Yeah, the amount of rampant sexist BS around this is incredible.
Comment on There Is No Male Loneliness Crisis. What’s Actually Happening Is So Much Darker.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 12 hours ago
Fully agree that poverty plays a significant role in loneliness, or at least, the analysis adds up in my view. I've also found that in many cases where some other societal denominator is mentioned as a reason for people being worse off, poverty plays a significant, often more significant, factor.
What worries me is what is addressed in the first few paragraphs - the way the male loneliness epidemic, real or not, is talked about in an almost mocking tone, and that just being accepted by society at large as normal. I also know that men are much more likely to die by suicide, and the supposed male loneliness epidemic has often been brought into connection with that. If it's not that, what is it? I mean, I have my guesses, but that's another story. I just wish the author would have looked at that angle a little closer, because I feel there's a significant piece of the puzzle missing there somewhere.
homik@slrpnk.net 11 hours ago
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Men are not people.
griselbrandalf@reddthat.com 7 hours ago
Adding to this, and with a side note that this is not my field of expertise, my reading of a few articles from the “tsunami” of articles about male loneliness is that they don’t just focus on quantitative but also qualitative differences of social connections between men and women at large. There’s this hypothesis that close female friendships tend to be more intimate than close male friendships. This is also supported by anecdotal evidence I heard from trans-men, that the absence of love and caring in their new male-male friendships hit them like a truck after socially transitioning, compared to previous (perceived female-female /) egg-female friendships. So I don’t know whether self-reported data like number of close friends is a good metric, or if it would be more informative to ask “how many friends do you have for whom you know the names of their parents” or “how often did you talk to a friend about your feelings this month” or whatever. Again, this is all anecdotal, but this is a vibe I’m getting from other reports on this topic that I was missing in this article. Still, very good article with many valid points, particularly in the second half.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 6 hours ago
The qualitative aspect is also something I was wondering about. I wouldn't even say that men don't have intimate friendships. Men can have very intimate relationships, but they're intimate in a different way. I could also well imagine that men have less of those intimate friendships.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
that’s true. male intimacy is activity based and less talk-based, and it’s devalued as such.
this also has a lot to do with male mental health. men improve their mental health by doing things, not by talking about feelings.
but our therapy industry/culture highly values talk therapy and regards intimacy as primarily verbal.
when i tell people, women specially, about what I do to maintain my mental health. they immediately dismiss it, because it’s not talk-therapy. if I’m not in talk therapy, I must be mentally ill, if I don’t have ‘deep’ talks about my feelings with friends, they can’t be real friends, etc.
you are entirely right, it’s a massive massive mismatch in expectations and definitions of what these things mean.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
What a stunningly obtuse thought terminating belief.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
it’s not male-male relationships.
it’s every relationship.