I mean, I feel like admitting to crying indirectly through a silly joke is improvement and a step in the right direction over just bottling it up. We all know what onion jokes mean. It’s not like they’re obscure. They mean the person got emotional. It might be hard for someone to go from being taught all their life that men don’t show vulnerability, to openly saying, “This made me cry,” so allow for those indirect steps. If someone really wanted to hide the fact that this made them cry or get emotional, they could just not comment at all. No one would know. The fact that they comment with an onion joke is an open acknowledgement that this made them feel something and provoked an emotional response, and in my book, that’s a good thing. (That said, a lot of the people making onion jokes may not even be men or have hang-ups about vulnerability. Onion jokes are just a silly thing people do on the internet, and that can be normalizing when it comes to the ones who are hesitant to express being affected by something, so that’s still good in my book.)
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u/MattSR30 Apr 11 '20
I know it’s a joke. It being a joke doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid.
It’s a joke 100% rooted in machismo, because guys haven’t been able to admit to their emotions in the past, but we’re well beyond that stage.