Maud Fernhout started her "What Real Men Cry Like" photo series just one year into her photography career. She wanted to develop a project that would subvert gender stereotypes. With her "What Real Women Laugh Like" series finished, Fernhout decided to continue the theme and set out to capture the emotions of young men.

"The idea of laughing girls as a series then led to the thought of having different series with different 'real' emotions, all opposing the one-dimensional way women are portrayed in media," Fernhout, who's based in the Netherlands, tells BuzzFeed. "But when I thought of a counter-project based on crying, at some point the puzzle pieces just fell together and it made a lot of sense to do that with men instead; taking it away a bit from media portrayal but rather towards gender stereotypes in general (which of course are also visible in media)."