At fifty-three, Brett Kavanaugh is an adult now, or at least no longer young, but after Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had pinned her to a bed, drunk, when they were teen-agers, covering her mouth so that she couldn’t scream, he gave his own statements after a recess and blubbered like a child. His voice broke sharply up a couple semitones while his mouth curled down at the corners. He scrunched up his nose and dug his tongue into his bottom lip, as he was deposed in an embattled bid to save his Supreme Court nomination. If he would get to don his black robe, he’d do it weepily.

Kavanaugh was now in what Othello called “the melting mood.” In front of the nation, and the world, he was crying. What should we make of it? “Woe awaits a country,” Sir Walter Scott wrote, “when she sees the tears of bearded men.” Since the era of the Victorian stiff upper lip, there has been a sense that it’s shameful for a man to cry, that it’s too much an advertisement of his own self-interest. This sentiment was reinforced by mid-century machos such as Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne, and John Ford. But, for much of American life in the past fifty years, a counterargument has taken hold: that crying is good for a man, that his tears are the outward sign of his inward progress, the evidence and end result of his “being in touch with his feelings.” A crying man came to be regarded as an unqualified good.

We like to think that putting men in touch with their more lugubrious side is some sort of emotional innovation, a sign of progress. It’s more like a return to form. The window where men restrained their crying was brief, and relatively recent, a Victorian overcorrection to the sentimentality associated with Romanticism. To pluck just one example: the author of an 1862 essay called “Shyness,” which appeared in the anthology “Littell’s Living Age,” looked back into the Western canon to sniff at how weepy earlier men had been. “The first thing, we believe, which admonishes an English boy, on being introduced to Homer, is the abundant tears which are shed by the noblest heroes of the story,” he writes. “The fifth form boy, who would feel himself dishonoured in his own eyes if he gave way at a tragedy or melodrama, marvels at the readiness . . . to melt into, what seems to him to be, inexplicable weakness.”

But, for most of Western history, men cried incessantly, and mostly for themselves. In one of the first written accounts of a man crying, in the Odyssey, Odysseus is drunk, and a singer, Demodocus, is taking requests. Odysseus wants to hear the one about Odysseus—of his own adventures in the Trojan War, desperately wending his way home. Listening to someone sing of his embattled sorrows, he begins to cry. “Great Odysseus melted into tears,” Homer writes. Nothing made the man cry quite like himself. And when he finally returned home, years later, in disguise, his nurse recognized him by his weeping. His cry face was his truest self.

A man crying also furnishes the Bible with its shortest, tersest line: “Jesus wept.” Later, in the Middle Ages, men cried for their souls. A cult arose among religious men around what were called tears of grace, or holy tears, which came in prayer, the evidence of God’s redeeming love. St. Francis of Assisi was said to have wept himself blind, proof of his godliness.

But Kavanaugh’s performance last Thursday was something entirely different, distinctly contemporary. It combined the postwar attitude that men should be in touch with their feelings, to the point that they may cry, with the intrinsic American ideal of white male privilege. Because Kavanaugh is accused of sexual assault, and may be denied the career elevation that he has long plotted, he blubbered like a newborn. “By my tears, I tell a story,” Roland Barthes wrote. “I produce a myth of my grief.” Kavanaugh was producing the sort of mythic substance that you’d collect in a cup decalled with #MaleTears.

His tears make a kind of sense. From a single phrase by Thomas Jefferson—that public life is about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—the fulfillment of the white American man’s atomized desires assumed the force of a fiat, and became the ultimate purpose of this country’s society. If a white man didn’t get what he wanted, it was nothing short of a constitutional crisis, in his body and his body politic both. Written into America’s founding document is the franchise for a man like Kavanaugh to weep when he isn’t fulfilled. In this, he’s less a citizen of his society than one of its disgruntled customers, who are always right. There’s an originalist argument to be made for being a crybaby.

It isn’t retrograde to think it may be beneath a man to cry under such circumstances. Trump himself was reportedly disturbed by Kavanaugh’s crying, and once told the writer Timothy L. O’Brien, “When I see a man cry I view it as a weakness.” Clarence Thomas, a man of a different generation but who underwent a similar public reckoning, had the old-fashioned disposition to fight Anita Hill’s entirely credible accusations with righteous indignation, to cannily counterattack by saying that his being held to account was nothing more than “a high-tech lynching.” Kavanaugh has no avenue of appeal, though, except his own hurt feelings. He is in touch with them, as he was taught to be. And so he’s seemingly weaponized crying, the way a little boy does when he’s in trouble.

Crying in American politics isn’t unprecedented. John Boehner had a particular weakness for the melting mood. He wept beside Pope Francis; he was moved to tears at a commencement speech he himself was giving; he cried on his first day as Speaker of the House, and he cried on the day he retired—there’s a supercut on YouTube of his greatest hits, set to Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” When Boehner cried, he cried sweetly, never really in self-interest. The tears he shed for the Pope were those of someone overwhelmed; when he retired, there was a touch of Lear—“that we are come to this great stage of fools.” But, nevertheless, it often didn’t play well.

President Obama famously cried after the Newtown massacre, a decent man moved by a profound tragedy, but still was criticized for having cried. There was a sense to some that his tears were of resignation, and stood in the place of a practical solution to America’s gun problem—a better strategy, a change of course. Condensing on the eyes of the most powerful man on earth, his tears inspired the upsetting sense that they were evaporating off a deeper reservoir of his resolve. But Boehner and Obama’s tears bear little resemblance to Kavanaugh’s, which are entirely in self-pity and self-interest.

A stone face—stoic and impassive—may very well be the woke facial expression for a white man in the twenty-first century. It means he understands his history. If the benefits of the world are, justly, no longer exclusively his inheritance, its ills are nevertheless still his patrimony. It would almost be enough to bring you to tears, should you be the crying type.