Crybabies

Sir Lancelot, Watergate, Michael Jordan, and how we do (or don't) respond to the strangely shameful act of crying in public.

Jan 23, 2023

In the 12th Century—

—there was no greater hero than Sir Lancelot. King Arthur’s best pal, Lady Guinevere’s number-one hookup, top Knight of the Round Table. In his first literary appearance, Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart, an epic poem by French writer Chrétien de Troyes, the seminal hero is captured by the bad guys and learns that he’s going to miss an upcoming tournament (he loves tournaments). His response is not quite what you’d expect:

Lancelot learned the hour and date of the tournament, and as soon as he heard of it, his eyes were not tearless nor was his heart glad.
The lady of the house, seeing Lancelot sad and pensive, thus spoke to him: "Sire, for God's sake and for your own soul's good, tell me truly, why you are so changed.”
"Ah, lady, for God's sake, do not be surprised that I am sad! Truly, I am very much downcast, since I cannot be present where all that is good in the world will be assembled.”

“His eyes were not tearless”—a circuitous way of saying that his eyes were, indeed, full of tears. Upon seeing this, his captors take pity on him, and eventually set him free so he doesn’t miss the big match.

Sir Lancelot, that icon of chivalry, doesn’t use his sword to fight his way out of captivity. He doesn’t scheme or strategize or use some clever deception. No—he cries like a baby until he gets his way.

In 1998—

—when I was nineteen, I worked briefly as an operator at a radio station in Regina, Saskatchewan. I sat at a huge panel of flashing buttons that looked like retro-tech from the original Star Trek, and when it came time to switch feeds, I’d fade in the local commercials and news breaks. It was a job that required me to push a few buttons every half hour, yet seemed like something I was grossly under-qualified to do.

I was scheduled to work over the Christmas holidays, but badly wanted to go home to Yellowknife for the break, and so, even though I’d been working at the station for only six weeks, I made my way into the Station Manager’s office to ask for the time off.

What I remember of the office: grey leather, brown carpet, small windows, yellowish light. What I remember of the station manager: grey suit jacket, brown hair, small eyes, yellowish teeth. The conversation didn’t go well. He performed a late-90s cover of the perennial classic “why are you damn kids so entitled these days?”

I couldn’t answer his question. Not because it was rhetorical, but because I was physically incapable. My throat had turned solid, my face had clenched like a fist. I was sobbing, I couldn’t breathe. The station manager stared at me—confused, repulsed, maybe a bit terrified. I, too, felt terror; the weeping was so violent, and had struck me so suddenly, that I felt pushed outside my body, and, watching from his perspective, was just as repulsed as he was.

He was so repulsed, in fact, that he fled the room. He made some excuse about being late for a meeting and told me I could stay in his office until I’d collected myself.

The shame I feel today, in recalling that moment, is only slightly less potent than the shame I felt as it was happening to me (shame, like the economy, might ebb and flow, but always trends upward over time). I never went back to that job. I couldn’t, even if they’d wanted me to, which, for the record, they didn’t.

I did, however, spend a lovely Christmas back home in Yellowknife with my family and friends.

Like Lancelot, I got what I wanted by crying like a baby.

In 2013—

—when I was thirty-four, I had a different job, this one at an ad agency in Ottawa. The office was a vast and stylish studio, wide open, bright, with rows of interconnected desks that were too chic and spacious to feel like cubicles. When the studio wasn’t loud with heckling, it was loud with music; when it wasn’t loud with music, it was loud with debate; when it wasn’t loud with debate, it was loud with laughter.

Perhaps this is why, when we heard the sound that afternoon — a throaty melody sung in quickening chords — we thought it was laughter. But it came harder and faster and harsher and it quickly became clear to us that it was, indeed, the sound of crying. Powerful crying. Unselfconscious, unrelenting.

It was the intern. We didn’t know her well. She’d been around for a month or so, working the reception desk, running errands, flitting at the periphery of our workday like a busy insect.

She staggered into the studio with a cell phone held to her ear. With her other hand she grasped at her open mouth as if trying to catch each popped-loose sob. Her face was glossy with tears and snot. As she approached our desks, she tried to say something into the phone, but couldn’t draw a breath, could only maintain that single note of alarm, that stretched-thin sob. She needed help, clearly.

And what did we do? Nothing.

We ignored her. We dove deep into the burlesque of our work. I moved my cursor in circles, typed lines of gibberish into an open document just to hear the clatter of the keyboard. I traded half-second glances of bewilderment with those sitting around me, but traded no glances with the intern. None of us did. No one moved to help her. We continued to write our copy, design our logos, animate our web banners. Her bawling broke against silence.

In the years that I’d been with the company, I’d observed tremendous acts of kindness among colleagues. We’d mourned together, celebrated together. We disciplined like parents, we misbehaved like children, we bickered like brothers and sisters. But when the intern came crying into our midst, we pretended like she wasn’t there.

The physical act—

—of emotional crying (the tears, the spasms, the flush of blood, etc.) serves no apparent biological function. Psychic tears are actually composed of different chemical stuff than the secretion that cleans your corneas. This means that crying is a highly-evolved social behaviour. A signal. Either a demonstration of submission to an aggressor (the sort of crying my ten year-old self was familiar with) or an efficient method of soliciting help from members of your social group.

A call for help, literally. So why didn’t we receive the intern’s signal?

Maybe we hoped that the very act of crying was cure enough for her grief. It’s a common assumption: that weeping is cathartic, that it flushes your system of all those brackish metaphysical pollutants. Aren’t crying people always encouraged to “let it out”? Maybe that’s what we thought as we turned up the volume on our headphones to block out her blubbering—that she just needed to “get it out of her system.” And why should we meddle in that totally natural process?

But it turns out—

—that the whole idea of crying-as-cleansing is carried over from antiquated concepts of Hippocratic medicine, wherein the body was thought to be regulated by humours in constant need of purgation and purification. There is, in fact, no empirical evidence to support the idea that crying has any sort of net positive effect on the crier—physically or emotionally. And while crying might sometimes relieve stress, criers who receive no social support after weeping actually feel worse.

Psychic tears, with their abundance of hormones and nutrients, act as a chemosignal; tears are odourless, and yet the nothing-scent of a woman’s tears can cause a man’s testosterone levels to plummet. So maybe my colleagues and I simply didn’t possess the chemoreceptors necessary to offer the intern solace. Maybe we weren’t close enough to smell them. How nice it would be to chalk up our apathy to some hormonal deficiency, some genetic disease: she’d eaten too much gluten, or not enough, and her tears were charged with the wrong mixture of stuff!

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In 2009—

—Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was a famously cold-blooded player, unshakable on the court, uncharitable with oponents and teammates alike. He was also no stranger to public weeping. He wept when he won championships, he wept when his father died. So why did the photograph snapped of him during his induction ceremony turn into one of the most robust and recyclable memes of the decade?

The tear streaming down his face weren’t tears or triumph or sorrow—they were wistful, sentimental, homesick. Complicated tears cried by a complicated guy looking back on his life from the far end of it. There was something inherently pitiable about it, and the last thing we want to do is pity our heroes.

As The New York Times explains in a feature from 2016.

The internet thrives on humiliation. Twitter is always raring for a public shaming. The Crying Jordan meme, which takes one of America’s biggest sports stars and makes him small, indulges those impulses.

Back in the 12th Century, no one thought it was shameful for Sir Lancelot to cry. No one demeaned Achilles (aka. the Michael Jordan of Ancient Greece) when he wept over the body of his best friend, Patroclus. In ancient Japanese poems, the same stoic samurais who chose seppuku over disloyalty were always crying over some lost pal or battlefield loss. One might argue that the 21st Century is a particularly progressive period when it comes to questioning, reframing, and inverting ideas of masculinity.

So why are Michael Jordan’s tears so humiliating?

We’re taught the rules at an early age.

Take a tennis ball to the face while playing ball-hockey in the driveway? Sure, you can cry (but only for a minute). Missed your favourite TV show because you wouldn’t finish your dinner? Snivelling is unacceptable. A pet dies? Tears aren’t just acceptable, they’re expected. Sorrow and joy: these are cry-worthy stimuli. Pain, stress, frustration, guilt: these are weaknesses of character that the act of crying betrays.

We quickly figure out how to make distinctions between acceptable/non-acceptable forms of crying, and perhaps those distinctions explain our reaction (or lack thereof) to the intern’s sobbing? If there are good reasons to cry and bad reasons to cry, perhaps we assumed that the type of crying she was doing was somehow frivolous. Perhaps we were embarrassed for her. Perhaps it seemed in bad taste for her to bring into our occupational domain the messy parts of her life that didn’t involve signing delivery slips and loading the office dishwasher. We would have been less flustered, I think, if she’d strolled into the studio naked.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard—

—of the American politician Edmund Muskie: because he’s a huge crybaby.

In 1972, he was the frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination. During a highly polarized political era, he was considered a very chill and reasonable and even-tempered guy—until he spoke to a crowd of journalists outside the offices of a New Hampshire newspaper that had just published an anonymous letter claiming that he’d used a vicious slur to describe a certain group of New England voters—those of French-Canadian descent.

The slur? Canuck. (Apparently, no one in American politics was aware that a new team called the Vancouver Canucks had joined the National Hockey League two years earlier.)

During his speech, as he defended himself (and his wife, who the newspaper had also slandered), it was reported that Muskie broke down several times, that tears were streaming down his face. In the weeks that followed, Muskie insisted that he didn’t cry, that his face was just wet from melted snow, but it was too late: the address —which came to be known as the “Crying Speech” — stalled Muskie’s momentum. He plummeted in the polls and eventually lost the nomination to George McGovern, who himself would go on to lose the 1972 presidential election.

“It changed people’s minds about me, of what kind of guy I was,” Muskie later said. “They were looking for a strong, steady man, and here I was, weak.”

Later in 1972—

—five men were arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Office Complex. The shambolic trail of cover-ups and conspiracy would eventually lead back to Richard Nixon, the man who beat McGovern, and whose cronies, it would later be revealed, had forged the “Canuck Letter” with the express purpose of derailing Muskie’s campaign.

It all caught up with Tricky Dick a few years later, and, in the final death throes of the presidency, as he sat alone in his office, preparing to sign his resignation letter (and more than a little drunk), he summoned Henry Kissinger for one last meeting.

From Anthony Bergen’s “The Final Hours of Richard Nixon’s Presidency”:

President Nixon started crying. At first, it was a teary-eyed hope that his resignation wouldn’t overshadow his long career, but soon, it broke down into sobbing as the President lamented the failures and the disgrace he had brought to his country.

A while later, after he pulled himself together, Nixon called Kissinger to thank him for stopping by.

Before hanging up, Nixon pleaded with Kissinger, “Henry, please don’t ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong.”

After everything he’d done to humiliate himself, after all the petty crimes and paranoid sedition, the one thing Richard Nixon didn’t want people to know was that he was a crybaby.

We learned the truth—

—about the intern a few weeks later.

The phone call she’d received had come from a medical clinic. It was bad news. She’d taken a test, and the results had come in. The intern, barely in her twenties, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. They told her to return to the clinic as soon as possible, to bring her parents, to bring a friend—to bring someone who, unlike all of us, was comfortable seeing her cry.

I suppose it would have been different if she’d fled to some private place: into the bathroom to weep quietly in one of the stalls, into the alley behind the building. But she didn’t. She staggered into the middle of the studio, where she knew everyone would be. She came to us for help. And even if the social codes of the modern workplace had nullified our communal instinct, couldn’t we have offered her, at the very least, the solace of our attention? Just a bit of eye contact? Just a brief pause in our emailing and browsing to acknowledge that, yes, she was there, she existed?

If she’d been laughing, someone would have asked her, “What’s so funny?”

But she wasn’t laughing, so we said nothing.

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