My wife tells me I've outsourced my emotions to cinema. I was in floods of tears after watching All Of Us Strangers recently, for instance. When my father died, I couldn't cry. I was too worried about my mother and focussed on her. But a few months down the line, I watched Departures and the last few minutes of that (excellent) film broke me apart. Film is catharsis for me.

Occasionally novels have this effect too. At different points in my life, Watership Down, The Kite Runner, Birdsong, The Lord of the Rings, and various others have all made me cry.

Further to your article, I think it's interesting how "man's man" type characters in Greek mythology, the Bible, and so forth, are all immensely emotional, weeping openly at times. That's a tradition Tolkien carried on in The Lord of the Rings. My children (both boys - 15 and 19) tell any of their male contemporaries who are inclined to follow twatbangles like Andrew Tate to instead look to Aragorn if they want a good model of traditional masculinity.