A brief history of tears

Men are reinventing themselves as victims. Champions of male liberation insist that in the war of the sexes all recent casualties have been on their side, and indeed that many of the deaths have been self-inflicted. ‘As boys experience the pressures of the male role, their suicide rate increases 25,000 percent’, says one. ¹ A man’s lot is not a happy one, we are told, because he is made to sacrifice his health and happiness for the sake of others. As if it were not enough having to provide for his family and put up with all the occupational hazards and mental stress involved, he is expected to be an ‘unpaid bodyguard’: ‘You know that is your job as a man – every time you are with a woman … any woman, not just your wife’. ² The so-called mythopoetic wing of the men’s movement traces male altruism right back to Greek legend, with the aid of a garbled version of the story of how Kleobis and Biton died helping their mother, and a bit of dubious Indoeuropean etymology claiming that the Greek word hero meant ‘basically a slave whose purpose was to serve and protect’. ³