Every now and again, Herself will have a bit of a cry. Usually, this isn\u2019t in response to a specific set of circumstances, it\u2019s more like emotional maintenance. She\u2019ll say: \u201cI needed a good cry. I could feel it coming on.\u201d And she\u2019ll feel better for it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never had that experience. Many times, I\u2019ve welled up. But at the point where the welling is about to turn into a full-on blub, something in me stops it. I\u2019ve often wished I could. I think I\u2019d feel better for it too. And there are studies that found occasional crying is good for wellbeing.<\/p>\n
As for the reason why I can\u2019t cry, the simple explanation is that I\u2019m a man. There is some sketchy evidence that it might be related to physiology, or it might be an adaptive trait: back in Stone Age times, you couldn\u2019t be weeping if you were out hunting food. But the most common assumption is that this is the result of social conditioning. Males are taught not to shed tears.<\/p>\n
Yet it doesn\u2019t seem to have always been the case: from the works of Homer, the Bible, the medieval period and Shakespeare (to cite just a few western examples), there are numerous descriptions of men crying. None of these are historical accounts, of course, but it does strongly imply that weeping men were more the norm in those eras; that crying didn\u2019t make them less manly.<\/p>\n
But at some point, this attitude shifted. How, when and why no one knows. My wild theory: it may have been during the birth of industrialisation, when for the first time people (predominantly men) had to tell other people what to do, but without the benefit of God-given social or military rank. They were the factory owners or their designates, there to screw as much labour as possible from the workers. And to do so effectively required certain personality traits. The early managers had to project authority, usually in the form of aggression. There was no room for tears or the emotional range that exists within us all.<\/p>\n
To be effective, they had to reduce themselves to two dimensions. And in time, male success, and maleness itself, became intertwined with a square-jawed, gimlet-eyed stereotype.<\/p>\n
All the other emotions were still there, of course, wriggling beneath the surface, but they couldn\u2019t be acknowledged or appropriately expressed. The only way they could emerge \u2013 especially for young men bursting with feelings but not knowing what to do with them \u2013 was through anger. The Friday night fight after a few pints was, and is now, a form of emotional release.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not getting any better. Granted, there are many men who are aware of all this and have striven to get past it. But thanks to social media and poisonous politics, we may well be living through the angriest period in human history. The angry men can rattle off all sorts of reasons for their fury, yet increasingly, the reasons are becoming less important. It\u2019s the anger itself, and the violence it produces, that it is the point of it all. It\u2019s become a form of narcotic.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Se\u00e1n Moncrieff: Why would anyone want to be a radio presenter?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Analysts have been baffled as to why US president Donald Trump<\/a> has unleashed violence upon Iran<\/a>, assuming a geopolitical calculation was behind it. His administration failed to provide any explanation of that sort. There have been multiple reports, from across all the US armed forces, of commanding officers claiming this is religiously inspired: the coming of end times. But it\u2019s none of that.<\/p>\n The language has been the most revealing. Trump and Pete Hegseth, the \u201csecretary of war\u201d, seem to be bathing in the death and destruction they have unleashed.<\/p>\n This is the point. Men being men. Killing other men, women, schoolchildren, whatever. The bloodlust is what\u2019s important. Doing it because they can. And because they want to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every now and again, Herself will have a bit of a cry. Usually, this isn\u2019t in response to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,356,13,14,2215,6,18929,11,12,361,15,16,5,63970,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-398194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-donald-trump","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-for-you","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-magazine","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-sean-moncrieff","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116273059281137190","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}