Men love to have a bawl

Another sporting weekend, another great big crybaby hits the headlines.

Forget this summer's metrosexual cardigan, these days the accessory du jour for any strapping bloke with Stakhanovite thighs and a five o'clock shadow you could sand floors with, is a nice lace-trimmed hankie — proper cotton mind you, so as not to chafe his septum.

This time it was a weepy Michael Vaughan, stepping down as England Test cricket captain because of a succession of knee injuries and an unfortunate display of lousy form this season.

Yes, it was a shame, yes, he must have been a bit fed up, but he wasn't sacked, he hasn't been thrown on the professional scrapheap and to the best of our knowledge, no one flicked a towel at him in the changing rooms. So why the blubbing, Michael?

Vaughan, of course, is simply following a well-trodden path of discarded Kleenex. Fellow sportsmen John Terry, Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham and Roger Federer have all cried in public.

Moved initially

But when, precisely, did crying become cool? It all began, if you remember, with Paul Gascoigne in 1990 who blubbed uncontrollably after England lost the World Cup semifinal against Germany on penalties.

Back then, we were moved at the unexpected tears of the clown, the wayward genius who kick-started the renaissance of football in England.

Gazza's subsequent car-crash career and private life have shed a great deal of light on the footballer's fragile state of mind.

Which makes it all the more baffling that so many grown men still seek to emulate him — have they forgotten that crying is for (whisper it) sissies?

Witnessing a man breaking down is hugely empowering. To me, not him, obviously.

But even as I am comforting him and congratulating him for not being an emotional cripple, I am despising him for his weakness.

In her incendiary new book Save The Males: Why Men Matter and Women Should Care, American newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker claims that we women have neutered our menfolk to the point where they have been reduced in popular culture to a job-lot of dolts, bullies and bumbling fools, straight from central casting.

Shrinking role

“At the same time that men have been ridiculed, the importance of fatherhood has been diminished, along with other traditionally male roles of father, protector and provider,'' she writes.

“The exemplar of the modern male is the hairless, metrosexualised man and decorator boys who turn heterosexual slobs into perfumed ponies.

But in the dangerous world in which we really live, it might be nice to have a few guys around who aren't trying to juggle pedicures and highlights.''

Hurrah to that. And the first step to reclaiming masculinity is to dry those pretty little eyes, reapply your manscara and get right back to the testosterone-saturated stadium.

Oh, and how about relocating your backbone while you're at it?

Observation

Sob and get more sympathy

A study by Penn State University in the US last year suggested that men are judged much more positively for crying than women; men were felt to be more honest if they cried while women were seen as having lost control.

And, sadly, the groundswell of opinion in the West at least is in favour of boo-hoo boys letting it all out.

But this only suggests things have gone too far. Sales of male beauty products are up 30 per cent over the past decade, 20 per cent more men are having plastic surgery and researchers from Harvard claim that a quarter of anorexia and bulimia sufferers are male.

In her 2004 Crying Men collection of portraits, photographer Sam Taylor-Wood presented well-known actors in various states of tristesse, most notably Daniel Craig, Jude Law, Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman.

The stark images were doubtless meant to be moving. In truth, they were just creepy and every bit as unsettling as Taylor-Wood's classic still-life images with a twist that feature fuzzily rotting nectarines; like men's tears, we do know it happens, we just don't want to have it shoved in our faces.