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Benjamin Perry is a Proud Cry Baby
2.4k Plays1 year ago
For this episode I was so excited to welcome back season 4 guest Benjamin Perry, a Minister at Middle Church in NYC, to discuss his new book, "Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter"! I loved Ben's book, and we had a fascinating chat about crying and how it relates to queerness and queer liberation.
We discussed Ben's realization that he hadn't cried in years and had to teach himself how again (and how this was related to coming out as bisexual), the science of tears and the latest research on crying, how crying affects our social development and connections with other people, how we change when we cry, why our culture values NOT crying and what happens when we suppress tears, why men cry less than women and how expressing authentic emotions often conflicts with traditional masculinity (and how to overcome that), why tears are and have historically been important for the queer community, and why crying is necessary to build a better society.
There are 15 minutes of bonus material available on Patreon in which we dove deeper into the intersection of crying and queerness (as well as other intersections), discussed how "crocodile tears" can be weaponized to cause harm, and learned why we should believe people when they cry -- even if their reasoning is unsound. Subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/robertbrookscohen
You can buy Ben's book here: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506485119/Cry-Baby
And follow Ben on X here: https://twitter.com/FaithfullyBP
Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction of Benjamin Perry
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to To Buy Guys. We're back with a familiar face today. It's book season. You all know this guest. He was here last two years ago, a couple of seasons ago. Was that two years ago? I think so. I mean, it was a few seasons ago. I have to check. Time is really cruel.
00:00:35
Speaker
I know, I know. Why does it keep on going and going? Can we take a pause sometimes?
The Significance of Crying in 'Cry, Baby'
00:00:43
Speaker
Benjamin Perry is back with us. He is a minister at Middle Church and an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Sir Jerners, and Bustle. And he has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, New York One, and other places.
00:00:59
Speaker
He holds a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and a master's in divinity from Union Theological Seminary where multiple episodes of SVU that I wrote were filmed. I think I said that the last time you were here. Still true.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah. And now he has a book, his first book. It's called Cry, Baby, Why Our Tears Matter. It was published in May of this year. It is now available everywhere and it is awesome. I just finished reading it. It really resonated with me and
00:01:33
Speaker
It's stuff I've been thinking about, but the book really helped clarify a lot of things for me and gave me some new ways to talk about crying and tears and how it relates to a lot of things that we'll talk about. Welcome back, Ben Perry. It's so good to be back, Rob. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
00:01:53
Speaker
I'm so glad you're here. I loved our first conversation. It was a lot about theology and bisexuality. We've talked about how Jesus might have been bisexual and stuff like that. So now we'll talk about a whole new realm of stuff, but it's all related as you wrote about. So before we get into the book, I just want to check in.
Ben Perry's Gender and Sexuality Journey
00:02:18
Speaker
I use he-him pronouns, but what pronouns do you use these days? And I know you still identify as bisexual, but has that identity evolved since we chatted? Does it mean the same thing to you today? What does queerness and bisexuality mean to you these days?
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah, I use he and they pronouns these days. I've been in a more gender fluid space of late, a testimony to my own confusion vis-a-vis my gender more than anything else. I don't feel like I have a whole lot of definitive things to say about my gender as I still feel a little unstuck in
00:03:05
Speaker
time to paraphrase Billy Pilgrim. But yeah, I've been trying to sort of nod to the fact that I have never felt particularly comfortable within cisgender masculinity. Thinking back to even being a little kid,
00:03:24
Speaker
never felt comfortable in large groups of cis men. And the more I started to recognize that that wasn't actually about them, it probably was a little something to do about me and started scratching beneath that surface, I realized that, yeah, I don't strongly identify with being a man.
00:03:45
Speaker
I don't know exactly where that leaves me, but I've been trying to nod to that sort of expansive place so people have a better sense of at least roughly where I am as much as I know it these days. Regarding my sexuality, I've been using queer more. I think particularly as I've been wrestling with some of my own gender stuff, queer, I like as a nice catch-all for
00:04:12
Speaker
something that will encompass both some of the gender fluidity that I've been moving through and then also
00:04:23
Speaker
It's funny that the label bisexuality, pansexuality, like there's a lot of different words that people use for the same thing that I experienced, which is I just don't, you know, my, I'm attracted to people regardless of gender.
Queering Identity and Belief Systems
00:04:36
Speaker
I don't use bisexuality to mean like, Oh, I'm attracted to men and women. And I think many people who identify as bisexual, don't use the word that way. But I've also heard other people be like,
00:04:48
Speaker
oh, well, that's what bi means too. And therefore if you're bisexual, it means you're attracted to two genders. Maybe it's not men and women, but it means that there's two genders you're attracted to. And I think that's a little needlessly legalistic. But I've been using queer just because I like how expansive it is. And I also like that it opens a doorway for if I want to talk more about my gender, if I want to talk more about my sexuality, it can. But in other spaces, when I actually don't really want to get into it, I can just say queer and people get a sense that like, oh,
00:05:17
Speaker
He's not a cishetero and that I think is enough oftentimes that I want to give people for if I don't actually want to enter into a whole conversation that I may not be feeling that day.
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah, I also have been using queer a lot more for exactly the same reasons. I have nothing to add. You summed up my feelings perfectly as well. And I also like how the word queer can sort of refer to more than just sexuality and there's other ways we can queer ourselves or relationships or communities and things like that.
00:05:53
Speaker
I just actually gave a whole sermon last Sunday talking about what does it mean to say God is queer and explicitly saying it doesn't have anything to do with saying that God has a queer sexuality, God has a queer gender identity.
00:06:07
Speaker
God is God. God does not have a sexuality or gender identity. But this idea of defying binaries, of breaking supposedly fixed borders, of this endless becoming, of dynamic change, of that fluidity that I very much
00:06:29
Speaker
my own theology is in a sort of process place these days. I don't believe in God as a sort of static entity, but something that is endlessly developing and changing and evolving alongside humanity. And so I think to talk about queerness in those kinds of languages also, it's a useful analytic tool to help people see that in the same way that queerness is not just about who we're attracted to, who we sleep with, who we love, although that certainly is part of it.
00:06:58
Speaker
that to say God is queer, likewise, helps people think and understand both God and queer siblings in a different kind of way. So just to say, it's a long way of saying I completely agree, and I think queer is a really useful lens for inviting all kinds of other conversation.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. I hadn't heard that, but I agree that God to me is an idea. And I think we talked about this last time, but a lot of this started to make sense to me when I came out as queer and it fit so much with my conception of God and things I had learned in my Jewish upbringing about questioning authority and asking questions and developing your sense of relating to the world as opposed to just
00:07:44
Speaker
doing what you're told kind of thing. So it's all connected.
The Evolution of Ben's Book on Crying
00:07:54
Speaker
Okay, let's talk about the book, Cry Baby, or Cry, comma, Baby, more accurately. So how did this come about? Why did you decide to write a book about crying?
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, I really didn't set out in the world to write a book about crying. I actually ended up writing an essay about crying.
00:08:19
Speaker
in the beginning of the pandemic. So I was living right next to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights. And I was watching as they were parking morgue trucks in the street outside my window, because so many of my neighbors were dying that there wasn't enough space for them in the morgue. And
00:08:42
Speaker
While this was happening, there was also this relentless push towards normalcy of like, get back to the office or not physically in the office, but like get back to work. We got to put on a brave face and just keep a stiff upper lip and make sure that the trains run out of time. It was this really perverse friction where I was experiencing so much grief just listening to the sirens wail all the time.
00:09:13
Speaker
did not see that grief reflected in a broader cultural response. And it brought back for me this really visceral memory of being 20, 21 years old and realizing that I hadn't cried for a decade.
00:09:32
Speaker
I had a professor in seminary who invited us to reflect on the last time we had wept. And as the conversation was going around this little circle, I realized that I had no memory, zero memory of the last time I had cried. I had so suppressed and deadened my emotions because of internalized homophobia and
00:09:55
Speaker
you know, toxic masculinity and all these other things that had convinced me that that kind of vulnerability was a liability and a weakness that I had just totally shut down to the point where I did not actually feel emotions in any real or significant way. And so I could sort of feel the rough contours of being happy or sad, but I didn't actually feel euphoric or heartbroken.
00:10:19
Speaker
And I had this, again, this embodied flashback to this memory of myself when I just was not feeling things. And what I ended up doing in my early 20s while I was in seminary was starting this deliberate practice of forcing myself to cry every day.
00:10:36
Speaker
I did it the first time that the same day as that class, I went home and I was like, oh man, something is broken inside of me and I need to fix it. I made myself cry and then I felt so good crying that first time after so long that I ended up making myself cry every day as a sort of spiritual experiment. What happened over the course of several months was I just completely rewired my emotions and I became somebody who learned how to feel again.
00:11:02
Speaker
So I was reflecting on that transformation that I had undergone when I was in my early 20s and used it as a kind of microcosm for what I thought we collectively needed to do. As a culture, needed to learn how to grieve, needed to learn how to express the pain that we were feeling and really confront it instead of papering over it with these exhortations towards normalcy.
00:11:28
Speaker
So I wrote this essay and it ended up in the Washington Post and an editor reached out to me and said, hey, would you be interested in writing a whole book about crying? And I said, I've never thought about that. But the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized that
00:11:48
Speaker
Crying was this beautiful lens to talk about all of these things that I cared so passionately about, about queerness and masculinity and race and politics and transformation and the opportunity to treat emotions as a topic for serious academic consideration. And the more I researched and looked into the topic of crying, I realized that there were very, very few
00:12:18
Speaker
serious treatments of crying in any kind of intellectual way. Crying has this big outsized footprint in poets' minds, but has such a modest treatment in any kind of serious intellectual inquiry. And so I wanted to write a book that would really approach crying with the seriousness I think it deserves.
00:12:42
Speaker
Fascinating. Yeah, it's also something that the more I read and thought about it is really a big part of my story and trajectory, especially coming out as bi. But it wasn't something that we've really talked about on this podcast that much. We've talked about emotions and recognizing them, but not so much about crying.
Crying and Queer Identity Exploration
00:13:03
Speaker
And I think I went through a similar thing to you. I don't know about never ever crying, but
00:13:09
Speaker
I also was brought up with an aversion to that and I would repress tears a lot and I didn't think it was cool or manly to cry. I mean, we'll get into all of this. But
00:13:23
Speaker
coming out as bi and going to see a therapist, that was very intertwined with starting to recognize my emotions and accept them and realize they were real and valid. And then to come out as bi, like around the same time I started crying more, but at first in a therapist's office and then in real life in different situations. And
00:13:50
Speaker
Can you talk about how your queer journey was intertwined with with this story of crying in the book? Yeah, I'd be glad to. And this is one of my favorite things about now having written a book about crying is I share that with people and I get to hear all of the stories of other people's journey and transformation with their tears. It's been this completely unexpected wondrous gift.
00:14:18
Speaker
people are so eager to talk about their tears, to talk about how crying has changed them. And alternatively, also to talk about, I hear so many people who say, I wish I could cry.
00:14:37
Speaker
That's been a reaction that maybe I should have expected given my own history, but I didn't. I kind of thought that I would have been one of the only people who had really suppressed tears to the point of exercising them for my life. And what I found having written the book is that so many people
00:14:55
Speaker
have this same experience of yearning to feel more deeply and feeling like there's just something blocked inside of them that's keeping them from that full experience of humanity. So yes, I'm going to talk a little bit about my own journey and my own queerness. Yeah, crying and particularly suppressing my tears.
00:15:20
Speaker
happened at the same time that I was awakening to my own queer identity. So the time that I stopped crying was probably fourth, fifth, sixth grade, which was right around when I also was realizing that I was attracted to boys. And that was a truth that I was not ready to confront.
00:15:45
Speaker
let alone share with anybody else. I just was not ready for me to really own that. And crying particularly in men or folks who are acculturated as boys is so feminized and so resoundly linked to homosexuality because anything that's a feminine man is automatically homosexual.
00:16:13
Speaker
that I think I had a pretty keen understanding that if I was crying, it might invite people to ask questions about something that I was just not ready to face. And again, I think I was actually more scared of admitting it to myself than I was about even other people knowing. And so I learned to suppress those tears. I learned
00:16:41
Speaker
In the beginning, I would start to feel like I needed to cry and I would suppress it in the moment so that I could get to a private place, a bathroom, or wait until I got home and I would cry in my room. But the thing about emotional numbness is that it becomes habitual and instinctive like anything else. You learn how to
00:17:07
Speaker
when you feel those tears coming, push them down. And then sometimes you go back to your room later and you actually don't cry at all. And then maybe the next time, you start feeling like you might be moving towards a place of tears and you cut that off at the pass so you never even get close to that place where you might be crying. And so before you know it, you're just not,
00:17:38
Speaker
in a place where you feel particularly moved to cry ever. And so, yeah, by the time I was in seventh or eighth grade, I was still very much in the closet about my sexuality, still very much unwilling to admit to myself, and I knew that I was not really ready to
00:18:01
Speaker
be honest that this was something that was really true about myself. I was like, maybe it'll change. I definitely felt like I was, and particularly being not homosexual, but somewhere all over the place in terms of my attraction, it was easy enough to just focus on my attraction to girls or to women and pretend that the rest of that didn't exist.
00:18:32
Speaker
But as I was doing this, that process of partitioning off parts of the self is a kind of psychic violence. And I think that this scar tissue that ended up layered so deeply over my tear ducts to use a weird metaphor, I think that is a product of the kind of emotional damage that I was doing because I was afraid.
00:18:59
Speaker
And so as I learned, then by the time I got to college, I started coming to terms with myself. I still wasn't out publicly in the world, but I was starting to sleep with man and was starting to recognize that this was a really core part of me that wasn't going anywhere. And so maybe I needed to find a way to integrate it into my personhood.
00:19:23
Speaker
And so by the time I reached seminary, I had really started to unravel some of that internalized homophobia. And then it was really that process of being in seminary and learning to cry again that helped me let go of the last of that shame. And so I think the journey that I made in college of starting to accept my sexuality was what brought me to a point where then in my first year of seminary,
00:19:48
Speaker
I was able to have this experience where I realized that there was this emotional damage that I had suffered that I really needed to work on.
Crying as Emotional Release
00:19:59
Speaker
And then it was sort of paradoxically that working on the emotional damage that helped me carry me that last leg of the journey in terms of actually owning and accepting my queerness. By the time I was done with Seminary, I was both a person who could feel and cry again.
00:20:18
Speaker
somebody who was no longer ashamed about who I was. I'm interested, you were sharing that crying was also very salient for you in this period where you were learning to accept your own bisexuality. And I'm wondering, what did it feel like in your body when you learned how to cry again?
00:20:42
Speaker
trying to think back to that moment. I do feel these days when I'm crying, it feels so good, even when the impulse is something difficult or negative. It just feels like I'm really experiencing that and not pushing it down. And it
00:21:05
Speaker
It's this thing I feel in my chest, and it is hard to describe. I work on this with my therapist, but it is some kind of a release of tension. And I think back to when I cried in my therapist's office and when I was first coming out, which was sort of the first time I said it out loud even to myself,
00:21:26
Speaker
And I think I was afraid. I mean, I was finally accepting feelings that were inside that I had pushed away for so long. And there was some recognition in me that life might change now that I'm addressing this, and it was really, really scary for me to do that.
00:21:51
Speaker
but it was also liberating. And I think that was part of the tears was the liberation and the feeling of like, I was sad for having repressed all this for so long, but there was something forward-looking about those tears. And
00:22:09
Speaker
I mean, I wrote this down. You wrote about tears as like people think of them as a consequence of things that lead up to the moment of crying. But actually, you wrote about them as a doorway to the future and to change and to authenticity. So I loved that and I was curious for you to expand on that.
00:22:33
Speaker
Thank you so much for sharing those experiences and memories with me. I think there's something really intimate about talking about crying. Crying is this very simultaneously private and social experience. It's something that's both core to ourselves but also connects us to one another. I think talking about tears
00:23:01
Speaker
it always feels intimate to me in a way that feels like a gift. So I just want to say thank you for giving me that gift. You're welcome. Yeah, thinking about what you've said and how does that reflect on sort of crying as a doorway. One of the things I hear in your story is how humanizing crying is, that when we allow ourselves to cry,
00:23:29
Speaker
it is this visceral embodied recognition of what we are moving through, whether that's the pain of loss and grief or joy or tenderness or even fear and anxiety. There's all these emotions that so oftentimes go
00:23:54
Speaker
unnamed beneath the surface of our lives because sometimes it's inconvenient to confront our emotions. Sometimes we just got to like, I got to finish this project. I got to turn this in on deadline. I've got to
00:24:10
Speaker
I have a party to organize. I don't have time to deal with these feelings. And when we do that enough, we start to really alienate ourselves from our emotions. And I think that one of the things that I think is really important to talk about is that this alienation benefits somebody. It is the kind of emotional suppression that so many of us endure day to day is a product of the systems of racism and capitalism and
00:24:40
Speaker
homophobia and transphobia and all these big systemic evils that we live under, those forces want us to feel divorced from ourselves because people who don't feel are people who don't resist. And so when I think about tears as a doorway, one of the things I'm thinking about is it's this invitation
00:25:10
Speaker
to recognize that we have already been moving through this personal journey. There are so many things that you are already moving through that are happening in the background of your life that you may not be naming or truly feeling in a deep way. And if we can cry about them, it's this almost liturgical action, this ability to stop, to name the thing we're experiencing and to dignify it.
00:25:38
Speaker
All of that is humanizing. It makes us feel human. And if we do it together, the response we get from somebody else who affirms, yes, the thing you are feeling is real and valid, that's what helps us feel not alone. And I think for me, that's one of the most important pieces in crying is the social dimension that if we're able to cry in the presence of another and somebody who empathically holds our tears,
00:26:07
Speaker
Again, it's this humanizing response. It's this person seeing what we've been moving through and saying, yeah, that's a fucking lot to endure. And I'm so proud to be in your presence and so proud to be on that journey with you.
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00:27:34
Speaker
It helped me understand a lot and differentiate reading your book, differentiate different types of crying and what purposes they serve. And there's some that serve these social functions, and then there's the internal. And it helped me realize I've had all of these experiences. I've
00:27:53
Speaker
especially since being with my wife. We fight a lot and we cry sometimes. And I used to think, oh, that must be terrible if one of us is crying. The other one must have done something to really hurt the other person. And that's possible, but it's not always the case.
00:28:15
Speaker
And a lot of the time, it's the first realization or recognition that we are really hurting about something that's more than just what we're talking about, that there's something deeper that we need to look at and
00:28:30
Speaker
crying is like the signal to the other person or other people around us. It's also a signal to ourselves. And there's been other times like I've been having career struggles in my TV writing career. It's very difficult profession. And I've had a lot of jealousy and resentment at times. And a couple months ago, I had a dream about this and
00:29:00
Speaker
I woke up crying and I was alone. I wasn't with my partner that night. I forget why, but I was in bed alone and I just couldn't stop crying because I
00:29:15
Speaker
I was just thinking about all these things and I didn't know what to do and I felt so bad. And I still don't know exactly what that meant, but it was a signal to me that there was something deeper here that I hadn't yet fully confronted. And it was kind of fascinating. I couldn't believe that I couldn't fall back asleep. And it was both terrible and it was also
00:29:43
Speaker
liberating because I finally just gave into it and I just cried for like a couple hours and I just didn't sleep. It's interesting that you're talking about crying in this space between sleep and waking because one of the things I've noticed in conversations with a lot, because I did all these interviews for the book so I've just talked to so many people about crying at this point,
00:30:08
Speaker
One of the things I've noticed in the interviews is how many people report crying more frequently in liminal spaces, that oftentimes you won't necessarily cry in the hospital room with somebody, but maybe you're crying in the antechamber before you enter.
00:30:24
Speaker
or you cry in the car ride home. People cry on planes. I was interviewing a lot of people from my wife's old office that I talk about in the book, and they talk about this stairway, this stairwell being the place everybody would go to cry. I think so oftentimes we cry in places that are
00:30:48
Speaker
are between one thing and another because crying is physically that process that moves us from somewhere to somewhere else. I have this interview in the chapter on physiology and crying that I love with this researcher who focuses on why people cry in response to art.
00:31:10
Speaker
why would you cry from an aesthetic encounter? He started this research because he was at a Rothko exhibit and he saw all of these people crying. If you're not familiar with Rothko paintings, they're just these big voluminous blocks of color. And he saw these people crying in front of them and he was like, okay, well, if they're crying about this, it's not the painting. It must be something inside of them. And he's built this whole analytical frame where he thinks about crying as
00:31:37
Speaker
particularly with relationship to art as our willingness to step into a liminal space.
00:31:46
Speaker
with a understanding in our heads that we're going to be the same as we were on the other side of it. And then all of a sudden we get into the middle of this aesthetic encounter with a piece of art and we find all of these things that we've been moving through and all of a sudden we can't help ourselves and we just start to cry because it's not just about what we're watching, the book we're reading, it's about what we've been moving through personally.
00:32:10
Speaker
And that's the thing that it becomes the impetus for our tears. And I think people's frequency and likelihood to cry in these liminal spaces is, again, a testimony to this process of tears as a function of transformation, as something that happens when we are in the middle of being transformed. And so it doesn't surprise me at all to hear you sharing this story about crying as you are waking up from a dream because
00:32:40
Speaker
it's this, like you say, physical manifestation of something that you have been moving through emotionally as your body is moving from a place of sleeping to a place of waking. You need that sort of break to sometimes get to that point to process what's happening and then make the transform whether you want to or not, but it often can't happen in the moment.
00:33:07
Speaker
And evolutionary psychologists will point to this function of crying as possibly a way that we are able to process trauma at a later time. So if you're- Right.
00:33:20
Speaker
running away from a predator or something, it's not a particularly good time to start crying. But then if you completely move back and blow past this experience and don't process it at all, you're actually not gonna learn the lessons that are gonna keep you safe the next time around. And so what an adaptive process to have this ability to sort of experience an emotional echo of a thing that we've been through in a time that hopefully we're in a safer place or with somebody we love and we're able to relive in real and emotional ways.
00:33:49
Speaker
this thing that we have gone through. I just love that idea of crying as this emotional echo space that lets us relive something important because there's still things we haven't learned yet.
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah, that part of the book made so much sense to me. I want to get back to that in a second. But you also mentioned something.
Art, Music, and Emotional Connection
00:34:09
Speaker
I'm going to jump around a little because I thought it's fascinating about crying in response to art. And there was part of your book where you talked about crying, listening to the choir in church or music in general. And
00:34:24
Speaker
And for me, theater or something, I've had those experiences. Even when I was younger and I would suppress crying about personal things, I would cry in the theater when something resonated on an emotional level or connected to something I was going through. And it was a signal that, oh, that's unimportant
00:34:45
Speaker
idea to me or that's an important emotion to me or has something going on with me. And even more so, music. I remember being in the jazz band in high school and I don't know why, but there would always be certain parts of certain songs that I just thought were so beautiful. And the melodies and harmonies and the way the band played together
00:35:13
Speaker
made my body vibrate on just this right frequency that made me emotional. And I didn't always cry while I'm playing in the band, but I had that feeling of deep emotion and awe of just these notes played in this order and how it came together. Can you talk about how music and art play a role in this?
00:35:43
Speaker
I mean, one of the things I would just say is like, what a beautiful testament to the majesty with which we're created, that we would be able to feel so deeply in response to an aesthetic encounter, that it moves us to weep. That's so beautiful to me. I just love this idea that we are hardwired to appreciate beauty enough
00:36:07
Speaker
that we have a physiological response to it. This last Sunday at church, I wept because the choir sang somewhere from West Side Story. And it was in the middle of this Pride Month that has been marked by so much public violence against queer people. And to hear the choir singing, somewhere there will be a place for us.
00:36:37
Speaker
There's a time for us. We'll find a new way of living. I was just, you can probably hear who was sitting on the podcast. I'm crying right now, but I was just undone. I was leaning against the wall because I couldn't hold myself up because there was something in those words. There was this prophetic invitation to something different.
00:37:03
Speaker
And I'm so weary, I'm so tired of living through these repeated cycles of violence again and again and again. I mean, so much of my professional life has been working in communications, writing rapid response statements and things in response to the most recent school shooting and to just go through and repeat the same words like this perverse ritual again and again.
00:37:34
Speaker
is shattering. And so to sit or stand in a sanctuary and hear a choir sing about something else than this made me believe that it was possible in a kind of way that somebody telling me it's possible never could. And I think the act of crying for me
00:38:06
Speaker
magnifies that hope, that belief. One of the things that heightened emotion does is it sends a signal to our brain that this piece of information is important, that there is something crucial about what we are experiencing that we should not forget. And so to listen to something beautiful
00:38:36
Speaker
and to cry as a way of cementing that hope of making it real and tangible, something you can touch and taste instead of just empty words.
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, and there's something about music and art that makes words resonate on just a different level and makes you hear it in a different way. And
00:39:09
Speaker
Yeah, I've had that. It's not coming to mind right now, the specific examples, but I've had that experience at Temple with certain songs or even just the organ at a certain moment. I've had that experience a lot in Broadway musicals, something about the combo of the words and the music, telling a story can be so impactful.
00:39:38
Speaker
I think one of the other interesting things about musicals and theater is that again, it's one of those liminal spaces because you're simultaneously by yourself and in a crowd of people that like because the theater is dark, you get this feeling like you're watching it all by yourself and yet at the same time, you're surrounded by community. And I think that that's just such a beautiful sort of duality
00:40:04
Speaker
that for me makes it one of those liminal spaces where I'm more likely to cry.
00:40:25
Speaker
give away, but it just reminds me and now I'm just kind of making sense of it now. But there's a love story and there's a scene. The main character is dying. She has a condition where she ages rapidly and she doesn't have that long to live, but there's a romance with her and this other boy
00:40:48
Speaker
And they're doing these anagrams. That's kind of the gimmick of the show. And they do an anagram of the boy's name, and it's bittersweet. And they say bittersweet, and then they kiss.
00:41:05
Speaker
and just name. I mean, and that was what everyone is feeling. And without naming that word, I don't know that I would have cried. But because they said, basically, this is a bittersweet moment, and then it happened. It made me cry so much. And that's the beauty of it,
00:41:28
Speaker
in the face of, you're aware this story is about she's dying. That's the one that comes to mind.
Research and Benefits of Crying
00:41:40
Speaker
If we didn't cry during this interview, it wouldn't be a very successful chat about crying.
00:41:51
Speaker
Let's move on because you mentioned the evolutionary advantage of tears, which I thought was fascinating. What else did you learn in your research about the science of tears and also like, why is there so little research to jump ahead? Because you wrote there's not enough. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that is true is that crying is very hard to study.
00:42:16
Speaker
Generally speaking, the way scientists research crying is they get a bunch of people together and they show them a really sad movie and they cross their fingers and they really hope it's sad enough, which as you can probably imagine, you the listener is not a
00:42:37
Speaker
surefire way to make everybody in the space cry. Everybody responds to different things. And so regardless of what movie you choose, there are going to be people who don't find that movie particularly moving. It's so notoriously difficult to get men to cry in
00:42:57
Speaker
laboratory settings like that, that oftentimes many studies exclude men entirely because almost all the time when you would include men, none of them would cry and you'd have to throw out all that data anyways. And so after a fashion, I think a lot of researchers were like, well, we're not even going to look at them. And there's also an artificiality to studying crying in a laboratory that I think is exacerbated and even more pronounced because obviously there's always an observer
00:43:27
Speaker
effect in any kind of research study. But when you're looking at something like salivation or sweating, there are ways to make somebody sweat reliably in a lab space that's not going to be super different than if you increase the temperature in a room, you're going to start sweating. And it doesn't matter if that's happening out in a beach or in a laboratory. But with crying, I think it's really hard to convince anybody that
00:43:55
Speaker
to show somebody a sad movie in a lab is the same experience of crying that somebody experiences when their mother dies and they're weeping and consult. Those two things, yes, they are both crying, but the nature of them is so far removed that there's an artificiality that's hard to shake.
00:44:18
Speaker
Also, crying is not linked to a lot of diseases. There's not a big pharmaceutical investment in drugs to make people cry more or less. And so the kind of grant funding that's often what makes research feasible and possible simply isn't there for crying in the way that it is for other things. So there's a real scarcity of research when you compare crying to other kinds of physiological
00:44:46
Speaker
experiences, which is tragic because it's also a deeply human and universal thing. I mean, how many things can you really say are true for all people? Like every single person cries at some point during their life. I guarantee it. I'm willing to
00:45:01
Speaker
to bet my own life on that. And there are very few things that we can really say that are true and universal for every single person. And so the fact that you have this core function of humanity that has been woefully under-researched, yeah, is really sad to me. One of the things that's really fascinating to me when we actually dig into the research of what people have found about tears is this beautiful reciprocal social dimension to crying.
00:45:26
Speaker
The researcher at Wingerhoods has done a ton of research on when you see somebody else crying, how does that make you respond? And what they've found reliably in lots of different studies, there was one study that they researched people in dozens of countries in six continents, thousands of participants around the world. They found that in every single country, when people saw someone crying, they were more likely to want to offer help.
00:45:56
Speaker
And that, to me, testifies to the fact that the social dimension of crying is not a cultural thing. It's a human thing. If it was a cultural thing, we would expect that in some cultures, crying would increase the amount of tenderness. And in some other ones, you would see the opposite. But instead, what we see is that when we see someone who is weeping, if we haven't been damaged, if we haven't somehow been harmed to the point where we see tears as a sign of weakness, most people
00:46:25
Speaker
they see someone else in distress want to offer help. And that is a beautiful thing to me. There's also some really fascinating research. The neurologist William Frey put out this book in the 80s called Crying the Mystery of Tears, in which he conjectured that crying is actually an exploratory process that
00:46:50
Speaker
When you compare emotional tears to tears cried because you're cutting an onion or you got dust in your eye.
00:46:56
Speaker
those emotional tears have a higher protein concentration and specifically a higher concentration of various neurotransmitters that are linked to stress. And so he conjectured that actually our tear ducts are concentrating and excreting the stress from our brains. Since then, there really has not been very much research at all one way or another to either confirm or disprove this hypothesis, but I think it offers a tantalizing
00:47:26
Speaker
possibility that the feeling that we have and we have that really good cry and then calm down and that night we just feel so much better is not actually something that's just in our heads. It's something that has physically happened that we have released some kind of toxin from our bodies. So I think there's so much more research to be done, but what things that we already know
00:47:55
Speaker
paint a picture about crying as this really essential human process, something that is linked to human connection, something that might actually be physiologically healthy for us, and certainly something that deserves more than a cursory note in psychological journals.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah, I thought all that stuff was so fascinating and that is certainly how it feels to me in my body. Like that clicked that like, oh, it's you're releasing something that's toxic inside. And you also wrote, I thought was interesting that the higher protein content in emotional tears
00:48:33
Speaker
could lead the tears to sort of linger on your face longer and fall more slowly so that other people have time to see them and respond to them, which is also pretty fascinating and makes sense. Yeah, there's all these just like these little, and again, because there's not a ton of research really showing
00:48:52
Speaker
one way or another, you'll just be reading these little books on crying exist or psychological papers and you'll come across some note like that that's almost like a throwaway line and you're like, oh my God, what a beautiful thing.
00:49:08
Speaker
There's such poetry to our tears. And it really does, to me, feel like this affirmation that we are hardwired for community. And that, to me, is one of the things that I take most deeply away from. The crying research is that humanity was not created to be alone, to paraphrase a book I've read from time to time. We are physiologically
00:49:38
Speaker
built to respond to one another's feelings. Humans are not tremendously physically remarkable creatures. We don't run super fast. We don't have exoskeletons. We're not particularly strong. Our babies take years before they're at all useful.
00:50:07
Speaker
If you look at something like crying, it offers a lens to see all of those things as a strength and not a weakness. Because what humans are remarkable about is our ability to build mutually beneficial relationships outside of our immediate kin, to build non-zero
00:50:29
Speaker
interactions that work for mutual uplift. That is a beautiful thing and it's something that's hardwired in our very biology that we have these processes that we were built with because and seemingly only because they inspire a reciprocal tenderness. That is remarkable.
00:50:52
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I cry so much more lately and it's opened me up to so much more connection and feeling and authenticity.
Societal Attitudes Towards Crying
00:51:02
Speaker
Given all that, why do you think our culture, at least the one we live in, values not crying so much? And yet then paradoxically, why do people who don't ever cry often seem so toxic?
00:51:18
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and one of the things that, you know, to look back to what you said in the beginning of that question, I think a lot of us are afraid that if we cry, we are going to be judged. People are going to, you know, think less of us. But in my experience as somebody who has really been trying not to, you know, hold back my tears over the last decade, almost always when I cry, it leads me into deeper relationship with other people.
00:51:49
Speaker
I have had so few experiences of somebody making fun of me or mocking me because I cry as an adult. I had some of them growing up. But as an adult, generally speaking, when I cry, it actually oftentimes invites some sort of beautiful encounter with another person.
00:52:10
Speaker
And I think so many of those fears are really more grounded in our own fear of being vulnerable than they are in a real response that other people have to our tears. And that being said, to link to the other half of your question, those fears that we have,
00:52:35
Speaker
that are so often linked to very particular experiences of, you know, crying and somebody else mocking us or crying and, you know, having negative social consequences. Those fears are a product of a world that does not want us to cry and particularly does not want us to cry around other people.
00:53:02
Speaker
Because when we cry around other people, it invites solidarity. Like the truth of when we cry, oftentimes the response is not negative. It's actually beautiful and positive and it creates more connection. That is a threat to people who would like things to remain exactly how they are. If you're in a workplace and you are setting wildly unrealistic expectations for your employees and your employees all feel like they're on the verge of tears,
00:53:33
Speaker
If they cry but they only cry in the bathroom or they cry after work when they go home, their colleagues don't see that that person is also going through.
00:53:46
Speaker
this harm in the place that they're working. I do this whole extended interview in the book with somebody my wife used to work with at a big women's media website, and I interviewed a bunch of people from her work for the book.
00:54:04
Speaker
because it was not a healthy workplace. And a lot of people reported crying very frequently, but almost all of them talked about crying and feeling like their tears were a personal failure. They weren't able to be strong enough to succeed in this workplace, even though the demands were wildly outrageous.
00:54:29
Speaker
they interpreted those tears as a personal failure. And I think that if everybody had been crying just at their desk and everyone's seeing, oh my God, everybody else is crying every day too, people would say, hold on a second. This is not a personal failure. This is a structural problem.
00:54:47
Speaker
And people who create structural problems do not want you to see them as structural problems. They want you to see it as a personal failure. And so whether it is the violent response to Black Lives Matter protests or
00:55:07
Speaker
evangelical Christianity's treatment of crying in men as something to be shunned and discarded to produce the kind of strong men who will continue a patriarchal project. All of these forces are intentionally designed to alienate people from what they are feeling and what they are experiencing and to make them feel like they are alone in that experience.
00:55:35
Speaker
Because if we really were more open with the kind of pain that so many of us are going through on a daily basis, it would invite a different kind of world.
00:55:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And it feels like I went through a similar trajectory in my queerness and in this, which was like I felt very alone for a long time and crying would make me feel alone. And it felt like something I had to do in private, if at all. And same with my bisexuality, same with my poly identity, like it isolated me for a long time until I broke
00:56:15
Speaker
through that finally and found, oh, there's a whole community of people thinking the same way or experiencing similar things. And actually, we have so much in common. And it's not a coincidence we all felt alone. There are all these structural forces that want that to happen.
00:56:38
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode with Ben Perry. There is more to come, stay tuned. But also, there is even more bonus content on Patreon. There's 15 more minutes with Ben. You don't want to miss it. Head over to patreon.com slash robertrookscohen. The link is also in all our social media bios and in the show notes.
00:56:56
Speaker
We continued diving deeper into why crying matters for the queer community specifically, then also explained why tears were a very important part of AIDS activism in the 80s and 90s. We also discussed the intersectionality of crying and why some minority groups tend to value expressing their authentic emotions more than other groups. We talked about how crocodile tears can be weaponized to cause harm and further oppress marginalized people.
00:57:23
Speaker
And we also talked about why you should believe people when they cry, even if their reasoning is unsound or they are crocodile tears. So don't miss all that. It's on Patreon. Thank you so much to those who have already subscribed. I really appreciate it. There's more and more content added there every week and more to come. And now here's the rest of my interview with Ben Perry.
00:57:50
Speaker
I want to talk about that as our final thought because clearly the book is not just sort of what is crying all about, but it's about how we can affect change and how we can use this understanding to do that. And I think you wrote something that resonated with me, which is that
00:58:10
Speaker
people see crying and joy at opposite ends of a spectrum. But like a good bisexual theorist, I think you explained how crying is not just this one thing. It's a lot of everything altogether, and it can be both ends of the spectrum at once. We cry out of
00:58:31
Speaker
pain and out of joy. And let me read this paragraph and then I'll ask for your response about how are we going to change the
Final Thoughts on Crying's Role in Resilience
00:58:40
Speaker
world. You wrote, particularly in the decades to come as climate change promises a series of relentless catastrophes, among other things you wrote about in that chapter.
00:58:50
Speaker
This ability to live abundantly within our grief is exactly what the world needs. As long as we picture tears and joy as opposite ends of a spectrum, we can sign ourselves to live within trauma in an increasingly traumatic world. If we mindfully celebrate the tenderness we feel in each other's arms, however, it preserves our capacity to hold these euphoric moments in tension with the world's pain.
00:59:17
Speaker
And I think that's a very queer, buy-something way of looking at the world, that we can hold these multiple things that are true at once, and tears can be part of our awareness of that. So how do you see that and how does crying help us address all these pretty difficult things coming in the future?
00:59:42
Speaker
Yeah. And help us is exactly the right question. In the last chapter of my book, in the whole book, I've been doing all of this buildup of all these things about why our tears matter and why our tears are important and why we should really be embracing tears as a place for transformation. And then in the last chapter, I do a little of like, will this fix everything?
01:00:09
Speaker
Of course not. Of course it's not gonna be, you know, if we all start crying tomorrow, like that's it, the world's better. Like, no, no, that's not how anything works. But I do think it can help. And when we're in a place where we need to change so dramatically in such a short period of time, we cannot afford
01:00:35
Speaker
the kind of slow, objective capital O, moderate change tinkering at the edges. We are moving towards a radical future in one way or another. And we get to choose what kind of radical future it will be. It will either be a future where we holistically overhaul
01:01:04
Speaker
everything about the way we live together, our economics, our social policies, our priorities, our energy sources, and everything from the top to the bottom, we need a complete marshal plan for the world. And that kind of radical change
01:01:29
Speaker
demands a willingness to enter into our own emotions. Because we're not going to get there if we're just logically thinking and taking one deliberate step after another. We need a conversion experience as a culture. Or we are going to end up in a radical future that is marked by
01:01:56
Speaker
large-scale ecological catastrophe and huge human migration meant by violence. It is a world that I do not want to live in. And the hard thing is that this changing we need to do is going to be happening at the time that we will also be continuing to suffer because of all of these forces that are already in place.
01:02:27
Speaker
And so we need to figure out how we can both tend to our own pain while simultaneously maintaining the resilience to do something, to dare to take a risk, to love the world deeply enough that we open ourselves to breaking. And I think crying helps with that.
01:02:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And I see that so much on the news and among a lot of my straight friends, there's this logical approach to how we're going to solve these things. And I don't think logic is all bad. I think logic is a good thing to use. But when it hits that place where all of a sudden they start feeling the pain part, the response so often is to shut off.
01:03:21
Speaker
Like that because you're operating purely out of this like objective place, all of a sudden when you hit a point where the things are so overwhelming, you don't have the emotional tools to actually process what you are experiencing. And so instead it's like, oh, it's time for brunch. I can't deal with that anymore.
01:03:41
Speaker
And that is a particular kind of privilege, but it's also a disastrous tendency because it undercuts the ability to build collective action.
01:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, right. And I think in that mindset, there's also this logic of, well, crying doesn't solve anything. So why should I do it? So why should I do it? And you quoted someone in your book I'll read where they said,
01:04:14
Speaker
when they cry. Everything that I cried about hasn't changed, but I've changed. I feel more alive and less dead than the moment before I cried." And you wrote that that's a potent gift that crying offers. And we need to change too in order to change the world. And this is one way to allow yourself to
01:04:39
Speaker
feel authentically and express that to others authentically so that we can address it collectively. Yeah. Cool. That's a nice note to leave off on, I guess. We have a lot of work to do, so get crying, everyone.
01:05:00
Speaker
I highly recommend Ben's book. It's called Cry, Baby. It is available everywhere. Do you have a website or any plugs about where to find your work? Yeah, my website is BenjaminJPerry.com. You can drop me a note and stuff on there. My book is available for purchase anywhere. It's also on Audible,
01:05:21
Speaker
in audiobook format and I just can't wait for you to read it and I hope that it will help you be curious about your relationship with tears and to let go of some of the shame that so many of us walk around.
01:05:37
Speaker
Awesome. Me too. I highly recommend it. Pick it up. This is stuff I've been thinking about and been ruminating on, and the book was really, really helpful for me to clarify a lot and introduce a lot of new concepts that I will be thinking about a lot in the future. So all of that stuff will be in the show notes. And thanks so much for coming back to Two Bye, guys. Ben, it was really nice to see you again. It's delightful to be here.
01:06:07
Speaker
2 by Guys is produced and edited by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, our music is by Ross Mincer, we are supported by the Gotham, and we are part of the Zencaster Creator Network. Use promo code 2 by Guys to get 30% off. Thanks for listening to 2 by Guys.