Where on earth did we get this idea that men don’t cry?

Earlier this week, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel struggled to get through his segment when the topic turned to the horrific fires that have been ravaging much of southern California.

“It has been terrible,” he said candidly, his voice breaking at the mention of how many of his friends and co-workers had already lost their homes.

And it HAS been terrible. To date, at least 27 people have died in the fires, and 31 more are missing. It’s hard to conceptualize just how many people’s lives will be dramatically altered by the loss of more than 12,000 buildings including schools, restaurants, businesses, and homes. It’s a truly awful situation, one where tears and grief are an entirely appropriate response.

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Kimmel finished his segment with a (probably unnecessary) potshot at Donald Trump, but political jabs aside, I felt for the guy on a very human level. These are difficult days for a lot of people, including celebrities. Having millions of dollars does not exempt anyone from their humanity or from grief when bad things happen.

So I was horrified to log into Twitter to see The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry eviscerating Kimmel for his segment:

“Good God,” Berry fumed, “You’re not being paid to cry like a little girl on stage. Your role is to give people a little laugh in a difficult time. If you can’t hack it, get off the stage, you low-T narcissist. Disgusting and pathetic.”

Now to be fair, it seemed obvious to me that Berry was mostly lashing out because of Kimmel’s comments about Trump, but be that as it may, “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” and his vitriol revealed a pervasive pattern in many of today’s Christian attitudes toward manhood, and it’s one I think we really need to address.

“Crying like a little girl.”

“Low-T narcissist.”

“Disgusting and pathetic.”

This is how much of conservative Christian culture has conditioned men to respond to any hint of emotion other than rage. This is the prescription for manliness: “Lock it up, bury it, and throw away the key.” We actively train men that it’s shameful to cry.

Think I’m overstating my case? Hardly.

Consider the following statements from prominent male leaders in the manosphere:

“It’s okay for a man to cry, but it’s preferable if nobody else sees it or hears it. You can’t afford to lose respect, or have those who depend on you freak out. She may encourage you to share your tears as a way of bonding. This is risky and unwise. Don’t be seduced. Tell son.” — @TellYourSonThis

“A man should not cry in public. If you cry, no one will sympathize with you. In fact, you will be punished severally for crying. If you want to cry, go and punch your bedroom wall or go lift wights in the gym.” — @amerix

“When we say that men shouldn’t cry, it is not just a joke. There’s an important truth
here. The world needs men to pick up their burdens, shoulder them quietly, and get on with business. The more that men become emotional and soft, the more that society ceases to function as it should. We need emotion and softness. That’s why we have women. We also need toughness and hardness. That’s why we’re supposed to have men. The men who fulfill this duty are accused of being unfeeling, of lacking depth, but the truth is that they have a depth that people like “James” can’t even begin to comprehend. And she probably never will. She has accessed only the surface level of the male experience, and she’s already fleeing for the hills. If she ever got the entire thing — I mean if she was actually able to fully inhabit the mind, the inner life, of a man — it would be torture for her. As it would be for any woman. That’s because women are not meant to carry the burden of manhood, any more than men are meant to carry the burden of womanhood. We are where we belong. Which is the identity we were born with. We cannot comprehend what it’s really like to have any other identity.” — Matt Walsh 

I could find dozens and dozens of these receipts. The consensus seems to be that emotion is for the womenfolk. Men need to be soldiers. Men should not cry.

It’s a severe overcorrection of a widespread societal resilience deficiency. It belongs to a school of thought that fantasizes, “If we could just go back to the good old days of 1950s America, everything would be okay again” without any sense whatsoever of just how NOT okay things actually were back then. I’ve blogged about this before, about how during WW2, more than half a million service members suffered some sort of psychiatric collapse due to combat. And when they returned from war and bottled their emotions, their families suffered.

Seriously, how many people have stories about grandpa’s temper? Stories that are really just about his undiagnosed PTSD and the way the family orbited around it while pretending everything was okay?

And why do we suppose the male suicide rate is so astronomically high? Between 2015-2020, fully 122,178 American men died by suicide, compared to the 19,297 women who took their own lives. Is this what they mean when they insist that women are the emotional ones? Really? While the manosphere might suggest that these numbers indicate an inability to bottle emotions, I would argue that it’s more likely men do not know how to process their emotions.

It turns out it’s pretty consequential when we teach boys that it’s a shame to cry. And it’s not anything close to a biblical model at all. 1 Samuel 30 comes to mind where David and his men find that their enemies have burned down Ziklag and taken their wives and children captive. David is an alpha male. He’s literally killed bears and lions with his bare hands. He’s conquered giants. He’s a man of war. And what does the Bible say he does?

He “weeps until he can weep no more.” That’s a lot of crying. It doesn’t say that he hid in his tent and quietly brushed away a few rogue tears to save face. He’s not sitting there worried about preserving his man card. No. He openly, passionately weeps, and he doesn’t care who knows about it. Then he pulls himself up by his bootstraps and annihilates the Amalekites.

Crying isn’t weakness. It’s an entirely appropriate response to grief in embodied people who recognize that emotions are a design feature, not a flaw, in thriving, healthy humans. How on earth can we expect men to worship God with their whole heart, mind, and strength, if we’ve conditioned them to wage war on their wholeheartedness by bottling all their emotions and pretending they don’t exist, or worse, that they are the enemy?

Where on earth did we get this idea that men don’t cry? How have we gotten to the point where we actually convinced ourselves that performative stoicism is God’s design for men? It’s just wild to me.

In the Old Testament, they would actually pay people to be professional wailers to help lead others in drawn-out public displays of grief. And again, it wasn’t just the women who participated here. They wore sackcloth and ashes. They paraded their grief through the city streets. Sometimes people would be in official mourning for fully 70 days. No one accused the men who participated of “having low testosterone.” No one called them “pathetic” or “disgusting” for crying out loud.

In 2 Corinthians 2:7, Paul (another alpha male) expresses that he’s written this letter “through many tears.”

Peter wept bitterly when he denied Christ (Luke 22:62).

Joseph cried so loudly when he was reunited with his brothers that the Egyptians heard him from the other room (Genesis 45:2).

Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet.”

Even Jesus wept.

There’s a way to teach fortitude, resilience, and mental toughness that does not wage war on God’s design for human emotion.  It’s rooted in deep security and health, not fear of man or an egotistical need to save face or bully others with the courage to risk vulnerability.

God says He saves our tears in a bottle. There’s no footnote anywhere that I can find explaining that this service is only provided to women. He cares about our hearts.

If there’s a war on men, is it possible that some of it is coming from inside the house? If men are in crisis, maybe it’s because they were designed to be emotional creatures and we keep telling them that their emotions are “pathetic.” They have nowhere to put them — no socially sanctioned outlet but rage.

Let men cry. And then let them pull themselves up by their bootstraps and soldier on. Both parts are necessary and healthy.