The thing about most crying is that it is usually born of self-pity. Some people are empathetic enough to weep on others’ behalf - starving people in Darfur, say, or (more commonly in Britain) broken old donkeys that people have been mean to. Some people cry because their heart is broken, which seems fair enough. But the majority of tears are shed selfishly: they’re shed because you think, a terrible thing has happened to me and it is making me very sad, whether the terrible thing is bad news, or someone’s death, or being passed over for promotion. We don’t cry because someone has died: we cry because we’ll miss them and it’s going to be very miserable for us.

We know this, which is why we view crying with suspicion: the person weeping is, more often than not, unable to control self-pity, and is putting it on display in quite a demanding way (because it forces us to react, whether we feel like it or not). You feel sorry for them, but it can also be slightly repulsive if the occasion doesn’t warrant a torrent of tears – if someone is hysterical, for instance, because X hasn’t phoned.

Hillary Clinton’s tearful moment in New Hampshire last week, which has been credited with winning her votes and reversing her fortunes, is a case in point. Although she was talking about America at the time she got choked up – “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. This is very personal for me. It’s not just political, it’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it” – you wouldn’t have to be the world’s greatest cynic to think, cut it out, Miss Pants on Fire. You are crying for yourself, which you’re perfectly entitled to do, and for your apparently doomed ambition. You are not crying for America. It was also noticeable that she inclined her head slightly towards the camera just before she welled up.

Anyway: whether she was crying for herself or for the US, it worked for the voters. Her tears were, I think, genuine – it must be bloody annoying to think something’s a dead cert and to have your assumption proved wrong in the most public way imaginable. As we all know, Hillary subsequently won in New Hampshire, and the game was on again. Because she cried. Or, more complicatedly, because she is a strong woman who cried. If she was a known weeper, or famous for wearing her emotions on her sleeve, nobody would have batted an eyelid – but then Hillary wouldn’t have been in the situation in the first place, because had she been a weeper, she wouldn’t have been a senator.

What worked here was how she went against the public perception of her as a tough nut whose tear ducts were out of use, who’d always go for the battering with the rolling pin rather than the weeping, the growl rather than the whimper, the brain rather than the heart, even under the severest provocation.

Hillary has had to put on male armour in order to get to where she wanted to be. The reason crying worked for her was that it was like watching a man cry – and we all love a crying man. (Bill Clinton, you will remember, was in floods every five minutes, or so it seemed.)

A crying woman – by which I mean a woman who cries all the time, on her own behalf rather than on other people’s – is a nightmare, because she feels sorry for herself all the time and because she is usually extremely manipulative. I used to work with one. Her tears were ever-flowing, and, in a male-dominated office, very much part of her career plan. It was tiresome in the extreme, especially the coupling of “poor little helpless me” with “turn your back, would you, so I can stab it”.

In public life, a crying woman has become a bore: the very currency of tears has become devalued (see Britney Spears, looking deranged, eyes wet with tears in the back of an ambulance, having just tried to kidnap her children. Result: hundreds of thousands of people speculating online on the manner in which she will kill herself, and wishing she’d hurry up).

A non-crying woman, on the other hand, who suddenly cries, is potent. Crying is essentially feminine, ergo not crying, and remaining stiff-upper-lipped, is masculine. We just love it when the two collide. A manly man crying melts the hardest of hearts: the captain of industry who weeps uncontrollably at the very idea of Bambi – and, sob, Bambi’s mummy – is attractive, being suggestive of the tenderest heart being concealed behind an implacable exterior. Crying men are sexy, which is presumably why the artist Sam Taylor-Wood once made a book of photographs on the subject.

Crying men aren’t needy or self-pitying in the way that crying women are: they’re just soft-but-hard, and we love them for it (like David Beckham blubbing on his son’s first day of school). And Hillary is, to all intents and purposes, quite manly. I mean this in a good way, in the sense that she no more bangs on about baking or period pain than Barack Obama bangs on about being black. Ergo, watching Hillary snuffle was like watching a man cry. It rocked. It ticked all the right boxes, including the one that said “Vote Hillary”.

But let’s hope she doesn’t make a habit of it. The fact is, crying women can’t win in the long run because the Victorian-sounding accusations of hysteria and emotional instability aren’t far behind (see Heather Mills McCartney).

The Hillary’s tears episode is fascinating, though, for what it tells us about voters’ desires – and I don’t think American ones are that different from British ones (except in the evangelical loon-belt). Voters want a person with a heart that can show recognisably mundane, human emotions. They may be impressed with strength, with fortitude, with grim-faced efficacy – can you see where I’m going with this? – but they will vote for the candidates that surprise them by showing themselves to be a little bit human underneath their armour, because armour is good.

If you remove gender and race – a big ask, I grant you – then you have our own Conservative leader and prime minister in a couple of nutshells: the friendly, armour-less one who seems like a good bloke and who you wouldn’t mind asking to dinner, and the one welded into his armour, clearly possessed of a beating heart but strangely reluctant to hand anyone a stethoscope so they can check it’s there. One of them should take a leaf out of Hillary’s book and show a little emotion every now and then. If there’s one thing she has demonstrated, it’s that man-tears win votes.

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