Silence is golden – at least where men are concerned. The “strong, silent type” endures as an aspirational archetype, whether you are a man yourself, or simply someone who interacts with them. In popular fiction, the Jack Reacher action novels have sold about 100m copies. The big man’s catchphrase is, tellingly, not a phrase at all, rather, it’s an anti-phrase: “Reacher said nothing.” In film, one of the ultimate images of machismo is Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator: leather jacket, motorcycle and, famously, only 17 lines of dialogue in the whole of the first film. And at the frillier end of cultural representations of men, the likes of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights depend more on their ability to smoulder a lady to a crisp with a glance than on their emotional articulacy.
It might work in fiction but, in reality, the “boys don’t cry” approach can be dangerous if it leads to men bottling things up or trying to shoulder their worries alone. Suicide is still the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, with men making up about three-quarters of deaths by suicide.
