Don't Worry, Baby

I'm pretty mad about the Noble prize winning scientist who complained that working with women is hard because all they want to do is fall in love, make you fall in love with them, and then also cry (connected in some way with the first two things I would guess). I feel compelled to join the heroic and thoroughly-thought-through #NotAllMen movement by pointing out that I completely disagree with my fellow XY-chromosome-haver. Some of us are not put off by any of this at all. I can only speak for myself, but falling in love with my co-workers and then making them cry are among my absolute favorite things about working, full stop. Right behind being paid more for the same work.

Actually the criticism of women crying at work is curious, which is a polite way to say "boring fuckery." I learned a lot about it when I was a stay-at-home dad, a job in which crying was something you just inked in (not pencilled, inked) as part of your daily schedule, somewhere between "Elmo's World" and the late-morning first nap. Who exactly was doing the crying isn't really something we should dwell on here, just know that it got done.

Over the same period, my ex-wife was (and, one imagines, still is) an engineer. She was making her way in a heavily male-dominated field, further exacerbated by the fact that many, many of the males she worked with came to the U.S. from countries where things like wearing lipstick or being unaccompanied by a male family member in public were potentially life-and-death decisions for women. Crying at work was something she dreaded and shamed her, avoiding at all costs, but still, despite her best efforts, still occasionally happened.

The misunderstanding that men have about women crying at work is that they imagine that it means the same thing it would when a man cries at work. For a dude, crying at work is the tepid puddle on damp carpet left after a looooong, hot process of ego melting that involved every available option before giving in to the impulse, including bargaining, anger, wall-punching, co-worker punching, vomiting, masturbation, shouting, feigned epilepsy, lying, hiding, fainting and cutting. Crying at work--the place you proverbially kill what you will later present to your mate as a prize, probably in exchange for the right to breed--is a willful abdication of dignity that somehow throwing a chair across a conference room would not be. Taking crying as an act in general and crying among women in particular, and everything it means (or more importantly doesn't mean), and attempting to interpret it in what is still an unapologetically male cultural space known as "work" according to what should by now be at best a quaint memory preserved in the memories of anthropologists and sociologists is an obvious error. The crime is that it's not really chauvinistic in the active sense but more as a sort of inertia, less a conspiracy of discrimination then an internalized anachronism most of us are to aggressively lazy to challenge, even lots and lots of women I know, have known and work(ed) with. How many women have you seen in a workplace giving another woman, the more emotionally demonstrative one, a liberal hosing-down with the stink-eye because Ms. Vocal is "making it harder for the rest of us"?

I'm in a position to both hire and then supervise the people I hire at my job now. Over the time I've been where I am, I've had seven openings to fill, six of which I've filled with, well, openings. The clumsy offering of a crude vagina joke hopefully underscores that it's less about what you're willing to say than your actual actions. In my four years as a supervisor, I've seen plenty of crying, for just about every possible reason, occurring among my female co-workers exclusively. I have yet to react to any of these instances with reproach, correction, annoyance or impatience nor with, and I think just as importantly, paternal concern, offers of protection, soft words or hugs. One hundred percent of the time, a co-worker who is crying is doing so while trying to tell me something. The only thing I think that makes any sense is to offer a Kleenex (without irony, for hygiene's sake) and wait until they're done talking, answer their question (if they have one) and then go back to work. Also 100% of the time they run through an apologetic script to pre-empt the expected backlash against the expected breach of appropriateness, which I've been known to aggressively wave them through.

This isn't really to brag because I honestly have no idea how this makes me sound. I only know what I learned from being raised amongst passive-aggressive co-dependents:* the only way to really change an embedded culture is to pretend it doesn't actually exist. This is of course problematic because it's exactly the same approach Europeans took toward Native Americans. So far this has gone better.


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*This is not to suggest that people crying are themselves either passive-aggressive or co-dependent. This would make more sense if you knew my mother.