Rebecca Traister at Salon had a great piece last week that laid out how one could go, in the face of that sexism, from being an Obama supporter to a Clinton voter. This was also at one time Sartre's relation to Communism: he was not Communist, he said, but he was anti-anti-Communist. Likewise for many people and Hillary Clinton.

But Hillary's tears weren't the only tears in the news last week. A piece in the LA Times called “Changing Abortion's Pronoun” told the story of men whose partners have had abortions banding together to fight abortion and to assert their own sense of loss. (The Times piece requires registration, but you can read about it here and here.)

We had an abortion, on the model of the more acceptable we are pregnant, or we had a child, reminds of the ways in which the plural pronoun's inclusiveness can also belong to a grammar of violence. Catherine Price, writing in Salon, describes the movement's guiding force:

As Roland Barthes points out in his reading of Balzac's “Sarassine,” the “male” tear is single (or double, but only one per eye), and therefore phallic: a hard condensation of emotional force, a pseudo-diamond. “Female” tears, by contrast, flow, violate the boundaries of inside and outside, of control and loss of control; like the tears of children, which they resemble (and in which resemblance they document the Western habit of identifying femininity with childishness theorized by Ashis Nandy in The Intimate Enemy), they represent a failure of accommodation to the reality principle, which in adults denotes abject and calls forth both pity and disgust. (It is the combination of pity and disgust that belongs most properly to what Kristeva calls the abject — from a certain perspective both pity and disgust are dehumanizing gestures, forms of disrespect or unleveling that provoke, in the long run, certain kinds of violence.)

Within this framework, let us note, Clinton's tears were “male”: they did not fall, just glimmered wetly in her eye. By contrast the tears of the anti-abortion activists seem “female,” both because they stem from grief (and not frustration) and because they seem copious, even excessive. Here we see that the public legitimation of crying happens along an axis that plots the “gender” of tears (or a single tear) against the gender of their origin: just as we can imagine Clinton losing an election by crying too much (imagine if she had bawled on camera), we can see that men on the left (environmentalists, say) would find it completely impossible to claim that they were going to create political change through the power of their (already feminine) tears.

Here, finally, you must imagine that I have gone on to write something that demonstrates the following: that somehow the number of the men's tears, like the number of men crying, is intimately related to the claims made by their highly charged use of the word “we,” that the plurality of tears and the plurality of the pronoun are connected in ways that go beyond the coincidence of their multiplicity. And that Clinton single tear has very much to do with the intense singularity of her performed subject at that moment — that the singularity of her crying has very much to do with the strong sense she gives off of being alone. And that somewhere in the relation between these two pronouns and crying is revealed something important about the structure of gender in public life in the United States today.