Calling a Moratorium on Women’s Tears: How Women Use the Accountability Gap to Manipulate Men and Why Men Must Resist It
By Janice Fiamengo
My subject is the problem of women’s tears. I argue that the exploitation of female tears creates an accountability gap in our societies; I’ve decided to use that phrase, accountability gap, rather than my original damseling, which describes something more specific.
My contention is that most feminist laws, policies, and social movements—whether MeToo, rape shield laws, the biased family court system, sexual harassment policies in the workplace, or the feminization of the professions—all these and more find their roots to some extent or other in women’s tears and our difficulty in resisting them. So, this is a call to resistance.
I am going to show that the tyranny of women’s tears has at least a 200-year history in the Anglophone
world—I’m sure it’s much older than that, but I don’t have the hard evidence—and I’m also going to touch on recent research strongly suggesting that women’s tears affect men at a basic bio-chemical level, shutting down some regions of the male brain and activating others, a fact that tells us something about how men evolved historically to respond to women’s demands.
Ultimately, I will argue, the solution to the accountability gap must be to restore male authority in the family and in society because women themselves are not, generally speaking, interested in becoming (or perhaps able to become) more accountable by using rational means of argumentation rather than tears.