Crying has always been a problem for me. First, I regard it as very unmanly, an admission of a loss of control. Secondly, I do it. A lot.

Growing up was a nightmare. I remember my horror when on a school trip to a stately home our guide blithely announced, “We are now entering the dog cemetery” and then went on to read out headstones such as “In memory of Bounce, the best friend a boy ever had”. I chose this moment to be overcome by hayfever, a condition I have never suffered from before or since.

It’s OK for a man to cry in some situations but I don’t cry in those. Pain, disappointment, romantic failure and grief, have all left me dry eyed. I cry sentimentally, which is social poison. I have never seen the end of Dumbo, always having to leave the room with a “bloody rubbish” at about the time his mum is taken away. Muhammad Ali winning the rumble in the jungle sets me off, as does the life story of Diego Maradona. When you’re 43 then people view it as amusing and touching that you can’t listen to Old Shep by Elvis without filling up. When you’re 14 they see it as a reason to play it whenever you come to their house and invite a jeering mob to witness the results.

Now I can find this funny. When I was a boy, though, I found it incredibly embarrassing and went to the doctor to ask if I could have my tear ducts removed.

The doctor, who had served with distinction in the Second World War with the Black Watch, gave me an evaluating stare.

“Your problem isn’t strictly medical,” he said.

“No? What is it then?”

“It is that you are a big girl’s blouse.” He recommended a spell in the Parachute Regiment, as soon as I was old enough.

However, a recent study from Penn State University in the US suggests that I may be worrying unnecessarily, that tears are becoming more acceptable for men and less so for women.

The study, using a sample of 284 people, found that men were judged much more positively for crying than women. This, according to the study’s authors, was because men were seen as expressing honest emotion where women were seen as out of control.

This could be to do with our stereotypical view of men and women. And, says Professor Tom Lutz, of the University of California, Riverside, it is why male politicians, at least in the US, can allow themselves the occasional tear, whereas women cannot. A man is seen as strong and unemotional, so crying hints at depth. A woman politician has to portray herself as tough to succeed. So when a woman cries it reinforces stereotypes and tells us that her toughness was just a front and she has revealed herself to be weak underneath.

“This is why Bill Clinton can cry more than Hillary can,” says Lutz, the author of Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears.

But have things changed in the postwar period? Lutz thinks that they have, not least because of the “feminist attack on male emotional constipation”. This, allied to the increasing acceptance of a psychotherapeutic world view, has made men more open, he says. To my father’s generation, having any emotions at all was a sign of great weakness.

I was researching this article and had Wikipedia up. The site contained a picture of a Frenchman standing weeping as the Germans entered Paris in the Second World War. “Hmmm,” said my father, looking over my shoulder, “he might have been better employed shooting a couple of them.” To my dad’s generation, not crying was more than just an essential part of being male, it was an essential part of being British. Now John Terry, the England football captain, weeps when he loses a game and no one censures him. So what’s changed? Jon Savage, a writer on pop culture, thinks that music is to blame — or takes the credit, depending on your point of view. “The rock’n’roll of the 1950s, and the pop music that came after it, opened up a language of emotion for men,” he says. In short, it allowed the private, inner emotions of men to be heard for the first time and celebrated, not derided as weak.

Savage identified the singer Johnny Ray as a key participant in this process. Ray, a star of the 1950s, was known as Mr Emotion and was noted for crying during his act. His single Cry represented a new, much more openly expressive form of music.

For a period during the 1960s it seemed that tears were very fashionable, from The Tracks of My Tears to Tears of a Clown. The 1960s didn’t just bring us miniskirts, dope and flower power, it brought us emotionally expressive men — right in the centre of popular culture. The most popular record of 1965 in the UK wasn’t by the Beatles, Dylan or Elvis, it was Tears by Ken Dodd.

Television has also played a part in this. Gameshow and reality TV producers choose people for their expressive natures. These histrionic reactions enter our living rooms and change what we see as normal. It’s allied to the new expressiveness of

British people even in celebration. So much so that when Judith Keppel won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, she was criticised for not celebrating enough; a previous generation would have admired her restraint.

Lutz sees tearfulness in a historical cycle, pointing out that Henry I was known to weep at sermons, that upper-class men of the 18th century cried openly at the theatre and that the Romantics paused only from blarting to pen the odd poem and knock back some laudanum. “We are clearly, in both English and American cultures, on the wetter swing of the historical pendulum again,” he says. “There is nary a popular film these days in which we don’t see the hero well up.” However, he adds, as an adult male you have to be careful at what you cry. Weeping at the pain of others is fine, crying for yourself isn’t.

Tears seem to say something very fundamental about us. In the words of one researcher, the person weeping is saying that “this affects me where I live”. So it’s OK for “where you live” to be for the love of fallen comrades. It’s not OK, apparently, to live in a world where baby elephants should not be separated from their mums.

According to Emma Baskerville, a psychotherapist for Psychologies magazine, however, sentimentality is a common male trait. “It’s an opportunist outpouring of emotion,” she says, “men are raised to keep a tight rein on their emotions in times of genuine stress and grief, so they look for other outlets.” She points out that most melancholic music is performed and consumed by men. It’s a way for them to deal with emotions that they are otherwise encouraged to keep under wraps. There are, of course, different sorts of tears — a moist eye being seen as much more acceptable than open crying. This is because, studies suggest, there are male and female tears. Open sobbing is a strong sign of being female, and so is seen as inappropriate for men. Ronald Reagan — and every US president after him — on occasion allowed a tear to come to the side of his eye as a testament to the honesty of his emotion. If he had started blubbing we would have seen him as weak.

A University of California study in 2001 indicated that 65 per cent of men said they almost never cried, whereas 63 per cent of women said they cried occasionally and 18 per cent frequently. There was also a significant difference in the type of tears cried. Most women described how they cried as “real sobbing and bawling”, or “slight sobbing and shaking”. The majority of men confessed only to “red eye and a tear or two”, or “feel like crying but no visible sign”.

The California study also suggests that people overwhelmingly cry in private. Crying at work seems to be the final taboo. It can, however, be very useful, especially for a large man from whom tears are unexpected. I once missed an incredibly important evening meeting for work because I was enjoying myself in a pub and didn’t fancy going. My boss asked me the next day to explain why I wasn’t there. I had such a bad hangover that her voice was sending my mind into orbit. I explained that my grandmother was dying and I’d gone to see her — a sort of a lie but we’re all dying, darling, aren’t we? The thought of her dying actually made me fill up with tears. It completely threw the boss, who let me go with a “don’t do it again”.

However, there are some public forums where tears are required. The McCanns were strongly criticised for an apparent lack of emotion over the disappearance of their daughter, the accusations over lack of crying falling largely on her rather than him. Joanne Lees, whose boyfriend was murdered in the Australian Outback, didn’t cry at press conferences and, as a result, fell under suspicion in the media. The police had to issue repeated statements that she was not a suspect in the case. Even the Queen came in for criticism at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, at a time when it was seen as perfectly normal to break down crying at the passing of someone you had never met. It seemed the stiff upper lip died along with the Princess.

In an age in which we expect to see emotions expressed, how long before we get our first weeping Prime Minister? Baroness Thatcher famously cried, but that was on leaving office, and one couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that she had done it in public to make the men in grey suits look like bullies. Could a sitting Prime Minister weep in Britain? Tony Blair managed a catch in the voice over the late Princess, but there were no tears. Still, it was a strong sign of empathy. Gordon Brown, understandably, was seen to fill up when discussing the death of his first child, but could we imagine him crying at, say, the Cenotaph, as President George W. Bush did at a Congressional Medal of Honour ceremony for a dead marine?

Perhaps the royals will one day seek to connect with the weeping masses by shedding a tear. Could we see the Prince of Wales crying? How about Prince Harry, or even the Duke of Edinburgh? Maybe there are some models of manhood whose cheeks will remain dry for the foreseeable future.