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Sentiments about crying divide along gender lines

Sentiments about crying divide along gender lines

NEW YORK -- "Please, please, please, just give the dog back," Ellen DeGeneres wept on national TV recently. It was a moment that quickly established itself in the pop culture firmament, less for the plight of Iggy the adopted terrier than for the copious crying itself.

Tears are a natural human response, and public figures are obviously not immune. But some who study this most basic expression of feeling will tell you that in this day and age, it can be easier for a crying man to be taken seriously than a crying woman.

In politics, it's a far cry (OK, pun intended) from 1972, when Sen. Ed Muskie's presidential campaign was derailed by what were perceived to be tears in response to a newspaper attack on his wife. Whether he actually cried is still up for debate. But decades later, an occasional Clintonesque tear is seen as a positive thing.

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Bill Clinton, that is.

"Bill could cry, and did, but Hillary can't," says Tom Lutz, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who authored an exhaustive history of crying. In other words, the same tearful response that would be seen as sensitivity in Bill could be seen as a lack of control in his wife.

There are additional rules for acceptable public crying. "We're talking about dropping a tear," Lutz notes, "no more than a tear or two." And it all depends on the perceived seriousness of the subject matter. Thus Jon Stewart or David Letterman could choke up with impunity just after 9/11. But a dog-adoption problem is a whole other matter.

In a recently published study at Penn State, researchers sought to explore differing perceptions of crying in men and women, presenting their 284 subjects with a series of hypothetical vignettes.

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What they found is that reactions depended on the type of crying, and who was doing it. A moist eye was viewed much more positively than open crying, and males got the most positive responses.

"Women are not making it up when they say they're damned if they do, damned if they don't," said Stephanie Shields, the psychology professor who conducted the study. "If you don't express any emotion, you're seen as not human, like Mr. Spock on 'Star Trek.' But too much crying, or the wrong kind, and you're labeled as overemotional, out of control and possibly irrational."

That comes as no surprise to Suzyn Waldman, a broadcaster of Yankees games on New York's WCBS Radio. She choked up for several seconds describing the scene as Manager Joe Torre's coaches choked up themselves, foreseeing the end of an era when the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs.

Her tearful report quickly became an Internet hit, and she was mocked far and wide, especially on radio, with her voice, for example, played over the song "Big Girls Don't Cry."

"This turned into something pretty ugly," Waldman said.

"When men express anger they gain status, but when women express anger they lose status," Yale social psychologist Victoria Brescoll, who conducted three experiments on how people perceive female anger, said. Her study is to be published in the journal Psychological Science.

There seems to be few limits on crying if you're an entertainment figure. Johnny Carson's tears were touching on the second-to-last night of his career, while serenaded by Bette Midler.

But in DeGeneres' case, along with the support from fans and many dog lovers, she also endured some criticism and mockery, especially from fellow comic Bill Maher. (To recap: DeGeneres had adopted Iggy from a rescue organization, then given it to her hairdresser's family when the dog didn't get along with her cats. That was against the rules, and the rescue group took the dog back, prompting her emotional appeal.)

Maher decided to respond on behalf of an entire gender: The opposite one.

"At this moment when the entire nation is saying, 'Hmm, can we have a woman president? Maybe they're too emotional,' I don't think this is helping," Maher said on his talk show.

"If I was a woman," he added, "I would be embarrassed right now. I would be embarrassed for all womankind."

First Published: October 28, 2007, 4:00 a.m.

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