The media panic around “male loneliness” is driven by cherry-picked statistics and sexism. Now, that’s sad.
Lonely men exist. Male Loneliness(TM) does not. A look at the evidence for the year's most annoying discourse.
There is no widespread outcry about the “gay loneliness epidemic,” or the “Black loneliness epidemic” or the “women’s loneliness epidemic,” even though there is just as much evidence to suggest that loneliness is a problem for those groups. The “male loneliness” panic only exists because of the unspoken and misleading assumptions that undergird most popular reporting about gender: (1) If you see the word “man,” you should assume it refers to a straight white man, and (2) straight, white men are entitled to get everything they want out of life, and if they don’t, that constitutes a crisis.
This whole thing is very good and I’d like to highlight another excerpt:
“Men are in crisis, these people say, because of feminists, who have made it so that men are now the more oppressed and disadvantaged gender. In order to fight the oppression of men, we need a gender-role reset that puts men back in their rightful place (in charge). If women object, that’s proof that they are bad, selfish people.
Men are victimized by women having civil rights, and women need to give up their civil rights so that men don’t suffer: That’s where this is headed. Women will also need to give up their standards and sexual autonomy, because men’s presumed right of sexual access to women dominates this discussion. Few progressives or leftists will argue out loud, as Ross Douthat once did, that men are turning to the far right because of sexual frustration, and that we ought to ‘redistribute sex’ by forcing sex workers to service them. They will, however, argue that by being forthright or harsh in rejecting men, women are ‘fueling incel shit,’ which is another way of blaming women for men’s worst actions.”
