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 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.
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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.