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  3. (1) One of our most firmly entrenched ideas of masculinity is that a real man doesn’t cry. Although he might shed a discreet tea

(1) One of our most firmly entrenched ideas of masculinity is that a real man doesn’t cry. Although he might shed a discreet tea

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问题     (1) One of our most firmly entrenched ideas of masculinity is that a real man doesn’t cry. Although he might shed a discreet tear at a funeral, he is expected to quickly regain control. Sobbing openly is for girls.
    (2) This isn’t just a social expectation.  One study found that women report crying significantly more than men do—five times as often, on average, and almost twice as long per episode.
    (3) So it’s perhaps surprising to learn that the gender gap  in crying  seems to be a recent development. Historically, men routinely wept, and no one saw it as feminine or shameful.
    (4) For example, in chronicles of the Middle Ages, we find one ambassador repeatedly bursting into tears when addressing Philip the Good, and the entire audience at a peace congress throwing themselves on the ground, sobbing and groaning as they listen to the speeches. In medieval romances, knights cried purely because they missed their girlfriends. In Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, or, The Knight of the Cart, no less a hero than Lancelot weeps at a brief separation from Guinevere. At another point, he cries on a lady’s shoulder at the thought that he won’t get to go to a big tournament because of his captivity. What’s more, instead of being disgusted by this sniveling (哭诉) , the lady is moved to help.
    (5) There’s no mention of the men in these stories trying to restrain or hide their tears. No one pretends to have something in his eye. No one makes an excuse to leave the room. They cry in a crowded hall with their heads held high. Nor do their companions make fun of this public blubbering (大声哭); it’s universally regarded as an admirable expression of feeling.
    (6) So where did all the male tears go? There was no anti-crying movement. No leaders of church or state introduced measures to discourage them. Nevertheless, by the Romantic period, masculine tears were reserved for poets. From there, it was just a short leap to the poker-faced heroes of Ernest Hemingway, who, despite their poetic leanings, could not express grief by any means but drinking and shooting the occasional buffalo.
    (7) The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes that took place as we moved from a feudal agrarian society to one that was urban and industrial. In the Middle Ages, most people spent their lives among those they had known since birth. A typical village had around 250 to 300 inhabitants, most of them related by blood or marriage.  If men cried, they did so with people who would empathize.
    (8) But from the 18th to 20th centuries, the population became increasingly urbanized, and people were living in the midst of thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression and even private conversation were discouraged as time wasting. As Tom Lutz writes in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, "You don’t want emotions interfering with the smooth running of things. "
    (9) Yet human beings weren’t designed to swallow their emotions, and there’s reason to believe that suppressing tears can be hazardous to your well-being. Research from the 1980s has suggested a relationship between stress-related illnesses and inadequate crying. Weeping is also, somewhat counterintuitively, correlated with happiness and wealth. Countries where people cry the most tend to be more democratic and their populations more extroverted.
    (10) It’s time to open the floodgates. Time for men to give up emulating the stone-faced heroes of action movies and be more like the emotive heroes of Homer, like the weeping kings, saints, and statesmen of thousands of years of human history. When misfortune strikes, let us all—men and women— join together and cry until our sleeves are drenched. As the Old Testament has it: "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy."
What is the author’s main message in the passage?
选项 A、Men should cry secretly on occasions.
B、Men should not cry in front of women.
C、Men should not suppress their tears.
D、Men should cry as often as women.
答案C
解析 主旨题。文章第一段和第二段提出，对男子气概最根深蒂固的观念之一就是真男人不哭，并引用研究结论说明现实中男人哭的次数比女人少。第三至五段说明中世纪时男性时常哭泣，并且那时候人们普遍认为这是一种令人钦佩的情感表达方式。第六至八段分析了现在男人不哭的原因。第九段说明抑制眼泪的坏处和哭泣的好处。最后一段则呼吁男性应像经常哭泣的历史人物一样情感丰富。由此可知，作者在本文传达的主要信息是男人不应该抑制自己的眼泪，故C为答案。在最后一段中，作者呼吁男性应像经常哭泣的历史人物一样情感丰富，并在不幸袭来时和女性聚在一起痛哭。由此可知，作者并没有主张男性应偶尔偷偷哭泣，故排除A；原文并未提及男人是否应该在女人面前哭，故排除B；本文虽然主张男性也应该哭泣，但并未强调男人是否应该和女人一样经常哭，故排除D。
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