I recently saw the 7th Harry Potter with two male friends. I bawled the entire time. My two friends tried not to laugh at me; they failed. I was reminded of a first date I had when I was a tween: I went to see Tarzan, and I cried during the scene where Tarzan finds the picture of his parents. My date's male friends were sitting a few rows behind us, sniggering, but when I started crying, their laughs grew even louder. I realized that while women are programmed by society to be sensitive to emotion, and to show emotion by actions such as crying, men are programmed by society to not pick up on emotional cues, and to not react to emotional moments. If they must react, they should certainly not show their reaction publicly, and certainly not cry. To so would be "un-manly". This is unfair to women: Society teaches them to cry, and then uses their tears as evidence against them, that they are not as strong as men. This is also not fair to men, who are being deprived of the basic human right to express human emotion - and tears are on way of doing that.
A while ago, there was a controversial - and poorly run - study claiming that women's tears lowered men's libido, thus providing women with a get-out-of-rape-free card: As they cried, the man's desire would wane, and with it, his motivation to force them into sexual intercourse. Leaving aside that a) without a comparable study of the effect of men's tears on women, this study's supposed gender implications are meaningless b) rape is about power, not about sex. Plenty of men who could get laid by consenting women choose to force women into sex - for some, it is the only way for them to get turned on or acheive orgasm (thus qualifying as a fetish in clinical terms). But the psychology of a rapist, while a complicated issue, does not change the fact that the rape is about his (or her - there are female rapists) psychology, not about the rapists' sex drive per se, and certainly not about the rape victim's actions and whether or not she cried - to say otherwise puts us right back into the old "blame the victim paradigm". So, either a) the rapists actions are not about sex, but about power, in which case libido is meaningless, as long as he has enough to get hard b) the rapist has a sexual fetish (rape is literally the only way for him to acheive satisfaction) that is very uncommon in the human population, so a study about the nature of "normal" men's sex drive would be irrelevant, this study goes completely against the pop-culture image of a man's comforting a crying woman, and all of a sudden, that comforting turns sexual. This pop-culture image was presaged by the Bible, which asserted in 2 Samule 12, that "David comforted Batsheva with love-making" after the death of their first-born child, a punishment for David's adultery with Batsheva and the murder of her husband. (Who needs telanovellas when you have stories like these?) The value that the Bible places on comforting a wife can be seen from the fact that this comfort-love-making results in the conception of Solomon, considered the wisest king of Israel.
So it seems that women's tears have long been beleived to have power: The power to entice a man to the bedroom, according to ancient and modern pop-culture, the power to stop rape (wow, if only women had that power!), according to a pseudo-scientific study masquerading as evolutionary psychology - no wonder that female tears make men so uncomfortable (such tears often evoke male laughter, which psychlogists and cultural theorists assert is a sign of discomfort - see Freud "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious"), and that they must reinterpet such tears as womens' weakness, to fit them into the motif of male superiority that forms the core of their male identity.
Of course, I should have known I would be embarrassed the minute we walked into the theater - the last time I was at that theater, was with one friend from the same group, to see the third LOTR. Before the movie, my friend and I had an argument over who was hotter, Liv Tyler or Cate Blanchett. During the movie, Aragorn and Arwen are reunited for the first time. Everyone was quiet during that moment, except for my friend, who turned to me and said in what he thought was a whisper, "You're right, Liv Tyler is hot!" - I wasn't sure what was worse - the shushing from avid LOTR fans, or the looks of pity from those who thought that my friend and I were on a date (we were not).
But of course, my main point in writing this rant was to be able to blame society for my tears - because what is feminism about if not enabling women to blame men for their problems?
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