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[Crying sounds].
An ugly cry is no ordinary crying game. Those tears and those facial contortions are the
product of our complete emotional unraveling. In a sense, we are powerless to the ugly cry
both as the ugly crier and the ugly cry-ee who is watching the ugly crying happening.
Who among us can watch Claire Danes cry? Or Beth in Show impersonating Claire Danes cry
and not feel a little something? Even if that something is whoa girl. But why do we ugly
cry? I mean, isn’t it kind of illogical that we are essentially wired to make ourselves
look as repulsive as possible when we are also as emotionally vulnerable as possible?
Why did nature do this to me? The basic physiology of why ugly crying is so ugly has to do with
our blood vessels dilating in order to push those emotional tears up and out of our tear
ducts because believe it or not our tears aren’t just waiting in the wings for I don’t
know, Beyonce to drop a new video and for us to just be like, [crying sounds] it’s
too much, my tears are in formation. Not surprisingly studies have found that ugly criers have an
emotional impact on ugly cry-cry-ees, engendering empathy, compassion, even guilt or shame if
the ugly crier of course is crying about something that that cry-ee had done wrong. As a result
we respond to crying faces versus non-crying faces with more support and less avoidant
behavior. In other words ugly cries bring out our softer side. And our uglier side.
And our softer side. Which is also the same as our ugly side. But research also suggests
that we ladies and our ugly crying is actually a super power [starts crying]. Back to back
studies in 2011 and 2012 both found that women’s emotional tears lower men’s *** attraction,
rates of testosterone and physiological signs of arousal because apparently our lady tears
contain some kind of chemosignal which is a major mood killer for dudes who are attracted
to women. So if we consider how crying is an up-close signal of distress, not something
that people for miles around can see, thank god! And considering how research finds that
men are not as great at reading non-verbal cues, perhaps women evolved this whole ugly
cry thing as a way to say dude, take me seriously. You are not sexually aroused right now, these
are obviously not crocodile tears and there is no mistaking that something is wrong. And
when I say something is wrong, I mean you make those pizza rolls for two. Because before
we had emoji, how did we accurately communicate any feeling? You know?