an awkwardly big part of the Male Loneliness Epidemic is that male homosocial relationships used to be an important part of masculinity, and have been severely pruned back over the last several generations in reaction against the increasing visibility of homosexuality. setting up that status quo discussed in the above addition.
the idea that emotional intimacy between men is de facto kind of gay is a relatively modern product of homophobia. which served to increase male emotional dependency on female romantic partners, even as the modern convenience age cut down on the traditionally high level of practical dependency.
like, the idea that Man Is Stoic isn't new, but the That's Gay reaction to being close with male friends is a late 20th century phenomenon. it's abnormal. it's reactionary. it's modern.
this is something i keep seeing people struggle with; there's this teleological view of history that assumes all social developments move along a given vector consistently always, so if a given view is old-fashioned it's obviously also ancient.
(a lot of old-fashioned approaches to 'male friendship good' were deeply misogynistic, ofc, but due to various historical forces you don't see a lot of modern sexist reactionaries pushing the idea that because women are intellectually inferior you can only have a really satisfying, emotionally meaningful personal relationship with another man. except in parody, where the joke is that the only reason a guy would say that is because he's secretly gay.)
but concurrently with this pathologization of male friendshp, feminism was reducing the practical dependency of women on men, so even as the need for female emotional support got thoroughly locked in as a social norm, the supply of women willing to do that kind of work for a partner unreciprocated was dropping.
leaving increasingly large numbers of guys crammed into an impractical corner where there is no realistic, survivable course that doesn't give them some kind of goddamn gender dysphoria.
so anyway i think one of the most important things we can do as a society, that doesn't even require anyone to take on the burden of Managing Dudes' Feelings For Them, and which is conveniently a much smaller target than Fix Manhood Systemically, is to stop validating the unhinged reactionary narrative that Male Intimacy Is By Definition Gay.
because like. it's funny when it's fiction. but when a real guy who is not gay, which is statistically gonna be most of them, is getting barraged from both sides of the political aisle with the message that he can't have an emotional connection of any significance with a male friend without Proving that the world Knows Better Than He Does and he's clearly gay and just lying to himself about it.
that creates a context where a significant chunk of young people are getting gaslighted into either giving up on having any kind of emotional support ever, or getting radicalized into bigots just to stop feeling insane.
that's bad. we shouldn't be doing that.
