What's the fuss about crying???

Do we expect men who hail from Mars to cry or is weeping one attributes solely to the femme? These where questions put up by a friend of mine who suggested I blog on this subject. My reply to her was that it would be foolish to believe that crying - the most spontaneous of human expressions for grief would have anything to do with gender. I doubted if it would be worth penning my thoughts on something as trivial as crying but once I paused to mull over this subject and turned to the web seeking answers, it occurred to me that by and large crying still remains a complex jigsaw puzzle to be put in place by theories from physiology, psychology, evolution and sociology (to a lesser extent) and was well worth a post. Stats say men do cry but not as much as women and we would investigate how gender makes the difference. Physiologically, tears can be classified as basal (the ones continuously produced to lubricate our eyes), irritant or emotional. It is the emotional ones - the ones that flow in huge volumes that are possibly unique to human beings and also the most mysterious of all.

Let’s start from the time we were born. A child cries irrespective of its gender and when it does so it carries a message. It could be anything from discomfort due to wet dipers, missing a routine nap, indigestion, hunger to fear of something thus establishing that infants tend to cry for reasons other than grief rather it is their own sweet way of drawing attention towards their needs. As the child grows up it may become stubborn and demanding. Any effort in the direction to make it yield and they willingly turn their lachrymose glands on. Crying as we see now turns out to be a form of protest or rebellion and has nothing to do with gender.

It is in the teens that one first observes a stark contrast in the way males and females react to extreme emotion. Can you figure out what would bring about this change? I can see two changes (one physiological and the other sociological) occurring during this phase: girls achieving puberty and boys becoming conscious of the “unmanliness” in shedding tears. But what would puberty have to do with secretion from the lachrymals or for that matter could cultural factors help men exercise restraint over the tear glands. To comprehend the logic behind this abnormal behavior one needs to dig deeper into biology. Since I haven’t dealt with biology elaborately in my younger days, I had to turn towards the search engines to help me figure this out.

Whenever human beings are subjected to intense emotions such as physical or psychological pain, there is a significant build up of stress hormones which need to be secreted to prevent build up of high toxin levels in the body. The body has different channels to release stress and secretion of stress hormones can happen through tears, sweat or urine. Crying is one form of releasing these stress hormones and tears have known to contain a stress hormone called prolactin in fairy large proportion. Psychologists thus refer to crying as a healing process which can be physiologically explained by the reduction of the level of stress hormones. This also corroborates findings of a recent study in the UK which claims that depressed people tend to shed lesser tears than those who aren’t. Incidentally prolactin is not only released during crying, it is also believed to be play a vital role in tear formation. And guess what?? Women have shown to possess prolactin in much higher quantities than men (as much as 60% more) and why not….they need prolactin for synthesizing breast milk. It is the high concentration of prolactin in women that correlates with their frequency of crying.

But the above argument is flawed in light of today’s fast paced environment where many a time men are found to shed tears as easily as women. The argument can be refined if one assumes that there definitely exist stress hormones other than prolactin and probably with a higher concentration in men, their favored channels of release being the alternate pathways of sweat and urine. This also makes sense from an evolutionary aspect as prehistoric man the natural hunter wouldn’t have liked blurry eyes impeding his vision during the age old tribulations of hunting. But then women wouldn’t have liked a blurry vision either. How could one explain the existence of emotional tears in today’s man had evolution been working all these years? May be it’s a work still in progress. May be today’s man can afford impediment of vision as long as tears help him de-stress. Folks, lachrymology is yet in a nascent stage…there’s a lot left to be known!!! Guess its best to allow our body to take care of the emotional tears and even if you are a man, you rather be happy if you can readily turn ‘em on. There is no shame in crying, it’s not only normal to cry, it’s good too.