The Crying Game

Not Carrie Bradshaw (?) made an observation in last week’s post I wanted to riff on a bit:

…..A conclusion I’ve come to in the past couple years is: a woman crying gets support while a man crying gets shunned.

Only to an extent. A crying women will elicit support and sympathy from men only if she is young and beautiful. Otherwise she is just an irritation that needs to be shut up,

A crying woman will elicit support and sympathy from women only if she belongs to the same “tribe” as the woman offering support and sympathy. Will a crying old black woman get any sympathy from a young white chick ? Not so much.

Men are not biologically pre-disposed to crying (not as much as women anyway) so when they do, no one really knows how to respond. Particularly if it is in front of strangers and the reason for his tears is not clear at all. Admittedly this is a very very rare occurance – usually when a man has mental issues or is having a mental breakdown.

Normally men cry in front of family, very close friends, people whom they trust implicitly or in front of medical emergency personnel so I don’t think he will be shunned in those circumstances, especially if it involves death or loss of something very very important to him.

Since 2010 I can think of only three instances when I broke down and cried – my father’s death, my wife’s younger brother dying suddenly at 39 and the loss of one of my best dogs. It’s not because I’m some unfeeling badass that nothing affects, but I think it’s more about what moves me, or any guy, beyond that threshold. I’m pretty good at holding back that lump in my throat from crossing the line.

Since its inception, part of the of the package feminization sold men about “getting in touch with their feminine sides®” included the encouragement of boys learning to be in touch with their emotions and cry more often. It was part of their ‘sensitivity training’, and they were acculturated to believe that women would appreciate them more for their honest tears. You’d think guys who’d learn to cry on demand would have it made, right?

Vestiges Revisited

NCB’s comment was in response to Hero’s observation from that same thread:

A conclusion I’ve come to in the past couple years is: a woman crying gets support while a man crying gets shunned.

A woman crying is still biologically valuable. She still has a vagina and a uterus. She could still successfully carry and care for a child. Thus she is embraced and supported by the tribe.

A man crying is a liability. His crying will alert the predatory animals and invading gangs to his position. His distress is actually a problem for the tribe.

It is a blatant lie that feminism is about creating equality. We have been misled into thinking that men should emote and talk about their feelings. Very few people in a man’s life will give a shit when he is going through a rough time in his life.

Women are afforded vast support and provisions that men will never know.

One of the most annoying sounds for me, and if the studies are accurate all human beings in general, is the sound of a crying infant. It was a species survival trait that this sound psychologically evolved to prompt such an irritated response in humans. No matter who’s child was doing the crying, you damn well couldn’t ignore the distress coming from the baby.

It’s easy to make the association of how this ‘check-the-baby’ dynamic is a vestige of what evolved to make our species so successful; if it didn’t annoy us, more distressed babies wouldn’t have made it to semi-adulthood. However once we pass a certain stage of development, overt emotional displays (the most obvious being crying) diverge drastically for us by gender. As Hero observes, graphic displays of emotionalism were a sign of weakness to protohuman tribal societies. Women generally took care of crying infants and the association of infantile helplessness, in addition to being a general annoyance,  would necessarily be a liability to the group’s survival integrity. From a male-only perspective we can see the implications of this, but expand that to the social cohesion of the tribal unit and you can see that overt displays of emotionalism from men would also be associated as signs of implicit weakness for tribal women. Thus a rational control of emotion became hardwired into men’s psyches.

So you see when the feminine imperative makes attempts to feminize men, as with all of feminization’s efforts, it struggles against thousands of years of species-valuable, in-bred psychology.

She Cries

The parallel to this dynamic is women’s crying. Have a listen to the interplay of emotionalism in the woman’s voice in this radio bit and article.

White Knights will come out of the woodwork to defend the indefensible in spite of the circumstance responding viscerally to a woman weeping. How did you feel when you heard the girl cry?

Once again, as Hero points out, the sound of a woman crying elicits the innate protector response for men, but as NCB examines, only insofar as that woman presents a viable reproductive prospect. Since this woman’s vocal intonation is within a feminine pitch as she weeps and pleads her case we’re more predisposed to sympathy for her, even in light of her redhanded betrayal of trust. Imagine this woman’s voice being raspy from years of smoking, lower from a higher testosterone  level or chordless like an old woman’s. Our male reflexive response, while still humanistically sympathetic as manageable, would be far different than what a young and associatively breed-worthy woman’s vocal intonations would cue us in to.

Again, we’re seeing hearing a species-valuable evolutionary vestige in the reflex men experience when they hear a reproduction-viable woman cry. To a degree it overrides even our rational capacity to separate the implications of her behavior with the empathy we want to establish with a woman we perceive as being a potential mating opportunity. It’s not that men can’t resist this empathy and apply a rational solution to a problem, it’s that it requires an effort for a man to do so.

It comes back to the Cap N Save a Ho dynamic and the Savior Schema. Empathize, protect and bond with a woman in distress (particularly emotional distress) and the potential payoff will be sexual intercourse.

Men’s effort to sublimate this empathetic sexual opportunism in favor of rational action has not gone unexploited by the feminine imperative. Thus you have women’s facility to cry (even under conditions of culpability) in order to provoke that male protector response. It’s like the crying baby example, stimuli and response.

Also, it’s important to mention women’s preferred method of communication, that is to say covert. When a woman cries she’s moving into an overt form of communication she knows will register with men, and this is usually the result of her having exhausted all her covert utilities. When women opt for overt communication it generally means one or two things have occurred: 1) she has reached the point of exasperation using covert means to convey her message, or 2) she has reached a point of desperation in her condition and needs the visceral response men will react to in order to defend and/or empathize with her (often in spite of herself).