A Man Who Cannot Cry

-Suhani Sankhe, FYBMS

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”

The question, posed in Fight Club, reduces masculinity to a peculiar equation: pain becomes proof, violence becomes initiation, and vulnerability becomes something to overcome. While a film pushes these ideas to an extreme, the belief beneath them is far more familiar. From “man up” to “be a man,” masculinity is often presented not as an identity to discover, but as a standard to meet. And perhaps that is where the story begins : not with the man who cannot cry, but with the question of who taught him that he shouldn’t cry in the first place.

The screen rarely tells us directly what a man should be; instead, it repeats the idea until it begins to feel natural. Popular culture has long associated manhood with stoicism, dominance, physical strength and the ability to endure without complaint. From the celebrated declaration that “It’s a man’s world” in James Brown’s 1966 song to films, where the silent, physically powerful hero is held up as the ideal, and masculinity is repeatedly packaged as something that must be performed rather than simply experienced. Even vulnerability is often reserved for moments that ultimately lead back to strength. For instance, the hero breaks, but only briefly; he cries, but only when someone dies; he suffers, but silently. These portrayals do not exist in isolation from society. They become cultural cues, absorbed by audiences and reproduced in everyday expectations. When the same message appears across enough songs, films and stories, it stops looking like a stereotype and starts looking like common sense.

And perhaps this contradiction is most visible in Mulan, a film celebrated for challenging the boundaries imposed on women. As Mulan enters a world where she must prove that being a woman does not make her incapable of strength, the background score sings, “I’ll make a man out of you.” The phrase is meant to signify transformation: discipline, courage, resilience and physical strength. Yet beneath its humour lies an assumption worth questioning. If Mulan has to become a “man” to be recognised as strong, what does that suggest about the way strength itself has been gendered? The film may dismantle one boundary by proving that a woman can possess these qualities, while inadvertently reinforcing another : the idea that these qualities belong to men in the first place. So who has reinforced this single definition of masculinity?

Perhaps the answer begins much earlier than adulthood. Masculinity is rarely handed to a boy as a complete definition; it is taught to him in small corrections, passing comments and seemingly harmless instructions, until they accumulate into a rulebook he never remembers agreeing to. As a child, he may be told that dolls are “for girls,” that pink is not a colour he should choose, or that crying over a scraped knee is something to be embarrassed about. When he falls, the instinctive question is often not “does it hurt?” but “are you okay, be a man.” In Indian households, the familiar phrase “mard ko dard nahi hota” (men do not feel pain) has become so culturally recognisable that its absurdity can disappear beneath its familiarity. Pain becomes something to hide and tears become something to swallow. Then adolescence arrives, bringing a different set of instructions. He is expected to be confident but not arrogant, aggressive but not emotional, interested in girls but never vulnerable enough to appear “desperate.” Even romance comes with its own masculine script: he should make the first move, initiate the conversation, plan the date, pay the bill, and somehow know how to be the provider. Bollywood has repeatedly turned this expectation into a familiar romantic formula : the hero pursues, the heroine is pursued, and the man is expected to prove his love through persistence, grand gestures and taking charge. By adulthood, the same lesson has simply acquired more respectable vocabulary. He becomes the provider, the protector, the one who is expected to remain composed when everyone else falls apart. None of these expectations, taken individually, necessarily seem cruel. Wanting someone to be responsible, courageous or dependable is hardly a problem. The problem begins when these qualities are treated as the price of entry into manhood and when every emotion that does not fit the script is quietly pushed aside. A boy is not born knowing that vulnerability is feminine, and that asking for help is weakness, or that strength requires silence. He learns it. And because he learns it repeatedly from family, friends, classrooms, films, songs and eventually from other men who were taught the same rules, then what began as a lesson starts to feel like nature. The cycle continues: a boy learns how a “man” is supposed to behave, grows into a man who performs those expectations, and then passes the same rulebook on to the next boy.

But what happens when the man refuses to follow the script? What happens when he cries openly, talks about his fears, cares deeply about how he looks, loves fashion, paints, dances, or simply chooses to be gentle without apologising for it? Interestingly, society often does not respond by questioning the boundaries of masculinity; instead, it questions the man who crosses them. A man who is emotionally expressive may be called “too sensitive,” while one who takes an interest in fashion, skincare or art can quickly be labelled “feminine.” Sometimes, the assumption goes even further : his mannerisms, interests or emotional openness may become grounds for questioning his sexuality, as though being attracted to men or being feminine were somehow the same thing. The public conversations around figures such as Ranveer Singh, for instance, have repeatedly shown how a man’s unconventional fashion choices can become a discussion about whether he looks “manly” enough in the first place. The clothes themselves are not inherently masculine or feminine; it is the gaze surrounding them that assigns them those meanings. The same happens with vulnerability. A man who says “I’m scared,” “I need help,” or simply cries is not necessarily becoming less masculine; he is displaying an emotion that has been unfairly removed from the masculine vocabulary. Yet the reaction often reveals how deeply the boundary has been internalised: if a man steps outside it, we search for another label to put him back inside a box. This raises a more uncomfortable question : Who gendered these things in the first place? Who decided that tenderness belongs on one side of the divide, while courage belongs on the other? Why should a paintbrush, a pink shirt, a skincare routine or a tear carry a gender at all? Perhaps the problem is not that men are becoming too feminine when they cross these boundaries, but that we have spent so long treating masculinity and femininity as opposing poles that we have forgotten how much human behaviour exists in between them.

Maybe the grey area is where the real conversation about masculinity begins. It is the space where a man can be ambitious without being defined by his career, protective without becoming controlling, confident without being dominant, and vulnerable without having to apologise for it. It is also where traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” qualities stop being opposites and simply become human qualities. There is nothing inherently masculine about courage, just as there is nothing inherently feminine about tenderness, and rather both are human traits. We have attached these meanings to them, repeated them for generations, and eventually mistaken them for facts. To move beyond the poles, then, does not mean asking men to abandon masculinity. It means allowing masculinity to be less of a performance and more of a personal experience and something that can look different from one man to another, without one version needing to invalidate the rest.

And this does not mean that men need to be told to be vulnerable either. That would only turn vulnerability into another test of what makes a “good” man. Look at Ma Dong-seok: he is almost always introduced on screen through his physical presence : big, intimidating, capable of taking down anyone in his way. Yet beneath that toughness, his characters can be funny, caring, protective and surprisingly tender. None of those qualities make him any less formidable. And maybe that is the point. A man can be strong without being emotionally closed off; he can be soft without becoming weak. Perhaps masculinity was never meant to be a choice between two opposite poles. Perhaps the real freedom lies in being allowed to exist somewhere in between.

And perhaps that is what the poles between us really are : not two fixed sides of masculinity, but boundaries we have been taught to see as opposites. Dead Poets’ Society gives us a glimpse of what happens when a person is finally allowed to question the role he has been handed, rather than simply perform it. The man who cannot cry was never necessarily born without tears; he was taught to hide them. The man who cannot wear pink, love poetry, care about fashion, or admit fear was not born knowing these things were “feminine”; somewhere along the way, we gendered them for him. Maybe it is time to stop asking whether a man is masculine enough and start asking whether he is free enough to be himself. Because strength and softness were never meant to be opposing poles. They were simply two parts of being human. So, the next time you see a man cry, choose not to wonder whether he has become less of a man. Remember that perhaps, for once, he has simply stopped trying to prove that he is one.

References : 

American Psychological Association. (2018). Guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf 

American Psychological Association. (2019). A closer look at the APA guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men. https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2019/boys-men-look 

American Psychological Association. (2023). How to prevent harmful masculinity and violence. https://www.apa.org/topics/men-boys/harmful-masculinity 

American Psychological Association. (2025). Rethinking masculinity to build healthier outcomes. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/11-12/rethinking-masculinity