[edit: I thank everyone for their comments and time. A lot of very interesting opinions and view points. Unfortunately also a lot of things that went away from the actual answer. So I’m thinking maybe this thread can be closed without deleting it?]
The more I hear people talk about it who aren’t cis-het men, the more I hear criticism about the concept. But so far, I’ve only heard people say that it’s stupid, that it’s not a thing, that it’s men’s own fault etc. But I’ve yet to understand where that criticism comes from. I don’t want to start a discussion on whether or not it’s real or not. I just want to understand where the critics are coming from.
Cis man here.
It’s an issue. It comes in lots of different colors and flavors but it all stems from social issues.
There’s lots of reasons, some men were never taught about social relationships, men tend to generally be less interested in social interaction thus giving them less experience, some men are ostracized when talking about their social struggles, and these are on top of preexisting environmental factors and preexisting mental conditions.
At this point it’s important to say: it’s not a contest for genders. Trans people have it hard, nb people have it hard women have it hard. It’s just that this is one of the rare times men’s struggles are not addressed properly.
I can tell you I probably have about 50 men in my life that I ko and wo are nice but if I had to talk to a man about my struggles socially, there are 2 men.
Now couple this with the fact 90% of men I had deeper conversations with told me they are struggling with depression and some of them having suicidal ideations, it is fair to assume we have a problem.
For me, the depression is always exacerbated by social isolation. It makes sense - not getting some feedback from other people can get you into crazy headspaces and there are thinking patterms that literally make you hurt yourself just to make it stop.
There’s another aspect: we are social creatures and as soon as you don’t get enough “social exposure” it’s harder to learn social cues and “get the vibe”, and other people notice. So the more you isolate, the harder preceding social interaction become and the harder it is, which in turn incentivizes isolating. A vicious cycle.
Now not everyone has these issues and I would never say that it’s the most important issue in our current society but every time I hear suicide statistics by gender it really puts into perspective that we should get to know those people who we have failed.
One thing I also wanna address is the idea that “men are never taught how to socialize”, because I think it implies a lot of things. First, I’m sure a lot of men are not, but a good number of men are. I was for example. It didn’t help, but that was never the issue for me. Second, it implies men want to be taught. I spoke to a group of 2 men and 2 women with mental disabilities about if they ever considered complete social isolation. The men said yes and the women said no. I think this is really significant and can give insight into why this is affecting men more than other genders. I would infer from this that women always see the benefit in social interaction, and men pursue social interactions rather as a means to an end. This might be a stretch but this supported by other observations of friends and family.
This topic is really important and I hope it gets talked about more - for the benefit of everyone who wants to see people become happier. The men affected by loneliness, as well as the people who deal with them.
men can be very social and still get nothing but negative feedback from others.
a big part of this is that men are rarely given positive feedback in life from anyone. with maybe the exception of your work where your ‘feedback’ is your pay raises/promotions.
personally in my life, when good stuff happens… people arne’t happy for me. They are often jealous or hostile. Most of my exes would downplay my successes. “oh you got a $5000 raise, why wasn’t it 10,000” etc. It really sucks the joy out of life to be around that type of thing. it’s also why i’m way happier being single and limiting my socialization… because i’ve stopped getting constantly negative feedback from other people even when it should be positive. i’ve also had so much more success the past few years due to that.
and frankly, most of the ‘social cues’ and ‘vibe’ that i’ve dealt with in my social groups is all negative crap. i’d rather remain ignorant of it than join some group where we circlejerk how great we are and complain about how awful everyone else is. i used to do a lot of volunteering and a lot of that stuff just devolves into people who want to do nothing and virtue signal.
Is that the case, because they are men, or because they are afraid?
Piggybacking on this comment: it’s incredibly rare for men to get approached, it’s incredibly common for women to get approached.
Both of these situations have downsides, but right now we are talking about men, so let’s ignore the downsides for women right now.
If you are the one who has to approach somebody if you want to start up any kind of relationship (from casual acquaintance to friend, to romantic relationship), that means you will be on the receiving end of rejection, by definition. If you are in the “approaching” role, and you’d reject somebody, you just don’t approach them. So by definition, it’s quite rare when being approached that you are rejected by the person who approached you.
So while women have to reject a lot of approaches they don’t want, men get rejected quite often. A socially inept woman is a wallflower, a socially inept man is a creep.
If you have been rejected too often (and maybe too harshly), this might easily turn into a sour grapes situation (“I can’t do social interaction, so I don’t want social interaction”) due to fear of rejection.
What you are raising is a very delicate subject but let’s call it what it is: dating sucks. No matter your gender, there’s hurdles, it’s just really hard to find someone who’s putting effort in. If you’re a woman, it’s because lots of people matching you will be absolute garbage. A friend showed me who was writing her and most of it was weird and creepy. If you’re a man, it’s hard to find someone who wants to write with you period. And any other genders deal with an equally limited dating pool.
It makes sense, it’s statistics, mathematically plausible, but damn it sucks. Unfortunately I think we are at the point where these conversation are bound to get eroded by inflammatory rhetoric. So these nuanced discussions are things for the future.
Totally, dating sucks for all genders, no question about that. The issues are just different and pretty much mirrored.
Yeah, that’s exactly it.
That’s also not wrong.
Tbh, I think the most important thing (not only in regards to dating but in regards to society at large) is to counter the individualization trend. It just makes people very lonely in general. It separates young men from resources needed to develop into more socially acceptable people, it separates people from their support groups in general and it just makes things really hard for everyone who’s not perfectly well adjusted for the individualist life style.