Big Boys Don't Cry

 I am always impressed by Caroline Furlong's blog posts. She's a writer, and writes about writing. Today she posted the following:

Big Boys Don’t Cry! – A Look at Male Vulnerability in Fiction

I think that everything she says here is pretty spot-on from her perspective. But it is a female perspective, and I hope here to give a little more insight by showing you the other side of the coin. 

Here's a secret from the unpublished manual that all men keep in their heads:

Speaking as a male veteran of the US armed forces, it's not that men aren't ALLOWED to cry. People who write this type of fiction aren't concerned about pushing some agenda about what you are or aren't ALLOWED to do. In fact, it's quite the opposite: male characters frequently break rules and ignore social norms.

The plain fact is, men rarely cry. We will mope. We will cope. We will turn introspective and distant. We will deflect. We will process, prioritize, and focus. We will immerse ourselves in work, a hobby, or the task at hand. As any woman who has emo-dumped on a man knows, a man does not validate her feelings. Rather, he will search for causes and solutions. That's NOT what the woman wants. She will tell him he's being dismissive. But he's no more dismissive of her feelings than he is of his own. From personal experience, negative emotions are a PROBLEM to be SOLVED. Sorry, ladies; it's what we do. That's the nature of a man.

When we DO cry, 99% of the time it's in private or in the company of other men... and if you're a very lucky guy, you might have only one or two friends with whom you have that privilege, even in a company of soldiers. And when we do talk about a problem, there's not much crying. It's likely to come out emotionless and flat. But I assure you, that lack of tone coming from a close friend hits us like a brick. It's as if you physically saw the color drain out of someone's soul, life, and surroundings. You can NOT express the depth of that emotion with a lurid display. The one exception is that if a man is in a healthy marriage -- not some social contract, but a real, honest-to-God marriage -- he will cry in the embrace of his wife. And when that happens, this is the case where the woman gets to be the rock... his anchor.

Again, nobody forces us to do that. It's in our nature. Even sobbing in complete privacy doesn't happen much. It's far more likely to take the form of sitting in a dark room and quietly letting tears fall.

This doesn't apply to just grown-up men, either. Boys are incredibly unwilling to admit to having been bullied. Boys are more likely to address the problem through circumvention, withdrawal, or taking up a study of self-defense. If he still has the slightest glimmer of hope that he can solve the problem by himself, a boy will deny to others that it exists.

Note that all of the above applies to the majority of males whether they are physically strong or not; dangerous or not; intimidating or not. They're not consciously dialing things back for the sake of those around them. You might say they evolved that way for the long-term benefit of the species. And obviously there are those, both weak and strong, who are emotionally immature. But they're the minority.

Authors who write strongly believable male characters don't force them to weep on cue because that would not be believable. Being mostly men, the authors know that. Being mostly men, their readers/viewers know it, too.