in different ways -- my writing, my skin erupts in a rash, my hands shake -- I have all the feels, but few tears. Maybe one. Maybe two. But that's about it. Because 1. childhood trauma. 2. PTSD 3. meds. 4 needs more therapy.
So I admire your tears and see how they cleanse and bond. I look coldhearted, perhaps. But I'm crying on the inside.
I don’t know if I have any good answers, but as the mother of a sensitive and non-sportsy boy in his young teens, it’s something I think about all the time. The push against men having space to be sensitive and emotional is definitely perpetuated in schools, especially gym class and the locker room, and it can be very hard to get even well-intentioned administrators and teachers to see it and its effects. But finding other people to spend time with, older role models who give the boys permission to be their whole selves, helps.
Specific to our area, I find a lot of good both male and female adult role models in Backcountry Hunters & Anglers people. They can do all the stereotypical bro stuff (women as well as men) but are caring and kind and make room for being whole people. Though to your point about Rinella, reading the varieties of comments on his social media posts was always really interesting! His followers seem to run the whole spectrum.
Not a man here, but the joke (not only a joke) in our household is that I was "raised as a dude." It was a kind and mostly gentle version of the patriarchy I grew up in, and maybe harder to see over because I grew up venerating and believing in it completely. I was not exactly taught by the men in my family not to cry. But I was shown that public tears were usually embarrassing, uncomfortable for everyone, and a symptom of a lack of self-control. They were ok if someone died; they were excusable if they were kept quiet. Nobody would make fun of you or tell you off for crying, but they might not respect you quite as much.
I am a CRIER, and I used to hate when that happened in public. I used to not actually be able to do it, unless I was injured. (Even then, I would try to suck it up.) I would just hurt until I could go somewhere private and cry. Even if the reason for the tears wasn't a sad thing. It hurts to hold your vulnerability so tightly.
It's taking years, but I can look back over the past decade or so and see that I'm now (usually) able to let my tears fall when they need to. I'm still embarrassed by them. I still don't really know how to just let them flow, without explaining or justifying or apologizing. I still feel that sharp whisper of the patriarchy every time. I just tell it to shut up, mostly. I've learned better. I'm still learning. And it does feel better. An acquaintance of mine (a man) said recently: "crying is like breathing." I keep circling back to that: it's natural, it goes in cycles, if we can't do it, something might be wrong.
This is perhaps tangential, but this essay made me think about how I've seen masculinity operate in fandom spaces. (I've written fanfiction for years, participate actively in forum spaces on Twitter and elsewhere, etc.) There is this very distinct pattern in fandoms where the "popular ship," or the romantic relationship that garners writing/art/etc., is almost always two men. But they usually are not characterized as "masculine" men in the traditional sense -- a fanbase, largely made up of women, will portray the characters as sensitive, emotional, maybe they have a hard time communicating their feelings for each other but eventually they get there. Even a show like Supernatural (which ended recently) that bills itself as a very macho monster hunter show is now perceived as a decade-long love story. You can see this kind of transformative art as a pushback against bro culture, and I think there is some inherently revolutionary act in rewriting a story like Supernatural (or other ostensibly macho works ranging from sports anime to the WWI movie 1917) as a love story. But at the same time, it's almost always women writing about men, characterizing relationships in a way that can sometimes feel divorced from reality. (Or in a way that is literally fetishizing, see: A/B/O.) Often queer men who actually operate as creators in these fan spaces are pushed aside, especially when they criticize content or behavior that makes them uncomfortable.
I don't really have any kind of conclusion here, just parallels and questions. It's something I have struggled with a lot myself. Why do I, a lesbian, keep writing stories about men? What do these stories mean? I will say, though, I know from my comment sections that I have made a lot of my readers cry, and that always feels like a deep accomplishment that I don't quite know how to understand.
I cry too, unapologetically nowadays. This was a good read. I’m going to check out Wyman. I see you are no longer on Twitter. Not sure why, but I hope it’s nothing too bad. I need to cut back, myself.
Excellent post. I testified at the 12/16/2020 MT Legislative Rules Committee mtg regarding the in person session. After my personal story about how Covid has effected my family and business, my voice broke on “We see your humanity in all its glorious strengths and weakness, will you see ours?” It’s all people remembered and kept asking me if I cried during my testimony.
My husband. Not sure I’ve ever seen him cry. His avoidance of uncomfortable feelings has created an emotional chasm we’ll probably never get over.
Sent here by AHP's newsletter! I am non-binary (AFAB), but deeply embarrassed by public crying, especially in a context where I am being watched by an audience. I think this is because I was relied upon from a young age to self-soothe: public crying is a sign that not only can I not handle my emotions, but also that I'm (selfishly) burdening others with them. These days I find myself longing for more good crying opportunities -- I feel very numb to the goings-on of the outside world most days -- but I think I will have to make do until I can start seeing other humans again.
To me a man is a guy whose comfortable in his own skin - whatever that skin brings with it - and secure enough to be what he is in most any crowd come what may. He he does is own thinking and doesn't bow to peer pressure. Which is the opposite of course of what those "meathead" clone dudes you are talking about are. Why they are clones. I have long been chagrined at how few people there seem to be marching to their own drummers out there. On the other hand, it isn't easy to be one of those people. Men in general won't "get" you, and if they don't get you, they will probably fear you, and if they fear you, they will perhaps not hate you, but for sure they will dislike you. So it's not an easy path, being yourself. Unless "yourself" is genuinely one of the cookie-cutter boys.
I am an Albertan, by the way. You've never seen a more homogenous bunch of dudes in your life. They pass you in their pickup trucks and they are all exactly the same. Cropped hair, meticulously shaven face or at most one of those little circle beards that is just an apology for wanting to grow a beard, ballhat, sunglasses. Interchangeable. If they are hook and bullet types (like me) they carry plastic guns in .300 winmag or 6.5 creedmore, scoped.
Women are more interesting in my experience. More accepting, less stunted, more open mentally, more curious in general. A lot of men could learn a lot about functioning properly as a human being by having more woman friends. But don't get too down on the meatheads. I've been surprised by them. More of them may be thinking like you do than you realize. They may even be looking for an outlet. You give them one opening and it starts coming out. And they're usually pretty grateful to you for that.
Living in "American West" I have been exposed for years to the macho image and the manly image. They are not the same, but they do converge from time to time, and what I believe is that there is emotion and there is emotion. The man, the rancher, who sublimely smiles at the birth of a new calf after a long night of delivery, and sheds a tear at bringing forth life - that's real emotion. Then there is the macho dude who emotes to get attention and nothing more. One is real, the other is not. Where they converge is where you will find the truth. The macho dude who bends down and helps the newborn to their feet - that is when the macho dude becomes a man.
https://iamcolorado.substack.com/
The "crying at your own readings" element is interesting to me, as I have problems sharing my work without getting misty (I have to take time to coach myself through it, I find it so embarrassing!). And there's not only the toxic masculinity angle to it: I'm ashamed of how conceited/self-involved I must be to be emotionally affected by my own work. But that's ridiculous, right? If it weren't moving/affecting, we wouldn't write it or want to share it. It's very wrapped up in self-assessment for me.
I wouldn't consider this to be a half-assed newsletter, but if it's a little half-baked I appreciate the opportunity to finish cooking it with you.
I think it's very interesting that uncontrolled expressions of some emotions by men are very "manly", like yelling or fighting from anger or outrage, while others are described with slurs, like crying or weeping from sorrow or empathy. I've done a lot of work to try to grow from that projection of white American toughness and individualism, but it is still always a bit weird at what I feel shame or embarrassment at emoting over. Weeping like a damn willow while reading Ady Barkin's book on a plane? Totally fine. Get a little misty over some touching scene in a garbage TV show in the comfort of my own home? Mortified.
This is beside the point, but my thoughts on crying, as a woman, is that an apology before crying is usually because the crying interrupts the flow of conversation, it forces a pause in the thought, and the apology is for the pause, not the crying. If someone were telling a story, but was having a hard time getting through it due to uncontrollable laughter, there would probably be an apology there too.
However, if the crying is taking place when there’s no conversation, just witnessing something sad, there’s no need for an apology. Same with laughter; as an audience member at a comedy show, there wouldn’t be a need to apologize for laughing when it’s not interrupting anything.
I cry when I read too. I don't know why. But it's really hard not to. Some of it comes from fear. Some of it comes from the fact that what I write comes from an emotional place. It's intimate, and intimacy makes me cry. It embarrasses me too. I have this idea that I'm supposed to be cool when I read, but that's probably because I grew up around and amongst the male writers around here, and none of them ever cried when they read.