There was a scene in the latest Star Trek movie that tried my patience. What riled me was this: Spock cries. For those of you who have resisted the Trek allure, the point about Spock is that, being Vulcan, he is not meant to cry, ever. Then again, being actually half-human, but having chosen to live as a Vulcan, this always meant that, in the original series, he was the crew member Most Likely To Lose It, precisely because he was expected, most of all by himself, not to. But whenever it did happen, it was because of some space lurgy, and never in the normal course of his duties, which is how it happens in the film.
And the even more annoying thing is that not that long before, Benedict Cumberbatch had also shed a manly tear – and he's the baddie. Clearly, we are reaching a point where the currency of male tears is becoming valueless.
None who saw that picture of Osborne crying at Thatcher's funeral will ever forget it, or their contemptuous reactions. His tears were interpreted not as the involuntary secretions of a man who has turned out to have a heart after all, but as the very possibly faked emotion of a man who is so twisted that he can immiserate a nation and smile about it, but still be moved to visible anguish by the merciful death of a senile woman.
Men seem to have given up the notion that big boys don't cry. (Not a notion that was around in antiquity. Achilles weeps often in the Iliad, but few would have been rash enough to call him a softie.) I was brought up under such a belief; it was not directly imposed, as I recall; it was just in the air, and although there were many times as a child when I not only wanted to cry but did, the main thing to do was to make sure that no one else saw you doing it. Tears being what they are – an incontinence – it was rarely possible to arrange things that way.
Last year we swam in them, as Alice did in the Pool of Tears in Wonderland. The Olympics were soaked in them, and it seemed to make no difference if they were caused by victory or defeat. Victory was usually the culprit, though. Sport and tears are increasingly bedfellows, and we tend to turn a blind eye to them. I remember Kim Hughes's tears in 1985 when announcing his resignation as captain of the Australian cricket team, and thinking to myself "crybaby"; it emerged years later that he was not necessarily prone to cracking under psychological pressure, but that his own team-mates had bullied him for years.
That said, ever since I read a Barry Mackenzie strip in which the eponymous hero weeps buckets as he makes a speech praising his native country – I vividly recall the phrase "sheilas who root like rattlesnakes" coming up – I have suspected that Australians, under pressure from their own masculinity, are particularly susceptible to crying.
Paul Gascoigne's tears on his yellow card against Germany in 1990 were famously mocked in a crisp advert six years later: it was the mockery that proved cathartic, rather than the tears themselves (although it is Gascoigne's life since then that has proved the sadder story).
Nowadays, tears are expected of us: they're a marketing strategy. Anyone who has seen Toy Story 3 will recognise that what they experienced was not so much a film as a machine designed to extract tears; and I remember thinking, as my eyes welled up at the end of Wallace & Gromit: the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, that things were getting a bit out of hand. Whether this was down to me or the film industry I find it hard to say. Emotional lability is the order of the day. We are, rightly, discouraged from bottling things up too tightly. But let us not cheapen tears' worth. May I suggest to any men on the verge of them: make sure, when they're unleashed, that something really bad is going on.
