"There's no crying in baseball."

For much of my childhood I quoted a movie that I had in actuality never seen in its entirety. To be quite honest I didn't even know what it was from. "There's no crying in baseball." It was a phrase my dad used with me when I thought something was too hard to do. For the longest time it was something that served as a sort of inspiration. Only recently did I discover where the phrase is from. The movie "A League of Their Own" deals with women playing in a baseball league while most of the men are away fighting in the war. After having attended some classes on sociocultural sports and women in sport, I feel it is appropriate for me to approach the phrase once more. The movie itself was a wonderful work that had me rooting for one team and sad when it ended. The part I want to focus on, however, is when Tom Hanks has one of the most famous lines of the movie. "There's no crying in baseball" when I was a kid, there was no question in my mind that you just didn't cry during sports. I now want to bring up just one question, why? It's easily one of the most dominant ideologies in not only men's sports but in society in general. Men just don't cry in public, some may want you to believe they don't cry at all. Any showing of emotion by men is generally considered negative and men have their integrity questioned. Why can't men be human about their emotions, it is a fact that men do feel emotions so why hide it? Society has this fixation on men being strong and invulnerable. Crying is viewed as showing weakness and thus not masculine so any man that expresses his emotional state with tears has his masculinity questioned. A discussion in class brought up masculinity versus femininity and how women are allowed to take on masculine traits but not feminine traits. This is the perfect example of the opposite, how men are barred from doing the opposite. It is not just men that will question other men's integrity when a man cries in public. Women are just as likely to do the same and be less likely to want to go out with that man instead favoring their pity response. Society will never be equal until a man can cry in public without feeling ashamed and emasculated.

Ryan Plunkett
Kin 338I
Tu/Th 2:00-3:15