There is no shortage of articles on and offline bemoaning the increase of loneliness among men. Professionals have called it the pandemic of male loneliness; younger and middle-aged men are the loneliest they have been in generations and everyone is ostensibly supposed to be eaten up with worry and concern over it, especially women, we’re told. Let’s talk about this ‘crisis’, what has caused it and why nobody needs to be asking women to fix it.
Men’s problem = everyone’s problem
Women are fearmongered from day one about dying alone. They are told to lower their standards, or they will end up lonely and miserable with only their cats to keep them company in their old age. There’s a word for women who end up alone and unmarried, spinsters and for a long time, it was an insult and something to laugh about. When women are alone and lonely, it’s the subject of many a sketch comedy show. It’s funny. When men are lonely, it’s a global crisis and we should all be concerned not amused. Make it make sense. Why? Either we care about people’s mental health, or we don’t.
Where are the hundreds of op-eds about lonely married women raising their children alone because men refuse to participate in housework? Where’s the concern for their mental health? The media is irredeemably complicit in these sexist choices. Men’s problems are everyone’s problems, women’s problems on the other hand are individual issues. If you don’t want to be lonely in your old age, get married, if you pick a man who won’t support you, a man who makes you feel lonely, that’s on you. No more.
Crisis of misogyny
Thanks to progress that has made many women financially independent, women no longer need men to survive. Women’s standards have risen, and they are increasingly selective. It’s not enough to have an income, women want men who are emotionally available, good communicators and who share their values. That means men must change, that means they must let go of patriarchal, misogynistic values and they won’t. They must begin to value the things women value; the things women want in a partner including seeing intimacy and emotional connection as worthy of their time and effort.
The problem is addressing this skills deficit is not something men want to do. It’s a lot harder than just having an income and calling all the shots. It requires a lot of internal work and maybe even therapy. This will help not just with their romantic relationships but with friendships as well.
If you know the solution and you have everything you need in you to fix the problem, how then is it still a crisis? There’s no crisis unless it’s a crisis of misogyny. There’s just a refusal to change, to adapt and nobody needs to be feeling sorry for these men in this instance. The truth is men don’t want to do what women want, they would rather listen to alpha male podcasters talking about being a provider than women themselves, talking about wanting gentle men then they wonder why they’re so lonely.
Men imagine this is some kind f tug of war where one side will have to shift but they don’t realize that women are not going to change their minds on this one. Just look at South Korea and its Four No’s movement; no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing. Women are not about to blink first when it comes to these changing requirements.
Women can easily fix it
Especially when it comes to the rise of single men, women are told that if they just adjust their requirements, they can fix it. Women are somehow held accountable for men’s loneliness. Women are being asked to change instead of situating the solution where it should be, on men’s doorstep.
One of the big problems with saying women can easily fix it, apart from ignoring the fact that men are also lonely when it comes to male friendships is it places the blame on women. Women are the people refusing to fix the problem and men are the victims. This is the kind of rhetoric used to justify and minimize incel men’s violence against women. The red pill podcasts proliferating the airwaves and their sexist, violent rhetoric speak to what happens when you identify women as the problem and men as the victims. The failure to identify the real issue also makes it impossible for men to fix the underlying issue.
While on the topic of violence, one of the reasons men’s loneliness is a public health crisis is they visit violence on society because of it, see the rise of incel mass shootings in places like the US. This is another indicator that this isn’t so much a crisis of loneliness as it is a crisis of misogyny. When men are hurt, they set out to hurt everyone else.
If men really care about the rise of loneliness, then they will have to do the hard work of changing. Women are not going back to the old order. Too much has changed and like the men in South Korea, their options are transformation or extinction.
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