Nobody knows exactly what it was that had the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer sobbing her way through Prime Minister’s questions earlier this week. A cold-hearted cynic might have assumed it was the hapless brutality of Sir Keir Starmer’s answer when asked by the leader of the opposition if Rachel Reeves would remain his Chancellor for the remainder of the Government’s term. Sir Keir artlessly avoided the question in the most public and cringe-inducing manner possible.
Or perhaps, as the Chancellor’s allies insisted, it was simply a personal matter. For all we know, her beloved cat had died.
In any case, the financial markets reacted negatively towards Britain in the hours that followed. We can say one thing with some certainty: Whatever about all the guff over the years about how people should be freer showing their emotions, people with money at stake do not like seeing people in high-powered jobs blubbering in public.
Personally, I am not a crier. A bit of manly choking up is about as far as I go, usually in response to some emotion-stirring sporting triumph, and once because a female villain tricked me into watching a movie called The Notebook which was I suspect designed by scientists to make people cry. It is also the case that I am from perhaps that last generation of desperately repressed Irish men who still regard shedding tears as a sign of weakness. In myself, though not necessarily in others.
There are, of course, occasions when public tears are universally regarded as entirely acceptable for men and women alike: Funerals of loved ones being one example, world cup victories another. But by and large it remains the case, despite years of media efforts to change public perception, that public tears are more acceptable from a female than a male.
But even then, as Reeves has discovered, there are limits. Which makes this week’s events an interesting conundrum for feminists.
Female politicians have cried before, of course. The most famous case involves the hardest and most iron-willed female politician of them all, Baroness Thatcher, who blubbered openly as she left Downing Street against her will, defenestrated by her colleagues. That outpouring of tears provoked, at the time, a mixture of sympathy from supporters and cruel mockery from opponents.
Way back in 2008, when her campaign for President was floundering, Hillary Clinton also broke down in tears in a New Hampshire café, saying that it all felt very personal. That clip went around the world in a flash, inspiring much feminist sympathy for Mrs. Clinton, for all the good it ultimately did her.
So what’s different about Reeves? The short answer is that when you cry in public, it’s generally a good idea if the public understand the reason for your tears. Both Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs. Clinton had suffered career-defining political reversals. The reason for their sadness was relatable, even to their opponents.
But when you cry without formal or obvious explanation, people start to get worried. And uncomfortable. And they begin to suspect that the problem is with your strength of character and fortitude, rather than your environment. They start to think “maybe this job is too much for her”.
Of course, the problem for Reeves is that she can’t now, ever, offer an explanation. She has already told us that the cause of the tears was “a deeply personal matter”. You can’t go around disclosing deeply personal matters having initially described them as deeply personal. And as such, many will continue to suspect another explanation: That the job itself is just too much for her.
This whole thing isn’t that interesting in and of itself, but I do find it a fascinating example of how irrelevant much modern blabber about topics like crying is: You can write five hundred thinkpieces and host a million radio segments about how crying is healthy and not a sign of weakness and should be almost encouraged – but people will still react to tears from another human being in the ways that we always have done and have always been genetically programmed to do.
Tears are, first and foremost, an expression of intense emotion and feeling. That is what they betray. Nobody cries over a casual feeling. They cry because they are feeling something deep and overpowering that they cannot physically contain within themselves. When we understand what that is, we can sympathise with it: Loss, triumph, or whatever.
When we do not understand what it is, and cannot relate to it ourselves, we simply see a person experiencing some overpowering emotion that they cannot control. And that is programmed to make us nervous.
It’s also an enduring lesson: The human instinct is to prefer hard men and hard women in leadership. We know that Prime Ministers and Taoisigh and senior politicians have stressful jobs where big decisions have to be made. We instinctively prefer a streak of ruthlessness and coldness in those who have to make them.
That may not be fair. But it seems to me that this week’s incident with Mrs. Reeves shows that not much has changed in human nature, no matter how much we insist otherwise.
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