For Halloween I went as a man who cried. The most terrifying costume ever made, it caused children to scream and men to punch walls and women to vomit into the phones on which they were booking last-minute sterilisations.
A man, but crying. It’s hard to keep the two images in your head, I know. The two belong in different universes, one in the universe of wood logging and hard cash, the other in a universe of menstruation and chamomile, am I right? Of course I am. I know. I live in the real world, where a man is to tears what a bath is to a panini. They both have their place, but never the same place.
When an Uber driver refused to take me to the party, I realised, sadly, that the performance I’d planned for later, a dramatic reading of last week’s Evening Standard piece reporting that half the men in London feel like crying once a month, would be too dangerous, and was forced to duck into a Costa and change into a gentler costume. Of course it still had to be scary. So I wiped off the glass tear and went as “Sending a dick pic but accidentally replying all”.
But when are they crying, the Standard’s London men? And where? Perhaps that flight of stairs underneath Somerset House, the one that leads down to the river and is often slippery. Perhaps High Barnet. Men’s tears are so uncomfortable, even in this modern world where almost everything else is OK, that it’s almost impossible to believe that not only are they weeping so regularly but that they’ve admitted it.
The tears of a man are said to bring a curse to his village. In our case, the square mile around his nearest Little Waitrose. It is rumoured that the reason our tomato plants never bore fruit is that two summers ago my neighbour watched Blue Valentine, alone. Why, Sean? Why couldn’t you hold it in? Why couldn’t you simply pretend everything is OK, all the time, and that no emotion is stronger than a pinch, like other men do so successfully? Why couldn’t you watch something sturdy and proud on Dave instead? What led you there, Sean, to the DVD your wife left on the side for after yoga? Before the tears came, and as they came, as your eyes became children, how did you feel? Was it good? Did you like it?
There are some men, of course, because there always are, some perverts that profess to enjoy weeping. A perfect Sunday, said one man to me anonymously, his face pixellated, would start with a good coffee in the park while the kids play on the swings, then back home to eggs and bacon, flick through the papers, then a gentle cry in the bath, then Mastermind. Another man, who hasn’t cried since he was 11, told me he worries that if he started crying – if he watched the wrong YouTube video, or saw the wrong sunset, standing on the wrong beach – he would never stop. Hence him carrying around a bottle of isotonic sports drink in case of surprise dehydration.
But that wouldn’t be the worst of it. The worst would be that he would no longer be taken seriously by his colleagues and peers, who would from that day on see him clouded in a viscous pinky haze, as if seen through a bottle of bubble bath. No more invitations to “the pub”. No more questions about his thoughts on the Grexit. He would become a man that cried, and all the terror and weakness that implied.
They should just block the ducts up with a drop of UHU, men. Wouldn’t it be easier for everybody in the long run? Easier that than trying to solve the brutality of masculinity, say, or socialise our sons to talk about emotions. Instead a simple cauterising of the male eye urethra, at birth or earlier, and life for everybody else would be so much simpler.
Never again would we have to suffer the affront of a human man with his face wet with anything other than whisky or sweat. Never again the slightly awkward moment where, having patted the crier’s shoulder, you feel a strange lump rising in your throat, the size and density of an Ikea meatball, and your eyes become blurry, and empathy happens in an inappropriate place – public. Save us from this indignity. Save us, lord, from the crying man.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
