The Devil's Own Blog From God's Own County

Having said that it does lead you to some strange places - like for example a page on a creationist website that appears surprisingly sane at first sight. I doubt the claim that emotional tears are exclusive to the human ape.

Anyway what prompted this surf? A past episode of one of Radio 4's comic gems - Heresy [by way of an aside note that this Beeb page claims there are three series of the programme - complete balls there have been six, I think the revisionist nature of that link is connected to the fact most BBC website employees have an effective age of about 3. Sadly even that pile of shite excreted by the herd of autistic geeks known as wikipedians is more accurate at six]. In the course of the proggie one of the guests suggested that women's tears contain endorphins (the brain's own personal heroin supply) whereas men's don't and that this explains why women cry more - to get more of those endorphins.

So where is the evidence? Well we have a really crap piece of research based on nothing more scientific than asking people questions .... this demonstrates why people like me hold the soft sciences in utter contempt. There is some better stuff here but all that tells us (in so far as such small samples can tell us anything at all) about gender differences in composition is that the salt and protein content of female tears may be more variable than that of males. There is a discussion here that is useful.

So what of the suggestion from the proggie ... well somewhere among the links above there is a possible mechanism for getting the excreted endorphins back into the brain ... namely that tears drain into the nasal cavity and thus to the brain, of course in your typical weeping woman most of the tears spill down the cheeks rather than via the normal drainage mechanism for lubricating tears. On the whole I can't see it myself and will stick to the idea that the differences are simply the result of western society's tendency to encourage blubbing in women and discourage it in men (metro-sexuals like Beckham excepted of course - they cry at the drop of a hat, or after taking a penalty like a girl and missing).