‘Boys Don’t Cry’: A ‘Crying Boy’ Reflects on the Shame of Male Tears Andrew Follow Jan 27 · 6 min read

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All people experience shame. For men, shame often arises from our perceived ‘failure’ to inhibit the stoic masculine role. Men are expected not to waver or experience doubt. Men cannot be dependent or in-need. Men must be strong and feel powerful. Those are the messages consistently drilled into us by the masculine constructs of our culture. For men, shame rises in our hearts for not being able to tackle something alone, for relying on others, for being vulnerable, for being physically ‘inadequate’, for feeling helpless. Men are told to avoid expressing weakness. As Brene Brown summarises in her book Daring Greatly:

Men live under the pressure of one unrelenting message: Do not be perceived as weak

Crying is one of the earliest and most critical lessons young boys receive about what not to express. As the infamous phrase goes, “boy’s don’t cry!” It twists itself into a gender-defining paradigm: big boys don’t cry, real men don’t cry, crying is for pussies. A natural response to sadness, stress, frustration and hurt is conditioned out of us by gender expectations.

As a child, I was sensitive. I’d wager I was one of the most sensitive children in my school — more so than many of the girls. I was ‘the crying boy’, the one who responded to criticism with tears, being yelled at with tears, being hurt with tears, and being angry with tears. The two main strands I can articulate from my early experiences is that being a sensitive boy, and in particular, a tearful one, is that people often assume you have a problem and need to have your sensitivity treated, and that you become a ripe target for bullying. In my childhood, I was often mocked and emasculated for my proneness to cry when upset.

It’s difficult to be a more sensitive boy and not feel the stigma and strain of masculinity hanging over you. The sense that you’re ‘not being a boy’ properly continues to infiltrate you life, biting at your self-esteem. Crying is a taught to be a source of shame for men. It’s conditioned into us to ‘bottle up’ our emotions, to stand strong against adversary, to challenge and fight back against people who hurt us, to ‘be a real man’ and not show weakness. Crying is viewed as the antithesis of that. We mock men who cry instead of challenging, who weep when they “should” rise up. As a child, other boys often asked me for explanations as to why I would cry so easily. I was never really sure. I didn’t know any better. I felt bad, sad, ashamed, afraid. And when I felt that way, the tears followed. I recall once being given an explanation by someone that I was “born without balls” so I couldn’t man-up properly.

Once I tried to turn the tables, sagely asserting at the tender age of eight, that “a man who can’t cry is no man at all!” only to be met with laughter. I look back on that statement now and find, oddly, a smidge of truth in it. I avoid, as a rule, the ‘real man’ type statements, but I do think that when we socialize men to be ashamed of fragility, of tears, of weakness, we are fundamentally stifling their humanity. We attempt to make men half-human, denying them the full array of emotional experiences. We push them to repress themselves, to hide away from the internal difficulties they experience.

Essentially, this cultural attitude abandons men: from boyhood we are trained to not ask for help, to mask our needs, to promote an image of stoicism even in our most desperate times. I felt those effects: years of bullying had convinced me to never speak about my problems, to never let the weeping happen in public, to avoid looking vulnerable. It did its damage. As I’d later discover, my ‘tormentors’ often came from extremely abusive backgrounds. I have wondered if their treatment of me for my sensitivity in some ways reflected the abuse, invalidation, shame and violence they experienced at home.Perhaps their targeting of me was simply applying the lessons they had been taught through their own brutalisation.

Back then, as a lad, I found myself in a strange place: caught between defending my tears and feeling deeply ashamed of them. In many ways, I couldn’t help crying. I felt overwhelming sadness, shame, and hurt when I was insulted, criticised or shouted at. Responding to that, the tears just fell. People demanded answers for my strange non-boyish behaviour, and all my defences rang false both to their and my own ears. If only I had known, back then, that crying is scientifically understood to be a natural, healthy thing. But our gender scripts frame it as an unacceptable behaviour for men to express. We associate it as something womanly and unacceptably ‘fragile’ in men.

But this is, in truth, a more recent conceptualization of masculinity.

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The ‘shaming’ of male crying has not always been the established rule. In many cultures it was a respectable behaviour for a man to exhibit, showing his piousness or his appreciation of the weight and melancholy of what was before him. Indeed, it seems medieval literature and culture looked more fondly on crying as a source of expulsion of sin, of appreciating tremendous sorrow and beauty, amongst other interpretations.

If we seek to help men push beyond the boundaries of their gendered conditioning, we have to allow expressing all emotions to be normalized. We need to deconstruct the cultural attitudes that judge it as wrong and shameful. We need to educate both men and women about the variances in personality, accepting that some people are more sensitive, naturally, than others and that this is not wrong or peculiar. And it is also important to establish that the the ways in which we culturally police behaviour is not a manifestation of naturally ordered roles, but rather ones shaped through the binary cultural and historical understandings of how the genders ‘ought’ to behave in relation to one another to fulfil patriarchal obligations.

When one looks at the rates of suicide in men, it suggests that our conceptualization of ‘need’ and ‘weakness’ as things that ‘boy’s shouldn’t feel’ is playing a dangerous role in the psychological anguish men experience. Anxieties surrounding talking about problems, seeking help, admitting weakness, and the often cruel responses to emotionally vulnerable men keep a vicious cycle in place which fuel the tragic endings of too many men’s lives. Lacking the surety of acceptance and support to willingly come forward, death may seem the only option left against the lonely, shameful and dark place they’re trapped within. Suppression kills, and from boyhood men have been taught to suppress unacceptable emotions.

No one should be shamed for feeling vulnerable and upset.

Shame and fear of weakness runs deep in men, deep enough that men fear to be open with their most intimate partners. Men face the expectancy of being the supporter in their relationships, they are there to look after the family, not the ones to be looked after. Whether it is being financially or emotionally reliant on their wife or partner, many men experience those roles as especially cutting and humiliating. Recently there have been more pleas for men to open up, to be emotionally expressive, to talk more about their problems. Unfortunately when men do open up about their pain, it can be met, sometimes, with revulsion and mockery. As we continue to take small steps forward in changing the perception of the male gender role, it can seem as though we’re still barely making any distance at all. The rules remain stubbornly entrenched, enforced by men and women alike, down every aspect of society.

Boys do cry, and that is something the world has to become comfortable with.