We’re damned if we do blub and damned if we don’t

Case in point? Next month the artist Sam Taylor-Wood brings out a book of photographs called Crying Men, which is exactly that: two dozen film stars, all of them macho pin-up types (or so we thought) — the likes of Paul Newman, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Sean Penn, Gabriel Byrne and Willem Dafoe — whom she has persuaded to weep for her camera.

OK, they are actors. They may well have faked it. But why did she ask them to do it? More to the point, why did they agree? I’ll tell you why. It’s our old friend, the Zeitgeist, which must be obeyed.

Right now, women are demanding that men “show their soft side” — by sobbing like schoolgirls. And men, rather oddly, are caving in under the pressure. Or as Taylor-Wood revealingly says about her (admittedly striking) images: “implacable male power (has been) reduced to the point of real vulnerability; ego stripped away”.

Of course, the cringe-making sight of “implacable male power” dissolving in floods of tears is now a commonplace in sport. When Paul Gascoigne blubbed at the 1990 World Cup he hit the headlines because the spectacle was a novelty. Now, the achievement of winning Wimbledon, or Olympic gold, is regarded as somehow incomplete if the new champ doesn’t turn on the waterworks, big time, at the victory ceremony.

Indeed, so torrential were Matthew “Man Mountain” Pinsent’s sobs after winning his coxless fours final that he has now apparently been signed up as the new “face of Kleenex Tissues”. I suppose his rugged rowing buddies can only be grateful that he isn’t the new face of Touche Eclat.

This clamour for strong men to go moist and wobbly is now producing ludicrous results. It is being claimed, for instance, that we have never truly understood Hitler because the thousands of books and films about him have never shown his “human side”. So Bernd Eichinger’s movie about Hitler’s last days, Der Untergang, depicts the genocidal monster being kind to secretaries, stroking dogs and blubbing all over the screen. Now, apparently, we have a “ rounded portrait”. The possibility that Hitler didn’t have a human side, and doesn’t warrant a “rounded portrait”, doesn’t seem to have occured to Eichinger.

The pro-blubbing brigade argue that great men have never been ashamed to cry. And it’s true that history furnishes one or two notable examples. Jesus wept. So did Julius Caesar (at least as Brutus tells it in Shakespeare’s play). Even Churchill is said to have been a bit of a sobber, though never in public. But they were operating in traumatic circumstances. They had every justification for the occasional (discreet) display of emotion. That’s a far cry, as it were, from David Beckham going misty-eyed on his son’s first day at school. For goodness’ sake, laddie, get a grip!

And the pressure on chaps to weep openly and frequently grows daily. New research purportedly shows that women cry a “healthy” 64 times a year, while men manage “only” 17 blubs. Even that figure fills me with incredulity. Seventeen times a year? Where did they do the survey? Italy? I don’t know one British man who has cried 17 times in his life.

Yet for all this fashionable talk of “caring men”, there still seems to be a craving for old-fashioned macho grit when it comes to leadership. Tough-talking Bush is wiping the floor with milksop Kerry. Putin spent all of half-an-hour “grieving” in Beslan (and came nowhere near to shedding a tear) before returning to Moscow and giving Russia what it really wanted: the promise of iron-fisted retribution.

So what do we make of these contradictory signs? The trouble is, 21st-century man is damned if he does blub and damned if he doesn’t. Maintain the classic, stoic, British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity, as men are conditioned to do from their first school days, and women will accuse you of insensitivity. Adopt an ostentatious New-Mannish “empathy” with sorrow, and it’s just as likely that you will be thought soppy and unreliable.

It’s very confusing. But I find it impossible not to be suspicious of men who blub too easily. As Nora Ephron once put it: “Beware of the man who cries; he cries only for himself”.

Or for Kleenex Tissues, of course.

Anyone for a shot?

TALKING of ‘ard blokes showing their unexpected touchy-feely side, I see that Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the world’s favourite killing tool, has arrived in London to launch a new vodka that bears his moniker. The 84-year-old former Red Army general, who designed his AK47 rifle shortly after serving as a tank commander in the Second World War (hence its initials, short for Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947) has been appointed “honorary chairman” of Kalashnikov Vodka, which will be distilled in Russia but bottled in Essex, and aimed largely at British drinkers who already pour £1.5 billion worth of the clear stuff down their throats each year.

The man behind the operation is the British businessman John Florey. He sees nothing wrong with cashing in on a name with such chilling associations. For him, apparently, Kalashnikov “stands for integrity”. Besides, he argues, nobody gets upset about other commercial ventures with “military roots”, such as the Army and Navy Stores.

Good point. What’s next — Pol Pot Noodles?

Come as you are

JUST received an invitation to an event at Buckingham Palace. The only trouble is that it doesn’t specify what one should wear. So do I dress as Batman and bring my own ladder, or go in through the front gate in my normal “man about town” attire: cycle helmet, khaki shorts, and amusingly patterned Hawaiian Airlines T-shirt (circa 1993)? “I’d opt for the Batman tights if I were you,” my wife advises. “The police will be marginally less likely to shoot you.”

Actually, if the Metropolitan Police Commissioner really wants to tighten security at the Palace, and indeed at the House of Commons, he ought to hand over control to the woman who fixes the appointments at my GP’s surgery. Then nobody would get in.

Tutu much

MUST have been a torrid weekend at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where the “consciousness and experiential section” of the British Psychological Society held its annual conference. The topics discussed apparently included “black women, ballet dancers, stress, sexual harassment and dominance-submissive sexual games”. Fair enough, but when they finished analysing all my hang-ups and fantasies, what else did they talk about?

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