Can you tell me more about how you developed your intuition that it's not broadly accepted in our shared American culture? I think there's a lot of countervailing evidence (teaser: it's an MMA cliche) suggesting that this is not at all a taboo, but I don't understand well enough where you've gotten this notion.
My reference points for American culture are white southerners (where men crying is taboo) and elite whites in metro areas (who complain about “toxic masculinity” and its taboos on men crying). Those two groups disagree whether the taboo is a good thing, but both agree that it characterizes American culture. Since that’s also consistent with norms in my own culture, I have no reason to doubt those assertions.
I'm not sure I understand how the link supports what you're saying. A list of "manly" tears implies that generally speaking tears aren't "manly", and the examples seem to imply that the tears signify some extraordinary circumstance. Nobody's on the list for just having a really tough day at work.
It more or less is though. He's saying men can't show weakness. The examples in your page support that: men can only cry precisely when crying isn't a show of weakness.
I dunno. I'm reading through them. I don't see any examples of weakness. On the contrary, every example is a guy crying for a really good damn reason.
Even just the category itself kind of makes the point. The original claim way upthread was that women find guys who cry repulsive. I would assume this is roughly referring to guys crying when they run into a problem in life instead of dealing with it, that sort of thing. The examples in your link are, like, guys who gave their whole lives to a sport, everything's on the line, maximum skin in the game, and their crying is a show of strength, the raw emotion of someone at a peak/climactic moment.
I think there's clearly a difference in perception between crying as a show of strength vs weakness. My intuition is that it's strong if you're crying after "coming back from the battlefield", after a long buildup period of stoicism and having given a fight all you've got, and weak if you're crying as a matter of constantly giving into whatever you're feeling in the moment. The examples in your link are as far on the "strong" end of the spectrum as they could be.
It would falsify this if you found examples of our culture supporting guys just going through their daily lives and crying as an accessible reaction to random things that make them feel bad, almost as a sort of banality. (I think this is the bar, since culturally we're okay with women doing this.)
No, hold on: like I said, many of these examples aren't shows of strength, they're shows of vulnerability. You're dismissing them because you've concluded they're legitimate, which is a special pleading argument.
Hmm, okay. I was about to say that there's an interesting question of whether "vulnerability is a kind of strength," but I'm scrolling up and seeing that the original claim was that both weakness and vulnerability are unacceptable. I would agree there are some narrow forms of vulnerability displays by men that our culture finds acceptable, so I'll concede this one.
> Boys don't cry. It doesn't matter the circumstances; shedding any tears is the ultimate no-no in terms of what you can and can't do as a man. But sometimes... sometimes... sometimes there comes a time when a man's emotions deny any other form of expression, and they pour forth—prerequisite impassioned speech may or may not be present—by cascading down his cheeks. And crying does NOT make him any less badass in the eyes of the audience, but in fact may even reinforce this status. In other words, Manly Man-Tears Of Manliness.
...supports rayiner's point. Men aren't generally allowed to cry; when they are it's for exceptional circumstances, when the beauty of life so overflows one's cup that it becomes an expression of peak experience, or something like that. But the subtext is that everyday crying is taboo.
