KUALA LUMPUR: Over one drizzling weekend afternoon, my wife and I watched a marathon of romantic films.
Three heart-rending films, Notting Hill, Sleepless in Seattle and The Holiday had reduced us to tears.
I initially had a lump in my throat and I knew my wife was already tearful, but I didn’t quite want to look at her. I was embarrassed if she’d see me having a face like a wet weekend, just like the bits of rain that came down from the sky that day.
In Notting Hill, when actress Anna Scott (played by Julia Roberts) comes back to William Thacker’s (played by Hugh Grant) London bookshop with an original Marc Chagall painting as a parting gift, there is this heart-wrenching scene, which I think many will remember, that had us choked up.
In the scene, William, in a weak attempt to refuse Anna’s love, says: “I live in Notting Hill. You live in Beverly Hills. Everyone in the world knows who you are. My mother has trouble remembering my name.”
With tears welling in her eyes, Anna tells William: “The fame thing isn’t real, you know. Don’t forget, I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”
That did it. The floodgates of tears just opened up and overflowed on our cheeks.
You see, men do cry watching a good romantic film. My wife told me she didn’t mind seeing me cry for a good obvious reason. She said it was good for men to cry once in a while to let out those repressed feelings.
Real men do cry when they watch powerful, poignant and emotive films. So, I’m not alone when it comes to watching emotive romantic films. I can’t seem to hold back the waterworks during certain films like I had just got done chopping onions. Maybe men like me have some of women’s emotions. That’s according to my wife.
But that’s not true. There is a chemical known as oxytocin — a hormone that behaves as a neurotransmitter in the brain — released that helps us connect with humans and compels us to be empathic, loving, trusting and unselfish individuals.
However, we have been conditioned with a societal belief that “men don’t cry”. Since time immemorial, society believes that men crying is a sign of weakness and it leads us to think anything other than stoicism is unacceptable. There is nothing shameful about crying, as it is the part that makes us human.
Then, I read a book about men with “feminised brains”.
Feminised brains?
Research suggests 80 to 85 per cent of males have male-wired brains and about 15 to 20 per cent have feminised brains to a greater or lesser extent. A majority of the 15 to 20 per cent fall into the category of effeminacy.
Effeminacy is the manifestation of traits in a boy or man that are more often associated with feminine nature, behaviour, mannerism, style or gender roles. That is the reason we have transvestites.
In a Malaysian context, they are called by derogatory names like mak nyah, pondan, ponen or mak dara (Note: the last two are slang in Kedah and Penang).
Then, there are men who are known as metrosexuals. They are described as men living in urban, post-industrial and capitalistic culture. They are meticulous about their appearance, spend a significant amount of time and money on shopping as part of this. Metrosexual men are like women because they love looking “beautiful”.
They can be categorised as men with feminised brains.
If you go to KLCC or Pavilion shopping malls, you’ll see plenty of metrosexual men. They may be straight men who play or watch football every other night but put beauty cream on their face before they go to bed and they smell like babies, quite opposite to smelling musky and all.
Metrosexuals carry leather manbags that contain lip gloss, a bottle of perfume and sometimes, tubes of moisturisers and facial scrubs, as well as soft texture hair wax, just to name a few.
At home, they have an equal number of or more beauty products than their sisters. They look after themselves well in terms of dressing up, exercising and daily diet. Their homes are squeaky clean. They love cleaning, making their beds early in the morning and washing the toilets ritually.
They go to professional hairdressers to set a certain hairstyle for a weekend rendezvous or have their nails polished. These men clothe themselves meticulously — not just matching ties with chamois and cufflinks, but matching socks as well, apart from a rack of designer shoes for them to choose from on a daily basis. They usually stand in front of the mirror for minutes to look their best and if there is a crease on their shirt, they will not hesitate changing to another one.
The only items I had in my pocket when I was younger were a comb and a tissue packet. A comb was for my hair so that I’d look presentable to girls and soft tissues to wipe my acne-cratered face when I was all sweaty.
Men with feminised brains are good cooks, better than most women. They can dish out delectable cuisine like biryani, asam laksa to steaks or pasta. This, I believe as we have seen celebrity chefs and fashion designers, who are excellent in cooking extraordinary food through visceral senses like what our mothers do.
And these men will cry when they watch romantic films as much as real men. Oh yes, they do.
C’est la vie.
The writer is a former NST journalist, now a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food haunts in the country