5 Thoughts On the Way We're Talking About Men's Loneliness
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: This newsletter contains references to suicide.
Honestly, I don’t even know what inspired us to start talking about how lonely men are this time. I think we can trace this iteration of the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ discourse back to a recently-posted video by anti-feminist YouTuber Shoe0nHead that asks whether ‘we’ failed men, which generated many tragic comments… and also a lot of misogyny. There was also a Washington Post article this week that puts the blame on American men’s “cowboy mentality.” The term was coined by Niobe Way, professor of developmental psychology at New York University and the author of Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, who uses it to describe the phenomenon of Americans raising their boys to believe they can, and in fact must, function without support or community, since those things are perceived as ‘soft’ and ‘feminine.’ (This, of course, has horrific repercussions for those little boys and the men they grow up to become.) Either way, there have been so many thoughts about men being lonely on my TikTok and Twitter feeds over the past week or so, and that—combined with the fact that men’s loneliness in particular has become a moral panic—has given me thoughts, so here we are. Please join me for the most many-things-can-be-true newsletter I’ve written in a while.
1. Men are lonely. But… so is everyone else
The first thing to know about this discourse is that yes, men are lonely. According to a 2021 American Perspectives Survey, “thirty years ago, a majority of men (55 percent) reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut in half. Slightly more than one in four (27 percent) men have six or more close friends today. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990.” In June, non-profit institute Equimondo released its inaugural State of American Men report, which found that “too many men—especially younger men—are socially disconnected, pessimistic about the future, and turning to online anger… They are facing higher rates of depressive symptoms, suicidal thoughts and a sense of isolation, as seen in the agreement of 65 percent that ‘no one really knows me well.’” And it’s not just suicidal thoughts; men are also more likely to kill themselves. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 2021, the suicide rate for men was about four times the rate for women, and middle-aged white men have the highest suicide rate.
But is this data telling us the whole story? Maybe not. A lot of this discourse is predicated on the idea that men, and especially middle-aged white men, are doing worse than everyone else. But we don’t actually know that. For example, while studies consistently demonstrate that LGBTQ+ people experience high rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, no one really knows how many gay and trans people die by suicide every year. As a recent New York Times article reported, this data is rarely collected, which means queer people could be experiencing equally high, if not higher, suicide rates than cishet white men. (Sidenote: this lack of data is why the approach in this newsletter is so cisnormative and heteronormative; in addition to being cishet myself, which of course informs my opinion, basically all of the research I could find compares cishet men to cishet women. So: I would be super interested to hear queer perspectives on this.)
Also? No one’s doing very well right now. In May, United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said loneliness, isolation and lack of connection constituted a public health crisis in America.
A 2021 Statistics Canada survey found more than 40% of Canadians reported feeling lonely sometimes, often or always, and that “those who were frequently lonely reported poorer mental health and lower levels of overall life satisfaction than those who were lonely less often.” According to this survey, younger women were most affected by feelings of loneliness; 29% of girls and women aged 15 to 24 said they often or always felt lonely, compared to 18% of boys and men in the same age group. Even children are struggling more than they were; according to a new NBC News report, the number of kids and teens who need mental health care is overwhelming American emergency rooms; one doctor said “the number of kids seeking psychiatric emergency care in her ER has grown from approximately 30 a month in recent years to 30 a day” (emphasis mine, because what).
I don’t say any of this to discount the loneliness white, cishet men are clearly feeling. It’s just, we should also think critically about why the narrative around men’s loneliness insists that these particular men are more or uniquely lonely, instead of contextualizing their loneliness within the society-wide mental health crisis we’re experiencing… Which P.S., is wholly unsurprising considering wages are stagnant, the world is literally on fire, corporations are doing their best to screw workers over, mental healthcare is inaccessible, we are actually still in a global pandemic, btw, and no one can afford a house, rent or groceries (🙃).
2. Why has men’s emotional well-being become a problem for everyone to solve? Patriarchy, duh
The reason men are being perceived as more or uniquely lonely isn’t surprising, of course. It’s just patriarchy. According to developmental and social psychologist Angelica Ferrara, a protégé of Niobe Way’s and the author of Men Without Men, a forthcoming book about boys’ and men’s friendships across history and cultures, the increasing media interest in men’s social connections constitutes a kind of moral panic. Sociologist and criminologist Stanley Cohen, who coined the term ‘moral panic,’ defined this phenomenon as what happens when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Our intense focus on men’s loneliness, then, positions men at the centre of our society and their loneliness as threats to our collective interests—and this is not only classic patriarchal thinking, it also has consequences for the women in their lives.
According to Stanford’s Claire Urbanski, “In Men Without Men, Ferrara frames men’s isolation as a product and project of patriarchy, arguing that the very qualities that patriarchal masculinity emphasizes are at odds with the things men most need to thrive. Patriarchal virtues of stereotypic masculinity—like hyper-independence, stoicism, strength, control, and rationality—inhibit the forming of friendships between men. Consequently, this manifests into severe forms of social isolation, which result in increased suicide risk, depression, stress-related death, and (for men specifically) increased rates of domestic violence and incarceration. Ferrara argues that the impact of men’s loneliness also falls on wives, girlfriends, and mothers in the form of expanded emotional and intimate labor. Ferrara’s preliminary research implies that women can often take on the roles of therapist, event planner, social concierge, and best friend for the socially isolated men in their lives.”
3. If it seems like empathy for lonely men is in short supply, that’s probably because it kind of… is?
The fact that men’s loneliness can lead to emotional labour for women (at best) and even violence toward women (at worst) helps explain why the feminist reaction to the male loneliness crisis discourse has been a bit dismissive. Even without that aspect, it feels a bit rich to hear men complain about feeling lonely without acknowledging that they’ve benefited from patriarchal systems that have used women’s loneliness against them for basically ever. Women’s desire for love and companionship has been mocked, dismissed and characterized as unserious, frivolous and pathetic for literal centuries, while at the very same time society was teaching us that our primary goal should be love and companionship—and then using that desire against us to ensure we participated in social institutions that have historically disenfranchised us, like, you know, marriage. I mean, the idea that a woman will die alone surrounded by her 27 cats if she doesn’t lower her too-high standards before she hits 30 is so ingrained in popular culture that you probably knew where that sentence was going by the time you read the word ‘alone.’
But this isn’t just general annoyance. We are also in the midst of another epidemic that isn’t getting anywhere near the same amount of cultural attention: what the United Nations calls the preventable pandemic of sexual and gender-based violence. According to the Globe and Mail, “incidents of gender-based violence increased by as much as 30 per cent during COVID-19 lockdowns in Canada, with racialized women disproportionately affected. Women’s organizations, shelters and support groups received more calls for help at the height of the pandemic.” And it’s not just intimate partner violence, not did it stop with the pandemic. According to the UN, we’ve also been seeing “an unprecedented increase in all forms of gender-based violence [including] in public and online spaces.” And, an August 2022 Statistics Canada report showed that sexual assault is the only type of violent crime that’s not declining. Instead, it’s rising—there were 34,200 reports of sexual assault in Canada in 2021, 18% more than in 2020. This constitutes the highest rate of sexual assault since 1996. (And keep in mind sexual assault is still severely underreported, so the actual number is likely much higher.)
These stats are terrible, and there’s an actual human being who’s experiencing unimaginable trauma behind each of those numbers. But… we aren’t talking about this to same degree and with the same level of concern as we do lonely men. As NBC reporter Kat Tenbarge pointed out on Twitter, there is “a key difference in how the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ versus the rape and domestic violence crisis is discussed: male loneliness is assumed to be a shared responsibility, a collective impediment, while the relentless and increasing sexual violence against women and girls isn't.” Honestly, we live in a society that treats misogyny as a sad but ultimately normal fact of life, and this disparity in attention is one way we can see that.
4. The implied solution to men’s loneliness is often women’s sexual availability, which… ick
I think it’s also worth noting that the original context of the male loneliness crisis wasn’t actually about suicide rates or self-reported mental health challenges; it was about sex. One recent iteration of this whole lonely men discussion centred on whether lonely men had a “right to sex.” I’ve touched on this before, but that whole conversation was sparked by former Pennsylvania Democratic congressional candidate Alexandra Hunt, who posted an ill-advised Twitter thread in October arguing that, since men who don’t have sex are more likely to be depressed, “we should be moving toward a right to sex… People should be able to have sex when they feel they want to, and we need to develop services that meet people’s needs without attaching the baggage of shame or criminalization.”
Of course, the next question has to be, who will these lonely men have sex with? Considering again that this society is mostly preoccupied with cishet white men, the natural implication is that some women just have to take one for the team and have sex with these men to ‘cure’ their loneliness. Hunt implied that sex workers should be given responsibility for this task, which is not a new idea and also deeply problematic, but I’d argue that any acceptance of the idea that men have a right to sex positions all women as sexual surrogates, instead of autonomous beings with their own desires.
In addition to being extremely gross, this likely wouldn’t work anyway! As Washington Post columnist Christina Emba wrote at the time, “modern society tends to conflate intimacy and sex, to suggest that they are interchangeable or that the latter, perhaps, is even a bit superior. Proposing that a ‘right to sex’ will cure mens’ ills wrongly assumes that the depression, nihilism and economic dislocation that Hunt correctly identifies as serious problems will be eliminated by a higher number of sexual encounters.” Emba cites a psychotherapist whose clients included young men who compulsively pursued sex, but even when they got it, were still unsatisfied because what they actually needed was not just physical, but emotional intimacy.
Even if this time around we’re not explicitly talking about sex as a solution for men’s loneliness, you only have to look at the comments of the ShoeOnHead video, or scroll through the Twitter discourse this week, to see that there are lots of men who are blaming women for their feelings of sadness and isolation, and simultaneously looking to women—or, more accurately, women they see as potential romantic partners—as receptacles for those emotions.
5. The ‘male loneliness crisis’ isn’t a productive conversation; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about men’s loneliness
All of that being said, I think male loneliness is absolutely a feminist issue. At the very least, it’s the source of some violence against women, so if we want to make women’s lives better, this is something we need to address. But also, I don’t want any of the men who I love and care about to feel this way! I just also don’t want the solution to require the ongoing disenfranchisement of women.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Ferrara notes that “the dwindling of acceptable places to engage in deep forms of friendship, along with the extreme conditions required for many men to feel safe in seeking social support, is part of an ongoing crisis of increased isolation among men. The consequences of men’s thinning social support networks are far reaching and damaging, especially for women. However, some of [her] interviewees form nourishing friendships through defying the constraints of masculine norms. Guided by these hopeful narratives, [Men Without Men lays] out a positive vision of what men’s friendships could become.” (Emphasis mine.)
So, to recap, my problem with these unceasing conversations about men’s loneliness isn’t the part where we acknowledge that men aren’t doing okay. I even agree that men are experiencing loneliness in a way that’s different from the way women do. But please, can we stop pretending that this loneliness is due to some special and/or terrible characteristic of masculinity? Because it’s not. Men feel lonely because our white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society creates systems that make it difficult for them to access support; they’re told it is weak to seek community and that care-giving is not their responsibility. They’re expected to deny all of their emotions—aside from anger, of course. They are encouraged to seek out sex and status, sometimes at the expense of genuine connection. They’re told loving their children is feminine, and therefore bad. They’re expected to assert their dominance, engage in risky, thrill-seeking behaviour and glamorize violence, even if they don’t actually want to. Believing this behaviour is about an individual’s characteristics or choices is what gets us the “if men were better people they’d be less lonely” takes from (mostly white) feminists and the “if women were as sexually available as they were in the past, men would be less lonely” takes from incels. The commonality between the two being, neither will actually solve anything.
And Did You Hear About…
This heartbreaking, horrifying story about what happens when a 13-year-old in Mississippi can’t access an abortion. (Content warning: This link contains references to sexual violence.)
The reckoning that seems to be coming for reality TV.
Sara Talks Art, a TikTok account that explains art in a digestible and intersectional feminist way. Also on the art front, this Twitter thread of art that emotionally destroys people is also very good.
This smart take on all the ‘girl’ trends we’ve been seeing recently (i.e., girl dinner, girl math, rat girl summer, etc.).
This review of an $80 broom that I was fully prepared to write off as ridiculous but… kind of love? (Not so much that I’d buy one, but still.)
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