Crying Lovers / Did male crying on tv improve in the early 2000s?

**Posted by PhoebeOnThePhone** November 13, 2021 6:15 pm

I feel like somewhere around 2002, male crying on American tv started getting more consistently good, and maybe even happen more often. I'm not gonna say there was no good male crying on tv before then. I KNOW that's not true, because I watched the X-Files, and Mulder was a consistently good crier. But I feel like it got more consistently good after the 90s. Like maybe that 'men don't cry except at funerals and baseball games' aspect of toxic masculinity had less of a hold on society than it did before.

Plus Lost premiered in 04 so we had the tears of Jack, and later other male tears, THEN Supernatural premiered in 05 so we had both those boys in or near tears at least once a season. (We could probably write a paper on not just Jensen Ackles' ridiculously photogenic crying, but also how the camera often practically presents him to us.)

What do y'all think?

**Posted by caircair** November 13, 2021 6:43 pm

I think you may be right, and I think it was due to the cultural shift from men showing emotion with a single manly tear to men showing emotion more realistically. Also, oddly enough, my opinion is that younger actors (age 40 or below) are generally better at crying than older actors, or at least more comfortable acting crying scenes. I've also found that actors who are quick to cry in real life tend to be better criers when acting as well.

**Posted by Amans lacrimae** November 14, 2021 7:34 pm

I think it's more common to see men crying openly nowadays, between the 50's and the 70's when men cried in film, most of the time you could hear the crying but the camera aimed elsewhere, so you knew the actor was crying but you never got to see the tears. And in movies from the 80's onward (from what I've seen) you can see tears falling down the cheeks, and after 2010 you see unchecked tears and even girls wiping guys tears.

**Posted by PhoebeOnThePhone** February 9, 2022 3:27 am

Amans, I'm not sure I've ever seen a scene of a woman wiping a man's tears. Mostly I just remember the guys often running a hand over their face to discreetly wipe their tears.