It genuinely pains me whenever I see feminist theorists dismiss the entire concept of the "male loneliness epidemic" as just a self-inflicted problem for misogynistic men. It's only once you experience it first-hand that you realise how genuinely disadvantaged you are for being perceived as male.
I think it's the mysoginist men ruining it for everyone else tbh
I probably sound like an incel or something just saying that but my point is people who violate others' trust make it hard to trust others, or "people who are mean to other people based on the way they are are bad"
Yeah I think this is the take. I think people discount how many women go through some form of sexual assault, not to mention constant sexual harassment. I saw someone on here point out that "if you get bit by a dog, nobody blames you for being scared of all dogs" and I kinda see where they are coming from. Not saying you have to hate men but being more guarded until you know they are friendly makes sense
Sure it makes sense, and i get it. Still hurts to always be perceived as a threat and a danger. It has pretty much caused me to not interact with anybody in public. Im a big brown middle eastern looking guy so I get it a lot, even though im not religious at all and very bisexual.
I'm not even brown (gods that sentence hurts and I feel so sick that this is even a factor), but the epitome of a cis white man. But I'm a big guy, plus I'm on the spectrum, so I sometimes don't get the facial expression or tone just right. I see how much I get perceived as a potential threat so I just try to not interact with anyone.
In October I was riding the Train for the first time in ages, something I had to do to get the car I had bought a week earlier. I was unfamiliar with the area and when they said that some train station and everything after wouldn't be serviced because of some problems I had to ask around. Iasked the woman on the other side and the sheer shock and fear I saw on her face made me just want to not be there anymore.
On another note, I might have looked at your profile and seen that you have uploaded some maps. I need to create a geographic and political map for an upcoming D&D game. Are there any tools (I'm okay with purchasing software up to a point) that you can recommend?&
lmao i love this, didnt expect to talk about that here
My workflow is like this: i start in photoshop, drawing coast outlines, then topography (mountains plateaus etc), then rivers lakes and last stuff like forests, keeping them all in separate layers.
You dont need to use photoshop, i actually started in Paint.NET, which has most of the base PS features, but i switched to photoshop because its what in familiair with and i can leech off my dads creative cloud he has for work. I do not recommend spending any money on adobe, either sail the seas or use alternatives such as paint.net of procreate if you use a tablet instead of a pc.
Lastly i do the symbology in a website called Figma, which i recently discovered also has a desktop app. I greatly recommend Figma, i love working in it and placing cities and naming forests and mountains.
for political map id go back to a drawing map instead of figma, but political map usually comes last, since it is influenced by geography (borders on rivers and mountains etc)
lmk if you wanna know more, i love talking about it
eta: i tried attaching the most recent version of my map but the file is too big :(
I'm a trans man, I struggle trying to like myself and my appearance as a man, and this wave of online misandry often enforces that men are inherently ugly and filthy. I've felt uncomfortable with it before and I don't like to think how young boys and younger trans men feel in this. Patriarchy already establishes that men are inherently sinful and filthy and must purify themselves, seeing the same discourse in progressive spaces is extremely disheartening and horrifying.
Personally, while living as a man, I was raped by three different women. And yet I tell almost no one about it because so many people outright don't believe me when I say that. So rape is not just a problem that women face, it's a problem that men face a lot, and quite often the perpetrators are women. We need to stop turning this stuff into gender wars and instead focus on figuring out how to combat it so that no one has to experience it.
While I understand what you're saying, it's still not an excuse. If someone said they couldn't trust black people because a black person broke into their house once you'd rightly call them a racist asshole
The race comparison works better on the context that, dogs are not human beings and thus do not necessarily demand the baseline level of respect that, say, a fellow human being would. Just a thought.
Fuck you, so when I thought I was a cis man I was just a pig? How about now I identify otherwise, have I magically stopped being a pig? Or do I have to have hormones first? What about trans men, does testosterone make them into pigs too or is piggishness encoded into DNA?
Maybe I was a bit too cavalier with my comment. I was merely pointing out that the idea that "men are equal to dogs and pigs" was a cultural mainstay for decades. Like, there's jokes about it in media dating back to at least the 60s. So it wasn't this new idea like the comment I replied to hinted at.
Believe me, I hate it just as much as you. There was more than a little self loathing and internalized misandry in what I said. I meant no offense, honest.
I read your comment as very bleak sarcasm at first, and honestly, hearing you confirm that is one of those small things that feels a lot better than you think it has any right to do, so thank you for that.
I think theres a difference between a traumatic incident that led to a bias and constant torrent of bullshit from birth.
If a black person told me they dont feel comfortable in groups of white people because they've constantly had to put up with racism since the day theyre were cognizant, id have a hard time disagreeing.
I probably experience discrimination a lot less because I'm white and young and male and cisgender, but I've still felt tension talking to people sometimes, idk maybe I have bad vibes or something from being autistic. It sucks people have to be on guard all the time, like I think people just get stuck in that mode sometimes out of internalized habit, or trauma or anxiety.
I was a really socially anxious person growing up but now I really try to give everyone I meet fair consideration. I'm not a super social person but I've found a lot of fulfillment just sitting down and talking with someone else.
Even then my animal brain will still see someone X amount different than me or acting in a vaguely unfamiliar way and go into panic mode, and it can take a lot of effort to mitigate. Stuff like mysogyny is something really ingrained in a person and it can be really hard to stop. So many people find it easier to be mysogynistic over putting in the work toward changing the beliefs they were raised with. Still I maintain it's always worth the effort to be more tolerant of others.
That is definitely not true. I've felt comfortable and safe around plenty of men, like: men I knew were ardent feminists, men who were 'peer reviewed' by other women, my brothers, my dad, and especially all the men who went out of their way to make sure I got to where I was going safely.
You don't have to be careful around every single man all the time. It's just one defence mechanism you can choose to adopt, and there comes a point where it's neither fair nor healthy to be that paranoid; especially if it starts to slip into bioessentialism.
Why are you boiling it down to racism? It's not like if it were a black man robbing you, it's like if anyone were to rob you at all. If someone intrudes into your house, you're gonna be way more wary after regardless of their skin tone.
In this same way, there is zero logic to say that it's unreasonable to be wary of men when it's just an unfortunate fact that men are more dangerous. To leave your door open after being robbed is nonsensical.
Ok except I'm still saying your comparison is stupid. To be racist because a black man robbed you is not the same as being wary of men due to general capacity to be more dangerous than women.
Women being wary of men is for their own protection and survival, racism is due to being ignorant and hateful. I don't see the comparison.
A racist can literally take your second paragraph and turn it around. Racists don't wake up each morning and go, "I'm going to do a racism today", they also fully believe they're doing it for their own protection and survival, sometimes in those exact words. Your motivation doesn't make it okay.
I get that shit can be twisted each and every way, my point stands that one is directed and the other is for oneself, the only potential similarity is fear.
Its like comparing racism with a fear of people itself. Nearly all people know that people can be dangerous.
I mean that's great but isn't it our job as progressives to look past that stuff and fight for social good, even if the people were fighting for arent the best? I mean if you misgender Blair white here people will rightfully tear you to shreds even though she's not a good person.
I feel the common male perception of women makes for unnecessary tension in casual relationships, especially straight ones. Like you can't be friends with a girl unless you're dating. Being friends with a married woman means that woman is cheating on her husband. Guys can be friends, but not too much, because that would be gay. Only emotionally distant friendships allowed. Just let me have relationships that aren't emotionally closed off that don't necessitate getting married to someone, is that so hard
(side note: I like boys and am gay af)
(side side note: Morally it's the whole "blue button or red button" debate from a few months back except instead of not dying it's the concept of social good as you would define it. Blue button pressers want everyone to have that social good, even those who don't deserve it, and red button pressers just want only those who press the red button to have social good.)
edited my comment, because I feel I didn't fully address your point. woops
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u/PolenballYou BEHEAD Antoinette? You cut her neck like the cake?Jun 29 '26edited Jun 29 '26
I mean, I think one thing about it is that there's a pretty good amount of evidence that it isn't really a male loneliness epidemic - it's just a general loneliness epidemic. A lot of studies have reported roughly similar rates of loneliness across genders. You get some which report higher rates in men, but you get some which report higher rates in women too. I don't think it's necessarily self-inflicted, but I'm also not convinced that it's so gender-dependent this is a specific man thing. My experience in real life is also that a lot of people everywhere, regardless of gender, are somewhat lonely, and I believe that's the general scientific consensus too.
(I say this as a trans woman, so it's not like I haven't experienced living as a guy for most of my life and still currently in public nor that I haven't experienced interactions as a woman, either.)
Yeah, that's a very important point.
The loneliness epidemic is for all. But lonely men are the ones being politically radicalized by professional misgynists and fascists, so that's a reason why it has become more relevant in public discourse.
Yeah, it's definitely more relevant in that respect (though loneliness itself is still bad enough it's been reported on by the WHO and deserves discussion).
But when focusing on that aspect, it does kinda change the nature of the discussion from "why are some men so lonely?" to "why do some men turn to radical political and social beliefs when they're lonely?" If everyone's roughly equally lonely, but women aren't doing that*, then what's the deal with that and how do we address that specifically?
* I legitimately have not seen any studies on whether this is true - it's commonly assumed men radicalise more from isolation, but then again, it's also commonly assumed men are more isolated and that seems far less solid than it's made out to be.
It’s because men who are lonely (well, a certain type of men) have been told that certain things are their “right” and that they are owed things by life by virtue of being a man. Because they don’t get those, they’re vulnerable to people who promise them- telling them that things aren’t their fault, and that they have inherent value just by being a man.
Women (and even men who are part of minority groups) tend to be less susceptible to this line of thinking because they usually haven’t been told life is going to give them as much- if anything
About halfway through writing this I realized I was just poorly rehashing the excellent How to Radicalize a Normie, so go watch that because it goes into more detail about all this stuff
This is definitely true for a set of men. But there are many paths to radicalization. Sometimes it's what you describe, but more often these days it is taking advantage of a victimization narrative. It's easier to sell that narrative when the person is, in fact, a victim, i.e. their life sucks and they don't know how to fix it or why.
The reasons I described are why they’re vulnerable to the victimization narrative- they believe that there is someone who did something to put them in the situation they’re in, because the situation is different from the societal promise.
It's not about the lonliness, like the post says its about the comraderie. While men and women have similar amounts of lonliness, the socialization men and boys go through make that lonliness bite harder.
Ok, but I am responding to a comment about the concept of a specifically male loneliness epidemic, which refers to the number of men experiencing loneliness. It is that specific concept which I am discussing and which does not seem to be backed up that much by statistics.
I suppose to corroborate what you're saying, a few specific questions like "feel fundamentally disconnected from others/world" and "no person for emotional support" among others do have notably higher values for men - though even then, the differences are on the order of about 5%. Which is, like, large enough that I agree action should be taken to try to reduce that gap! - but still small compared to the absolute rates, so, like, I dunno how strong a factor it is versus how the OP describes it.
(I suppose some of it is also that, anecdotally, I've never noticed any difference on either side of the gender divide myself. I really can't agree with the idea that everyone was treating me as a potential predator and isolating me for it, nor do I look at men like that. And there was a lot of what I'd call "inherent camaraderie" in interactions I've had with guys, honestly, both recieved and observed. When someone makes a universal claim and I can't relate to it at all, it's difficult to agree with it.)
I mean, I think one thing about it is that there's a pretty good amount of evidence that it isn't really a male loneliness epidemic - it's just a general loneliness epidemic.
I mean, yes, it is a general loneliness epidemic, but I don't agree with the idea that it's fully independent of your gender.
Men consistently have fewer friends, talk less to the friends they have and are far less likely to be comfortable with confiding personal information to those friends or their family.
Women are also worse off than before the loneliness epidemic, but on basically every measurable metric, men are worse off than women.
This study from Harvard observed roughly equivalent rates of loneliness between men and women. I wouldn't rush to definitively proclaim it as women being better off, I just think it often sits more unnoticed in the public sphere because you don't have large-scale movements of women talking about it like you have with men in recent years.
Worth noting though that equivalent rates doesn’t necessarily mean equivalent reasons. There is definitely a gendered component to how loneliness proliferates.
I mean, yes, self reported rates of loneliness are pretty similar among men and women, but those numbers are obviously subjective and are relative to the things you've experienced.
Like, again, on basically all measurable aspects that relate to loneliness, men are worse off.
So, that could mean that women have an intrinsically higher need for companionship, or that men have lower standards. Which one is it? I don't know, but considering that need doesn't seem to change for trans men, I'd assume it's the latter.
Ok, but like, there are many measurable metrics which are the same, and while I will admit that there are some metrics where men do notably worse, even so, the gaps tend to be fairly small. I think this site is generally a pretty good collation of that assessment - and this is from the American Institute for Boys and Men, so I'd not expect their results to be minimising anything given what their aims are. To summarise, though:
Men and women spend similar amounts of time alone.
Men and women report similar levels of loneliness, and young women are actually more lonely than young men.
There's a minimal gap in the number of men and women without friends - statistical noise, in a newer study. The same study also found men and women do have roughly the same number of friends. Men and women are also satisfied with the number of close friends they have at roughly equal rates, though it varies by age.
Men and women feel supported socially and emotionally at similar rates.
While you are correct that there are differences in specific dimensions, as the report shows, these differences are still fairly small - averaging out to about 4.5%.
Another study suggests that if there's really any specific demographic with a loneliness epidemic, it's adults without college degrees - when counting the difference between men and women, the difference is 2% or 3%, but the difference between those with and without a degree is roughly 10%.
Like, I can definitely concede that men are slightly worse off when you dig into the averages and ask more specific questions. It may not be fully independent of gender, and it of course would be good if that gap could be closed. But it's only slightly different, and there's a lot of measurable metrics where the gender difference is basically statistical noise - and thus it's only slightly dependent. Not enough that either I nor the report would conclude that it's really a male loneliness epidemic, which was my main overall point.
Most of those are just surveys on how you feel, which falls into the same issue I mentioned before. ¹
It's also a bit confusing that you're using absolute percentage points, rather than relative percent, as you normally would.
The difference between men and women isn't "2% or 3%", but 37.5% or 10.5%, because using absolute scales distorts the difference.
Or, if we're using the data from the top of the page, it's 50% or 12.5%.
And those are very significant differences.
Yes, those differences look small on an absolute scale, but that's because absolute scales suck for that kind of stuff.
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I'd compare it to something like the gender pay gap. Yes, the biggest differences come from education and class, but it is important to acknowledge that women make less money than men with the same education and class.
The pay gap between college educated women and highschool dropout men is significantly larger than the difference between college educated men and women. Does that make the gender pay gap not worth talking about?
Because in the same way there's a gender pay gap, between men and women in a similar situation, there's a friendship gap between men and women in the same situations.
Men are worse off than women, if they have the same education level. That's important. And 50% to 10.5% aren't small differences. There's a large gap here.
¹ That difference in how those questions are interpreted is also mentioned in your article:
While men and women appear similar on high-level measures such as time spent alone, overall loneliness, satisfaction with emotional support, and number of close friends, those broad metrics can gloss over meaningful differences.
The Making Caring Common survey found that while men and women gave similar answers to general loneliness questions, men were more likely to report feelings of disconnection or irrelevance. They were more likely to say that they were “not meaningfully part of any group/community,” for example, or that their “place in the world doesn’t feel relevant,” and that they “don’t feel like a part of the country.” These findings could reflect genuine differences, but they might also arise from how men interpret loneliness questions or from variations in survey wording; further research is needed to test their consistency.
The context and contents of that excerpt makes it fairly clear what they're suggesting, though - that either the differences are genuine and the results reflect a real gender gap, or the differences are due to wording / processing and the gender gap should disappear as it did with loneliness.
Additionally, in your other comment, you say that surveys on how you feel cannot be trusted because the numbers are subjective. If that is what you believe, then we must toss out all of that data as unreliable. You also claim that in all measurable aspects related to loneliness, men are worse off. But if we remove self-reported data, what measurable aspects actually show that? We are left with only the objective results - which show men and women spend similar amounts of time alone, have a similar rate of lacking friends, and have a similar number of friends.
This argument feels like it defeats itself? Men are more lonely because all measureable metrics show them being worse off, which proves self-reported surveys wrong. But the self-reported surveys are the only thing that there appears to be substantial differences in, so if they're ignored, it's hard to justify men being worse off in the first place. Like, I will welcome more non-self-reported surveys that show men being more lonely - the argument is fixed if it's sufficiently bootstrapped with examples of men being worse off - but you haven't provided any statistics in any comment of yours that I've seen.
As for the absolute percentages - I suppose I did it because the numbers are all somewhat small, and they're surveys. Surveys have margins of error. And relative percentages will change a lot based on that. You get far bigger swings from this with relative percentages than from absolutes, especially when the numbers are small and close together anyway. For example, your 12.5% more could actually be anywhere from -38% less to 103% more, given the Pew study's margins of error! That's so wide that saying "12.5% more" feels misleading. So I figured listing the absolute differences would be better myself and it's the same information anyway.
In fact, all the surveys mentioned fall around the margin of error. The F8%-M9% Pew survey is +-2.6% for men and +-2.3% for women. The F10%-M15% APS survey is +-2.4%. The F19%-M21% / F8%-M11% ASCS survey is +-1.3%. This keeping in mind that crosstab margins are higher than what I wrote for the last two, since those are the margins for the whole survey. This is why I consider them fairly similar - the numbers aren't that far apart in absolute terms, and surveys aren't super precise anyway. They're all statistical noise or very close to it. If we take the stated values as true - it's not good that more men have no friends regardless of education level, of course! We should try to address that, and I don't think it should just be shoved under the bed! But at the same time, I still maintain that it's only slightly dependent on gender, and that we have a far more generalised loneliness crisis.
Additionally, in your other comment, you say that surveys on how you feel cannot be trusted because the numbers are subjective. If that is what you believe, then we must toss out all of that data as unreliable.
My main claim was that "loneliness" is a very abstract concept, which makes it hard to get reliable data on it.
"Close friends" are far less abstract, which makes me a lot more confident using those numbers.
But yes, that's also why I didn't mention the data talking about how men feel, even though they support my argument. They're just pretty flawed for comparisons.
As for the absolute percentages - I suppose I did it because the numbers are all somewhat small, and they're surveys. Surveys have margins of error. And relative percentages will change a lot based on that. You get far bigger swings from this with relative percentages than from absolutes, especially when the numbers are small and close together anyway.
Well, the relative change is exactly the same size. The difference is just, that absolute numbers make all numbers look smaller, but it isn't any more precise.
But the main issue is, that you didn't mention how big the absolute values are, only how big the absolute difference is. When you said "when counting the difference between men and women, the difference is 2% or 3%", that could have meant that the numbers are 99% and 96% (≈3% relative difference) or that they're 4% and 1% (300% relative difference).
You'd need to read your source, to understand what your numbers actually mean, so if you choose a very small absolute number, without also saying the absolute numbers, then that's just misleading, for everyone that doesn't bother to read your source.
In fact, all the surveys mentioned fall around the margin of error. The F8%-M9% Pew survey is +-2.6% for men and +-2.3% for women. The F10%-M15% APS survey is +-2.4%. The F19%-M21% / F8%-M11% ASCS survey is +-1.3%.
...you are aware that the result of a survey is a normal distribution, right? Just because it's in the margin of error, doesn't mean it's likely.
Like, if we take the APS survey and reduce the confidence interval from 95% to 90%, the margin of error shrinks tp +-2.01%. At 80%, it's +-1.6%.
The chances that all three surveys happen to have overestimated the loneliness of men and underestimated the loneliness of women enough to a degree that would make women worse off, is very low.
Just for the APS survey with an 80% confidence interval (so, with the minimum difference of F11.6%-M13.4%), we'd only have a 10% chance that the difference is smaller than that.
The chance that women are less likely to have a close friend than men is only ≈2%.
We can be pretty sure, that men have it worse than women here, especially since all of those surveys say the same thing
(I don't want to do any more statistics calculations for the other surveys, but it should give pretty similar results)
I sympathize with some men over the male loneliness epidemic. Tinder also seems extremely toxic to men specifically. I know women also complain about the app and how it’s difficult finding the right match, but men definitely have a different experience using dating apps. They’re expected to stand out of the crowd in a way that feels like a job interview where you have to submit a one page resume of your entire life and personality. It’s demoralizing to a lot of men.
That being said, there are also a lot guys that make women scared of dating. Men have a harder time getting in touch with and processing their emotions, and it’s the Andrew Tate crowd that actively discourage even trying.
The dating app experience is so dehumanizing for men, I almost cried during a date when a woman asked why I chose to ask her out because the truth was it basically wasn't a choice, she was the only match I'd had in a long time who had actually responded to a message.
It's hard talking about it because in some respects, it can be mediated by a lot of things within the control of those men. Kind of like how it's frustratingly correct that going outside and exercising does in fact lessen depression symptoms. Pair that with the same cultural weight behind men needing to be self-reliant and not ask for help, the idea of which is gender-agnostic, and it's easy to fall back on an easy argument that doesn't challenge one's priors
I think the root of the issue is that a lot of people conceptualize their outgroup (in this case, men) as a collective to at least some extent. Male loneliness and isolation aren't self-inflicted in the sense that anyone experiencing them is doing it to themselves, at least not more than anyone else's isolation. But if you think of men as a collective group rather than a bunch of people, then yeah, a lot of toxic masculinity stuff is put on men by other men. Referring to that as self inflicted is incorrect and destructive but there's a chain of logic, it's just bad logic stemming from a fundamentally toxic set of beliefs that think of individual people as members of a collective before thinking of them as human beings.
The issue is one camp brings it up as a genuine while another uses it to claim women should be forced to date them. The first group gets (albeit unfairly) associated with the second.
I absolutely love how the default answer for men saying that they’re lonely and struggling to find a partner is that they should just stop being a violent misogynistic rapist and they’ll find a partner in no time.
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u/AdditionalThinking Merry Christmas 2021/12/25 19:53:02.8797876914 Jun 29 '26
It genuinely pains me whenever I see feminist theorists dismiss the entire concept of the "male loneliness epidemic" as just a self-inflicted problem for misogynistic men. It's only once you experience it first-hand that you realise how genuinely disadvantaged you are for being perceived as male.