Reddit reviews Crying: The Mystery of Tears

Naw, "toxic masculinity" is a buzzword made up by shitty sexists who think that the only way to express sadness is to "talk about it" and cry and that men are somehow damaged by preferring to process their emotions internally


Before you continue spouting your sexist, ignorant rhetoric I recommend you read the book "Crying: The Mystery of Tears" by Dr William H Frey II---The guy responsible for discovering that there are emotional and antibiotic tears (and it's a damn shame that article isn't freely available on the internet... without sailing the high seas, of course))

It's totally not that humans are sexually dimorphic in behavior and physiology.

And it's totally not like secretion of tears is regulated by prolactin, the same chemical responsible for growing breast tissue and stimulating milk secretion (among many other secretions)

And it's totally not like prolactin levels vary wildly based on age, gender, and BMI, with healthy women secreting more prolactin than men under many, many circumstances

And it's totally not like abnormal prolactin levels have a wide variety of negative effects on men's overall health and sexual health

And it's not like elevated prolactin levels (a common side effect of antipsychotics) causes impaired cognition in male psychosis patients---but not in female psychosis patients.

And it's totally not like opthalmologists have found extensive sexual dimorphism in the tear ducts of mice (you know, the creatures that are staples in research thanks to having similar genetic, biological, and behavioral characteristics to humans) and that castrating a male mouse will result in his tear ducts becoming identical to those of female mice


No, no no, it's totally not that men and women have different physiologies and different emotional needs---That's the illuminati "patriarchy" conditioning them to be emotionlessly violent rapebeasts.

I can't specifically answer that question, as I'm not sure there's any hard science to back up the basis of the question. Where did you hear that crying causes the release of endorphins? Only sources for this 'science fact' I can find are pop science magazines and websites, and they all seem to stem from Dr. W.H. Frey's book on Crying. However, to the best of my knowledge, this is just a theory.

However, what I can tell you is that 'crying tears' are chemically different to 'reflex tears' caused by eye irritation. Wikipedia seems to have a reasonable summary of this. Basically, reflex tears are fairly simple in composition, mostly water, mucin and some lipids, while 'crying tears' contain elevated levels of hormones such as prolactin and ACTH.

That's about the limit of my physiology knowledge when it comes to eyes, maybe someone with more of a medical specialty can help answer the question further