Why are we still bashing women for crying more than 2000 years after Aristotle did ?

Yesterday's PMQs highlights the systemic misogyny making the entire country sick and emotionally repressed, which women are just as much a part of as men.

Whilst I was, rather surprisingly, holding back the tears yesterday as I sat in A & E with my unimpressed kids for 4 hours until their dad could pick them up (I had my own personal drama- thyroid related -currently OK🤞) it seems things were even more dramatic in Westminster.

From the way the media vultures have pounced on Reeves, you would think she had stripped bare breasted, sobbed uncontrollably and had a Joker-style melt-down in front of all the cameras.

‘It is time for Reeves to go’ pronounced the nation’s voice of probity Robert Jenrick, whose name, when googled along with the term ‘sewage’ yields an interesting array of results.

Actually Rob, I rather think it is high time for you to sling your hook, given you consistently voted against reducing the amount of shit being dumped into our rivers. I don’t know about all of you, but I am more than ready to stop seeing that name from appearing every week in print.

The TV reporters were also pathetic, the women just as much as the men.

‘Maybe she was just suffering from hayfever?’

That was the best one female commentator could do, whilst her male counterpart also seized on the fact that Reeves had been caught crying on camera after the fiasco of the Welfare Reforms Bill and its failure to go through as she had hoped.

No-one stepped in to suggest that a slightly moist eye wasn’t actually a particularly big deal. I appreciate that many will point to the financial consequences. They will argue that tears do matter when they make the pound tumble as it did yesterday.

But what strikes me about the Reeves episode yesterday is the fact that none of the female journalists stuck up for a fellow woman. Instead they not merely joined in with the woman-bashing, but they actually often led it, undermining the broader feminist agenda for all of us in the process.

I’m going to leave the politics to one side for a moment, because cutting the winter fuel allowance and cutting disability benefits when multi-millionaires are still not taxed enough has been, let us just say, rather optically regrettable for Labour.

But let’s just focus on the human side of this for a moment. Whether you like Reeves or not, whether you are happy with the government or not, will no-one put forward the human argument?

That showing some emotion in public should not always be viewed as a sign of weakness? That the stiff upper lip we still seem to idolise in this country is often just repackaged unhealthy emotional repression? That women piling on against Reeves and accusing her of crying ‘crocodile tears’ actually says a lot more about their complicity in systemic misogyny than it does about her?

Because what shocks me the most (I say shocks, but I should say saddens) is that the worst offenders in this pile-on seem to be other women.

Take Clemmie Moody for instance, that paragon of Sisterhood, who published a piece in The Sun entitled ‘After the Mess you’ve made of the Country Why Cry now: Blubbing in Commons does no favours for Women.’

She even admits to meeting Reeves at a party and finding her ‘warm and gentle’ but happily thrusts the dagger into her in the article. Nice.

She quotes Aristotle’s Politics, saying that he insisted women were inferior to men because they were ‘more easily moved to tears.’ Then despite apparently dismissing it as a ‘lazy trope that would go on to be a mainstay of sexist science for the next 2,375 years’ she perpetuates that trope herself by saying:

‘Rachel just confirmed every last one of those last lingering suspicions … if I were her I’d want to cry too. But I wouldn’t. Because I would save it for the Commons loos afterwards - anywhere but on the hallowed green benches … such a showing instils no-one with confidence and sure enough the pound tumbled yesterday …I’d be a monster to say I don’t have sympathy for the poor woman .. but as a woman I wish he could have just -well kept a lid on it. ..’

She wishes she had just ‘kept a lid on it’ ?

It is heartening to hear that female solidarity is alive and kicking. Emphasis on the kicking. And that the bitchiness I once experienced at an all girls’ private school can clearly still exist well into middle age if it is drummed into you hard enough.

Whilst people scrabble around to ask whether Reeves has personal issues or is just showing self-pity, the bigger question of our attitude to showing emotion in public generally is being dodged.

Have we not progressed at all from the time when we started to ship boys off to boarding schools at 7 or 8 to toughen them up so that all their tears could be cried and collected into a pillow in one fell swoop, so they were prepared for the years of emotional repression ahead?

Is this really still what most people want to see in their leaders? Is this an attitude we want to be modelling for our children?

Nor has anyone mentioned perimenopause even once either. Rachel Reeves is now 46 so it is more than likely that she is having to deal with that on top of everything else. She is in a window in her life where it is probably physically harder to regulate emotions. But does that mean she is only fit for the scrap heap now despite her years of experience?

I didn’t cry at the hospital yesterday, but frankly I’m surprised I didn’t and if I had shed a few tears in public then really, how much of a big deal would it have been?

I don’t think that crying in public would have made me a lesser human being if I had done so.

Many of us have cried at work too and not made it to the toilets in time. I have had more than one partner or manager who has managed to do it.

If people were more honest, they would admit that most women have once been where Rachel was, particularly at this stage of life.

What disgusted me after reading the news about this was not the fact that she had cried. It was the fact that it had become big news at all.

But the sad reality is that so much of the media now, women included, is more exercised by a moist eye and a tear on a cheek than by the slaughter of thousands of children or by the many real atrocities going on in the world.

How about they focus on that?

But no. I suspect the media circus around this will last a while. Because there are many people who would love for us to be distracted by women bashing right now, when there are lots of topics which should be the focus of our attention instead. So unfortunately Reeves is probably going to get a lot more of it in the days and weeks to come.

So what, in summary, did I think of those tears? Not much - except that Reeves is a normal woman. If anything it made me see her as more of a human and relate to her more.

And what did I think of the backlash against her? That, I am sorry to say, our society has still not progressed very far in terms of misogyny and emotional intelligence since the time of Aristotle.

Thank you for reading.

I write because I like the connections it brings me and helps me make sense of the increasingly mad world we live in.

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What do you think of our attitudes towards crying in public and women showing emotion?