i did a quick glance at the data once and i think it’s just to co-opt the broader loneliness epidemic (which exists and from what i saw is basically gender neutral) in a way that stokes misogyny rather than pointing people at the correct target (late capitalism hollowing out our social spaces and communal bonds).
there’s nuances beyond that in terms of how it probably does impact different genders differently (through the lens of patriarchal conditioning hurting everyone, but not at all evenly in terms of degree) but i think that core co-optation truly is the gist of it.
Yea there’s a loneliness epidemic.
There’s two possible solutions.
The incel basement dwelling groypers self reflect and try to not be repulsive unfuckable losers.
Or women drastically lower their standards for the benefit of being shackled to one of these trolls.
Weirdly, the second option is the more workable one in some people’s opinion.
i think this just buys into the incorrect incel framing of the actual social phenomenon though, which i get because the powers that be have intentionally made it the default narrative but it’s still flawed analysis.
people aren’t exclusively or necessarily primarily lonely along romantic lines - though like all social bonds, the material conditions for finding a romantic partner have eroded and suck ass and shit is rough out there in that way, no denying that. but i’ve seen data that the number of people who are straight up friendless has gone up 400% since the early 90s, like romantic loneliness is a factor, gender politics are a factor, but it’s a far wider reaching crisis than that.
the real solution is to rebuild communal spaces/group activities/communal institutions, deprogram patriarchal conditioning, and to deprogram “us vs them, what can i get out of this person” competitive/transactional thinking about human relationships. this basically amounts to working to dismantle two foundational pillars of societal oppression (capitalism & patriarchy), which amounts to a generations-long mass struggle with no assurance of success. that doesn’t make for a fun takeaway in corporate media thinkpieces, so the discourse gets warped along misogynist incel lines.
Or women drastically lower their standards for the benefit of being shackled to one of these trolls.
Weirdly, the second option is the more workable one in some people’s opinion.
I do agree that this is the conclusion reactionary misogynists tend to come to, yeah.
I haven’t had real friends in years.
Maybe you shouldn’t be so repulsive, and should try leaving your parents basement! Hope this helps /s
Personally I’m not friends with any of the people I was in high school because they all turned into right wing dipshits completely devoid of empathy.
Pretty eye opening when somebody you were friends with for a decade says they don’t have any sympathy for homeless people sleeping outside in the winter because they should just get a job without a whiff of irony.
But that’s also because I chose to live in a rural area so I consider the fact I’m surrounded by straight up fucking nazis to be an unfortunate side effect of being able to go outside for long periods of time uninterrupted.
But that’s also because I chose to live in a rural area so I consider the fact I’m surrounded by straight up fucking nazis to be an unfortunate side effect of being able to go outside for long periods of time uninterrupted.
That and it’s a lot more affordable. Not necessarily affordable in decent housing, but you know. There’s absolutely a tradeoff in needing transportation to better jobs.
I do agree that this is the conclusion reactionary misogynists tend to come to, yeah.
In high poverty level area, that’s what a lot of women decide too, at least in the rural Deep South.
I get that, if anything I’m “lonely” because all my former male friends and everybody i live near are dumber than shit fascists.
I’m just saying it’s another example of right wingers constantly complaining despite the factbsociety is literally set up to prevent them from failing at every turn.
These people have an unlimited supply of like minded individuals they could commiserate with, I’m just saying it’s an example of the “male loneliness epidemic” being a result of the fact even chuds don’t wanna spend time with chuds and what they’re really upset about is they don’t have a captive audience to abuse because that’s the only thing that they actually care about.
Kind of like how every social media site is specifically engineered to elevate them but they’re still miserable in a room of people who agree with them.
The “male loneliness epidemic” is just the large scale dehumanization problem, except it’s only a concern when it effects chuds. Kind of similar to how when corporations ruin the environment it’s your fault for personal consumption habits.
a real lack of systemic thinking in this analysis here. this is the ‘personal carbon footprint’ logic applied to social relations
Similar to that example nobody cared when vulnerable populations were suffering from the effects, but now it’s affecting the PMC it’s a top priority.
AI is fine but you should feel bad about getting a coffee in the morning.
It’s fine were kicking in doors at leftist political meetings but Braylen Whitacker got turned down for prom so people need to be more empathetic.
Yeah agreed, this kind of social alienation is fully acceptable to capital and bourgeois sentiment until it starts materially affecting lives and The Economy. I think we’ve reached that threshold now. Charlie kirk and Brian Thompson and the attempt on Trump got a lot of people shook.
Problems are only problems when they affect men.
To quote possibly the moist poignant thing family guy has ever said “Oh Louis, fat men aren’t fat, only fat women are fat.”
The lonely young men are becoming nazis and shooting up the nearest Walmart, while women by and large are not.
Yes the general focus on men becoming incels and radicalising into the far right through this pathway is the main reason this whole thing is focused on them.
That shit isn’t happening among women, the only pipeline for women into the far right has been terfdom or class interests.
It has happened a couple of times. There was a female school shooter in Madison recently, who was pretty clearly black-pilled from the right.
It does express itself that way for women, just not statistically as frequently, and rarely in as spectacular a fashion.
Capitalism screws people’s mental health over and profit from that by having mercenaries at their disposal
Yep, it’s a classic
situation. The capitalists want social alienation to undercut any type of organizing that would hurt their profit margins, but in doing so they create the environment for random acts of violence that we live in. They’re not going to undo the alienation, so at most they and their mouthpieces will complain about the symptoms, but never the cause.
On one hand, you’ve got the people who want to frame loneliness purely as a crisis for men out of male bias or misogyny. On the other hand, you’ve got feminists who are heavily invested in the idea of the girl group, intrinsic feminine solidarity. Which leaves women suffering from loneliness ignored as they don’t fit into either side’s narrative.
extremely insightful & under-discussed point!
Society has latched onto the incel idea that women can have any man they want/never be lonely if they chose to because all men want to fuck them 24/7.
Even if that were true (which it isn’t), you can fuck all the time and still be lonely.
Pretty much, like I’d imagine the life of a sex maniac who can’t form connections with people to be pretty off putting.
the Fuck Zone is a real thing, it’s not rare that guys will pretend to be your friend and evaporate once they find out you’re not going to boink them or once they find out you’re not single.
Me realizing now I need to text someone I said I’d check in with, but totally unrelated to this observation.deleted by creator
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all men want to fuck them 24/7.
This is such an insidious and harmful sentiment and it’s probably way more harmful for men, especially as it’s been used to persecute brown men.
Like, no Karen, you’re fucking 53 and I’m in the prime of my life, you should be sent to fucking prison for even thinking of me in a sexual context and then clutching pearls about it you fucking freak
I’m in the prime of my life too and definitely not 53
you’re not wrong but just adding on, discourse around the (very real and mostly gender neutral) loneliness epidemic has been so badly degraded by the incel co-optation that this framing doesn’t even examine that loneliness =/= romantic loneliness (at least, not exclusively). more and more people don’t even have one (1) close personal friend. let alone goddamn community! (which, fittingly, makes it much easier to find both friends and romantic partners).
I think it stems from an idea that since the incels are so deprived they would accept anyone so they think women should/would too. In reality maybe women are getting attention way more often, but it’s from gross (not just physical, but sex pest and whatever) people you’d never want to be with so staying single is preferable.
They would see this as being “too picky” and they could be with someone if they really wanted to, completely dismissing the reality that no one in their right mind should settle with some schmuck like me lol
Hey don’t sell yourself short, but otherwise I agree.
But I’m 5’6", it would be false advertisement!
Wakka wakkaaaa… :P
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Women tend to have stronger social networks outside of their relationships, a lot of men basically just have their GF and maybe one guy they get beers with every 3 months.
because they cope with it worse and there’s no group solidarity or support structures that minoritized people built for themselves (out of necessity)
In Australia women are lonlier than men but you never hear about it because we don’t murder people https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters/measuring-what-matters-themes-and-indicators/cohesive/social-connections
Sucks massively, yet more sidelining of women because women are expected to solve their own problems and men are trained to have their problems solved for them.
IIRC incel was invented by a australian woman on a forum
Yeah sort of unsurprising export.
She had this goal of self improvement but like yeah… unsurprisingly a bunch of miserable and entitled people gathered together…
You can link female loneliness to things like TERFs, but male loneliness is empowered by the patriarchy. I can’t think of any misandrist mass shooters while misogynistic ones are routine. That’s where I think the epidemic is. It’s driving a broader societal collapse while female incels are still as marginalised as any other bloc of women.
You can link female loneliness to things like TERFs
But can you though? It’s just bigotry combined with an understanding of feminism that says that patriarchy is eternal and all you can do is protect yourself to survive in it.
Any reactionary movement is going to reinforce the patriarchy ultimately. When it comes to the reactionary “feminist” ones, it’s the same pathology driving fragile masculinity. I’m obligated to accept the ideal for what a man should be and then compete for that with every other man I meet. Any deviation from being a lumberjack is losing points in a game I’ll never win, and even those lumberjacks fight for masculine purity. For a movement like TERFs or trad wives, they’re making a strict sociocultural ideal for femininity and trying to peacock to other women who meet it less than them as much as they are men. That comes from a really similar place of insecurity which we recognise as broader alienation. The pathology is universal and important to examine as the Pewdiepipeline driving any of these movements, it just isn’t empowered for anyone that white cishet men see as a second-class citizen. When TERFs were rallying around that swimmer who got 5th place the most common response was asking if they could even name who got 3rd/2nd/1st.
I don’t think it’s at all wrong to highlight this as a problem area (though certainly no gender identity has a monopoly on loneliness, which is a global human problem - just different expressions of it), unfortunately young men (in north america at least) who are forming social bonds with other men are doing so mostly in the worst online spaces imaginable on a diet of shooters, sports betting and pr0n with zero IRL community engagement or involvement. until or unless there’s a major prevailing counter-force soon the “epidemic” is not going to improve.
People say the situation won’t improve but if the chuds just keep digging the whole deeper and becoming more repulsive they’re eventually just going to complete isolated themselves and be a cautionary tale to the next generation.
I really don’t see a situation where a bunch of women just say “fine I’ll accept that he’s a literal nazi who thinks showering is gay and I’ll wait on him hand and foot for the chance to pick his up shaved nuts acknowledge between rounds of call of duty.”
The nazis really don’t have the leverage they think they do short of literal state mandated girlfriends.
And if that happens were just going to see a massive uptick in “accidental” poisoning just like in the good old days.
There is absolutely a female loneliness epidemic, but it tends to come from the most silenced of the demographics, childless lower/middle income single women who are over thirty. There are few representations of these women in media, and basically none that are positive, with the most common representation of them is stories about them ‘finding love’, thus removing themselves from the demographic.
However, they are, in general, not a threat to others so very few people will actually take the time or money to look into this particular phenomena.
cuz “The Side Effects of Patriarchy Floundering Under Late Stage Capitalism” is too long
And god forbid you suggest “what if we had the rich hire more people and landlords had to take one for the team and stop asking for so much in rent so young people can move out?”
Incels will crash the fuck out that anyone would dare to criticize the very rich people who ruined their lives…because they legally had every right to do so! Plus, they live vicariously through the rich so telling poor porky he has to hire more people or ask for less in rent is STEALING! They may be violent misogynists, but at least they respect the principle of property rights!”
There was talk about a loneliness epidemic for a decade, but when it got reframed as the MALE loneliness epidemic, is when it grew in popularity as a concept.
Toxic masculinity. Women have more friends on average and talk about their feelings. Men don’t get help when they need it because they hide and overcompensate.
I think about this once in a while because, well it’s not getting any better, and the framing seems to stick. The patriarchal subtext that women need to lower their standards and subjugate themselves is pretty obvious. But I also think there is the corollary message to men that they don’t need to self reflect or evolve in their attitudes.
I mean that beyond the level of a sexist society upholding male privileges, I think it cements the idea that men and especially younger guys are just a certain fixed way. And it serves as a framing that front-runs even having to ask questions like how did these men learn these behaviors and attitudes, how should they think and act, how could they become more chill and fun people to be around. Not just for romantic partners but for male and female friendships generally.
And I don’t mean to be overly male focused because I certainly agree with posters saying that this affects everyone and is a general issue of being disconnected beyond just not having romantic partners.
