Why Did Men Stop Crying?

Men don't cry. It feels like a rule as old as humanity itself. It isn't. It's barely 150 years old. For most of recorded history, the greatest men wept in public. Achilles wept for his best friend. Charlemagne tore at his beard in grief while his knights cried with him. Oliver Cromwell cried while he ruled England, and Winston Churchill cried while he saved it. Nobody thought their tears made them weak. Some thought tears made them better men. So how did one of the most natural things the human body can do become something men are ashamed of? In this video, we trace nearly 3,000 years of men's tears: the medieval "gift of tears" that monks prayed for, the 18th-century bestseller whose hero cries so often that someone later made an index of every tear, the Victorian boarding schools where crying was mocked as "blubbing," Darwin's claim that holding back tears made you civilized, and the surprising American origin of the "stiff upper lip." Then we look at what it cost, from shell shock in the trenches to what modern science says about why we cry and why it may be good for you. 💬 When was the last time you cried in front of someone? And did anyone ever tell you "men don't cry"? Tell us in the comments. 🔔 Subscribe for more stories from the forgotten history of being human. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES ▸ Weeping warriors — Homer, The Iliad (Book 18: Achilles mourns Patroclus) and The Odyssey (Book 8: Odysseus weeps at the song of Demodocus). ▸ Charlemagne's grief — The Song of Roland (c. 1100). ▸ The medieval "gift of tears" — Piroska Nagy, Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge (2000, Albin Michel). ▸ Men's tears in early modern England — Bernard Capp, "'Jesus Wept' but Did the Englishman? Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern England" (2014, Past & Present). ▸ A history of British tears — Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (2015, Oxford University Press). ▸ The index of tears — Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), and Henry Morley's later edition with its "Index to Tears." ▸ Boarding-school manhood — Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days (1857). ▸ "Men must work, and women must weep" — Charles Kingsley, "The Three Fishers" (1851). ▸ Darwin on tears — Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). ▸ "Stiff upper lip" — earliest known printed use in the Massachusetts Spy (1815). ▸ Pardons for executed WWI soldiers — UK Armed Forces Act 2006, Section 359. ▸ Swami Vivekananda — Lectures from Colombo to Almora (1897). ▸ How often men and women cry — Ad Vingerhoets, Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears (2013, Oxford University Press). ▸ Crying and the calming nervous system — Gračanin, Bylsma & Vingerhoets, "Is crying a self-soothing behavior?" (2014, Frontiers in Psychology) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00502 ▸ Male suicide rates — Office for National Statistics, Suicides in England and Wales. ▸ The wider story — Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999, W. W. Norton). #history #masculinity #humanhistory #victorianhistory #psychology #mensmentalhealth #ancientgreece #historyexplained #animation