Like, why is it so widespread, what causes it, what solutions are available, etc. I don’t really know how to ask this question so I hope I’m making sense
For decades it has been ingrained in men that they are to be held to a very specific standard. Men don’t cry, men are strong, men have to take care of everyone else, stop your whining, I’ll give you something to cry about, be the alpha male, that’s “gay”, strength, weakness, and so on.
My father, and grandfather, both grew up with a code of silence. Feelings weren’t talked about, but relayed through their wives; except anger. That was given directly through corporal punishment (hand or belt).
I was always “emotional” growing up. I cried “like a baby” over “nothing”. No one ever came to check on me, or console me, during any of my “fits”. In fact, there were times I was ridiculed for it (sometimes by family members).
When I was 19 my grandmother died. I was really close with her; she was the only one who ever came to my aid and defended me. It tore me up so bad I could barely talk without breaking down. I was told multiple times that I shouldn’t be so upset, and that I was overreacting (by my family). Everything came to a head when all at once my cousins, aunts, uncles, and even brother yelled at me because I was being selfish and unreasonable, and insensitive to my grandfather because “he just lost his wife”.
Oh, and apologies are for “pussies”.
Anyway, it’s not really about me. I wanted to paint a picture for you as to why I’m lonely. Do with that what you will.
Men have been taught not to approach women in public unless it’s online in a dating app. Women have always been taught not to approach men.
So no one is having relationships except for a very small portion of people who are disproportionately physically attractive.
Pair that with the hypergamy that women are doing where they only chase men out of their league now for the most part and it makes things that used to be normal and taken for granted like getting married and having a family exceptional jewels that are hard to come by.
This isn’t true. This is what right wing loser podcasters claim to further the idea of women or libruls as the problem, and themselves as the solution. It’s a much deeper problem than that.
If you actually spend time around women you’ll find that looks are a way lower priority for them than for men. You’ll find that they value things like being understanding, doing interesting things, being trustworthy, and for physical things as long as you’re hygienic and have a semblance of style they really don’t care much even if you’re heavier. And guess what? These are ALL things you can work on to improve yourself.
Want to have more women like you? Work on yourself first. Women aren’t attracted to men who complain online about “I’m not allowed to go talk to them in public”
At least in my experience, women tend to care about looks just about the exact same amount as men, that is to say some care almost exclusively about looks and some not at all, and everywhere in between, and at about the same rates from what I’ve seen. Anecdotal tho, and the general gist of what you said still applies, I’m just being pedantic lol
There’s been a concerted effort over the last several decades to push a men vs women dynamic online, and most men don’t buy into it, so it’s really just been people shitting all over men without consequence. Just look at the other answers here focusing exclusively on how men can be blamed (edit: many better replies have been posted since I made this comment).
Quite likely pushed excessively by foreign propaganda.
Society died but people kept having children anyway.
Maybe lay off the Internet for a while, mate
Part of capitalism is a need for high consumer culture. I grew up in a Latin American culture, and there are American sub cultures that also work similarly, there’s no nuclear family. Of course your relationship with your parents and siblings are very strong and important, but you have no problem living with grandma, or having your extended family live all very close together, my family were all in the same apartment complex in an immigrant neighborhood. I grew up with my cousins, like every day, if we didn’t want to play outside we’d go to different houses to see what everyone was watching on TV, we shuffle around with the different game consoles at different houses, food was entirely communal. After I got married to a typical American partner and started raising our kids together I was very shocked to find out that some food in the house is apparently owned by someone. And eating that food is a serious offense. Anyway, people used to live very close if not in a large family home with extended families. Why was this bad for capitalism? One large house owner by an entire family of 12-22 people securely, in which no one needs to buy their own home. We’re a few cars and carpooling is a simple task, where food is distributed to the hungry without a lot of steps between grocer and table, I was wearing clothes my uncle wore when I was an adult. When everyone dresses in a similar manner and suits and work close lasted generations, a pair of taken care of shoes or boots that just get repaired every few decades, are you starting to see the problem? That NOT good for capitalism. When the concept of the nuclear family took hold there was a huge boom in home conduction, hardware stores, department stores, companies made fortunes off baby boomers, all this individualized products, razors, deodorant, soap, every stage in life requires a new variety of soap, 10 kinds of cereal to pick from, new shoes every 6mo.
Humans are Apes. Every other ape on the planet lives in large troops that mutually aid eachother and who is boss, and who is contending to take over, who has first pick of food and women, it’s based on what? Being hella aggro? Being bigger, stronger, what? Usually it comes down to who has the best social skills, who ever bonds with the most members of the troop, because when a fight ensures, it’s not about who is smart, cunning, or strong, it’s about how many apes jump in on your side. We are DEEPLY social animals. The nuclear family isolated men the most. Toxic masculinity harms men on a HUGE scale. Quietly, emotionless, provide a secure home, two or more cars, and income to spare to the family you alone protect. It’s pretty lonely. Many men don’t even have friendships, one of the worst aspects of toxic masculinity is that it’s a sign of weakness to be kind, caring, and nurturing. You know. Those aspect of social life that make every other species of ape successful. So where do men locked out of this already broken system go? They look for groups that will accept them, invite them out, bond with them socially. And who’s funding all these far right groups that do this with millions of dollars? Russia. Far right billionaires and millionaires who don’t want these men talking about WHY they are locked out of the system. If you look around you can also notice a lot of small service business aren’t run by white people. You see Hispanic, Asian, east Indian people, who ‘‘are all packed into that house like sardines’’ with a staff of related people doing the work. Consumer culture is a dead end. The Nuclear family is a dead end.
Eventually we will break down and then who survives. The armed and dangerous? Or a farmer, rancher, producer of products, doer of services, with strong social ties and distributes food, product, service, with simple bartering making sure everyone’s still alive.
When you have a significant change in the population dynamic, it takes a significant time for the population not (really) effecting this change to adjust.
From my perspective as an old bloke, Women now treat relationships as transactional or have standards that are impossible (for that individual) to achieve; men are reacting in the only way available. There are obviously a number of reasons for the changing in dynamic and I’m not making that statement to judge or analyse; mass change requires motivation. The motivation presented itself.
To my mind society is in the same incredible flux as when the female pill became a real and accessible/allowable thing fifty years ago. Gillick competence case law didn’t happen in the UK until 1985; that’s awfully late to protect young women.
The risks to a man of a long-term relationship significantly outweigh the potential rewards. Being aware of the overwhelming risks and deciding not to engage doesn’t stop one being lonely.
“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.” - Robin Williams
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by risk and why is it worse for men?
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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/risk I’m assuming you’re not familiar with the word and English is not your first language.
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- 80 - 90% of women win custody battles, despite prisons being almost entirely of fatherless homes. Homes where the father is the single parent have the same recidivism rate as two parent homes. 100k children each year lose contact with a parent as a result of divorce - guess which parent usually. Legal Shared parenting has almost completely disappeared.
- False accusations of violence are free or fully funded for women. In the England/Wales when legal aid introduced the requirement of domestic violence before legal aid was granted, on the quarter of this rule coming in (2011) applications under domestic abuse as documented by CAFCASS were multiplied by 10 times. Either men collectively decided to start beating their wives in that quarter or fully funded false accusations were exposed as an issue.
- About 20-30% of children are not related to their father as named on their birth certificate. Statistics from the child maintenance body in the UK shows that for the thousands of men placed on child maintenance applications over a third were shown to be false applications citing unrelated men. In France, it is illegal it seek the DNA child - father match for your own children. Visit a genealogy community or ancestry on Reddit or Facebook.
- In the UK the 1971 law (MCA) says effectively that joint marital assets follow the children. The woman typically gets around 80%+ of net assets because they have custody of the children. that’s a personal observation because these are private law cases. The government refuses to publish the real numbers.
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(I’m tired of typing now) Domestic violence against men is ignored; or the victim is arrested. There are no shelters for men and children in the whole of the UK. Erin pissey, a lovely woman, who came up with the idea for shelters for DV survivors for both sexes was removed from the organisation she started by feminists and now campaigns for DV shelters for men. All of these government money for supporting male victims of DV is given to 'Women’s Aid" after their successful bid years ago. There is still no support for male victims; it doesn’t take a genius to imagine why.
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(Others are going to have to help finish these.) Sixty five years after the female pill, there is no male equivalent. Women can opt out of being a mother with abortion, men don’t have the right to opt out of their equivalent. I don’t know a guy who hasn’t been told “you can take the condom off, I’m on the pill” - if he refuses a row ensues. I do know of the sale of positive pregnancy tests, condom mining for semen which is then used to become pregnant and the “on the pill” being a complete lie.
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There are multiple reasons for this. First of all due to the fact that a lot of infrastructure is based around cars society actively looses places for people to meet and hang out(I think this effect even has a name, but I’m not sure). Lack of places to interact with other people, and therefore lack of social interactions, causes a rise in loneliness. Then theres the problem with how men are supposed to act. We get told, that we shouldn’t “ask out” women in every day life, since its now considered creepy. For me this causes a certain type of being not sure where and when it is OK to ask someone out leading to me not doing it since I don’t want to get labeled as a creep. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to blame women for the male loneliness epidemic and there devinetively are a lot of men beeig creeps and asking someone out in absolutely the wrong situations, but this is something that needs to be said to understand the male loneliness epidemic. This also causes dating to take place online. Now the problem is, that online dating fucking sucks. Dating apps are useless, as long as you don’t want to sell your kidney to them, since they want you to keep using it. If dating apps were somewhat usefull they’d be out pf buisness quite fast.
I was thinking the other day there’s probably a pretty straight line between Match group owning so many dating apps, men’s unhappiness, and violence.
Like the apps create the illusion that you can meet someone and be happy, but their primary goal is to make money. They don’t try very hard to introduce you to good matches. They also haven’t solved the experience from the woman’s point of view. So men feel like they’re just shouting into the void, that people don’t like them, etc etc. Some of those people likely go on to become incels or do violence.
This isn’t to say that violent men are not culpable. They are. They retain agency. But Match group (that’s tinder, okcupid, hinge, match, plenty of fish, and more) is making the problem worse.
It’s like if there was a food shortage, and someone bought up all the grocery stores. Then they made all of them mazes and had half the cereal boxes empty.
What makes you think this is a gendered thing?
Women are better at being friends to each other. I’ve basically given up on trying to make friends with other men because they are terrible friends. At best, they make no effort at all at friendship and are completely passive, requiring you to call and make all the plans. At worst, they are hostile in various ways when you try to befriend them. It is very rare to meet another dude that makes effort to be a friend.
Edit: it’s soooo funny to see this comment being downvoted because it will only perpetuate your loneliness. You deserve it.
There’s a few factors working together to cause it. There’s really two main ones: pressure to have sex and romantic connection, and an inability to be able to make those connections.
There’s tons and tons of pressure out there about being in a relationship and having sex. In modern day, a good example is Andrew Tate and the like, directly linking your self worth to having sex. Back when I was a male teenager during the days of rage comics and advice animals, it was memes about the friend zone. The core idea is the same, being alone is something to be ashamed and upset about. Being rejected is something that reflects badly upon you as a person. Young men are constantly being bombarded with messaging about how being a man revolves around sex and romance, and lacking these things makes you less of a man. In addition, so much media portrays sex both as this amazing thing on a pedestal and as something that’s not just commonplace but as something that everyone’s expected to be doing.
So young men are believing that everyone except them are all in relationships and/or fucking all the time, and believing that them not doing those things makes worth less as a human being.
The other problem is actually making romantic or otherwise meaningful connections. So much more socializing is online these days, and there are a lot fewer women on the internet than men. It’s difficult to make organic connections with single women online, as random social media is by far mostly male and more direct closer friend groups tend to be made of single men and people in relationships (this is very arbitrary and circumstancial, it’s just what I’ve noticed). So, your odds of finding a single and compatible friend of a friend of a friend online aren’t great, and dating apps are complete trash for pretty much anything other than gay hookups. So, there’s not really a way for many young men to find romantic partners. Straight up hookups are easier, especially if your standards aren’t too high, but it’s an area a lot of young men aren’t socially comfortable with because it’s not something they’ve done a lot of, which makes everything much harder.
In the end, if there wasn’t so much pressure to be dating and having sex, then the difficulty of doing so in the modern day wouldn’t matter so much.
Personally, I’ve basically only had sex with men, because it’s so much more straightforward and the dating pool isn’t crazy lopsided. Though that’s at an end now too, because I’ve transitioned too much to be appealing to gay men anymore and haven’t transitioned nearly enough to be appealing to straight men or gay women.
So young men are believing that everyone except them are all in relationships and/or fucking all the time, and believing that them not doing those things makes worth less as a human being.
I just want to add that, in virtually every online discussion I’ve seen about the dynamic between men and women, if a man says something incel-ish, or otherwise not popular, there will be somebody (almost always a woman) who will fire back a retort like, “yeah, but no woman wants to be with you anyway,” (I haven’t seen it on Lemmy, which is wonderful.)
There it is: Your opinion, and by extension your worth as a person, is based on your ability to have sex. Is it any wonder that men think that, after being explicitly informed so?
You make very good points also to add women in online spaces have incentives to pretend to be male or be ambiguous and not bring attention that they are women online to reduce the harassment they get. I’m pulling numbers out of the air but I feel 10% the internet that is male are assholes or children that don’t have any social skills yet and the other 90% get lumped in with them because we don’t reach out at all as to not come off as creeps like the other 10%. So you don’t hear about the polite respectful ones.
My hypothesis for this comes from the fact that most men I meet in real life are polite social people that respect women with about 10% being weird assholes. I also don’t blame women being guarded of all men as that 10% are true nightmare. I mean if there was a 10% chance a strange man you meet out in public was going to be Jason Voorhees. I would mace every man that came up to me as well. That’s how those assholes ruin it for everyone. Well except the grifrers that make it worse that is.
Also I’m married but we met online before tinder broke dating sites. So take what I say with a grain of salt just from an old man that sees the struggle of young people of all genders go through and I have empathy for them.
Seeing Lemmy’s reaction to the bear made me want to crawl under a rock to be honest, so many people demonstrating that they’re exactly the reason why women don’t feel safe. A lot more than 10% of men on the internet are weird assholes, they just mask it well until they feel insulted. I’ve had a cis woman friend have to change her screen name because she’d occasionally get clocked and harassed, and a trans friend is really split on the progress she’s making with her voice, because now she’s also getting harassed when using voice chat in games.
Sorry mostly unrelated tangent, it just feels like gender relations have been backsliding
I’m out of the loop, what bear situation are you referring to?
it was something like, there was a viral tweet asking if women would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man, and most women said they’d pick the bear, and many many many men were very gross about this in response
Lack of socializing. We’ve lost the third place in modern society. It’s work and home and nothing else. Lots of people work from home now, which is great, but only if you have a third place. You have to meet people in the real world and find a way to connect with them.
People laugh, but churches are a good way to do that. Check one out, sit in the back, and watch the people who show up- the demographics, make sure the congregation is diverse, etc. If you see a same-sex couple walk in and sit down like they’ve done it a hundred times, you don’t have to worry about all the hate bullshit.
Church is a great way to meet people in a place where everyone feels safe and accepted. They are extremely welcoming to newcomers. There are always activities and groups to join. Churches have been the third place for literally centuries.
Even if you have irreconcilable philosophical differences, check out a Unitarian church.
Church is not a great place for third places- unless you happen to be like all the others at that particular church.
No church will actually accept you unless you’re the same as them. The “sameness” doesn’t have to be about race or orientation or accepting that.
They might be totally willing to let you in the front door, but unless you conform, that won’t be for long.
Libraries are a much, much better 3rd place, and they don’t try to ram theology down your throat to use it.
I’ve never talked to anyone in a library. Have you? Generally conversations are taboo in my experience. Maybe things have changed since I was able to go to one and relax.
I’ve thought about this a lot myself. I’m 12-15 friends/acquaintances down due to them deciding to step out of life in their twenties or thirties. On paper none of them seemed to be in too bad a way and yet…
There’s obviously the problem that having and discussing emotions is for girls and gays only (/s), but there must be more to it than that.
I think there’s an expectation (where I live) that men should be strong and stoic at all times - but, honestly, many of us are fragile little flowers, some of the time, but it’s seen (erroneously) as weakness.
In my experience most men are happy to talk about: “big screen tv’s, blunts, 40’s and bitches” to NSFW quote
but they can’t open up about emotions and feelings.
Sorry for your loss.
Yes, I think of emotional talk as “showing weakness”, because people around me gladly lash out at the exposed surface. Men and women do that, but it hurts more from women. They seem to be better at dealing emotional damage, or I’m just more receptive when it comes from them.
Also, talk about feelings needs to be handled, and can be handled very poorly. It also can seem demanding. “When I have my plate full of my own stuff I don’t want to deal with yours”, or similar mindsets when the tools to properly handle such a situation were just never acquired.
On the other hand talk about sportsball is a way to entertain oneself while giving the lizardbrain time to adapt to the people around it.
I think you’re correct that (some / many) people see the tiniest chink in your armour and go for the juggler (jugular vein - clown 🤡 joke) to compound your misery to make themselves feel/look “strong”.
And, yes, in abusive relationships I believe a husband is more likely to hurt and damage his wife with his fists whereas a wife would be more likely to hurt and damage her husband with words - generally speaking. It’s tragic either way…
Too many cars. No more third place.
Others have explained it (places where social interaction is the primary intent - not home and not work) but I’ll add - old European cities (and most smaller towns) have some sort of public square. Many have lasted to this day and are still used. We can still build them, we but our chosen form of urbanization isn’t that conducive to it so we don’t. In North America in the 80 and into the 90s, malls we’re 3rd place. Then they started aggressively going after loitering in malls since simply sitting in a mall doesn’t produce economic activity. Many malls died and many are still dying. Those that survived achieved the - nobody goes there to chill anymore. Just to buy what they need, maybe eat, and then leave. Nobody plans to “meet at the mall” anymore.
Oh, too many cars! Absolutely, makes sense…
How much time do you willingly spend in public interacting with others?
There was a lot more of it happening before society required everyone to have personal transportation.
I’m an introvert so I am at home, work, or errands. I probably would talk to a lot more strangers if I had to use public transport and it wasn’t so expensive to do anything fun in public.
You would?
I use public transit daily and hardly ever interact with anyone. Maybe there is one interaction every 100 days? I don’t frequently see two strangers interacting either, it’s unheard of except maybe for retirees with effectively infinite time.
What’s “third place”?
The colloquial “third place” is, as I understand it, a (usually) public place OUTSIDE of Home or Work where people can meet, hangout, play, or just exist without the expectation of spending money or being productive in some way. Examples would be Parks, Libraries, old-timey Public Houses and Cafes, Playgrounds, Forests and Wilderness within walking distance, and more.
Car culture killed a lot of that by removing the ability to reasonably walk places outside major metro areas, as businesses relocated to cities, and because they straight up increased the fatality rate for walking substantially. Internet Culture also killed it since you can just talk to your buddies through the Demon Rectangle instead of meeting IRL.
In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. Examples of third places include churches, cafes, bars, clubs, libraries, gyms, bookstores, hackerspaces, stoops, parks, theaters, among others
There is a lot of comments faulting society. But the individuals need to take personal accountability. Choosing to live online is what I see as the crux of this issue. This comes from personal experience of living online and being loney and miserable untill i started getting out and meeting people. This lonelyness “epedemic” is people not managing their screen time.
Generally if there is a massive trend in society then only systemic changes will change that trend.
Sure it would be nice if every incel worked out, microdosed mushrooms and became more selfless people, but that’s not something that will happen.
One thing that would fix a lot of this would be the government better regulating dating apps, since that’s how the vast majority of people meet their partners now.
People simply just don’t like men
There’s a multitude of reasons, my personal favourite is that men are highly aggressive sexual creatures and the stigma against homosexuality is hindering our ability to form fulfilling relationships with our male peers.
Just crack open a history book, looks like a lot of the masculine activities came with a considerable amount of gay sex. Like, it seems like the main draw of joining an army to go to war is that you can fuck a bunch of dudes the whole time you’re away on campaign.
Deranged take
