I mean yeah. To start with, casual homophobic phrase: “{blank} is gay” is a very common, very quick social check on behavior; it’s saying to be careful of being too effeminate, or too lame, uncool.

I think for children, they first use the phrase more to mean “lame”, it’s edgy for them and therefore interesting because it’s as close to cursing as they can get without cursing. I think that by the time they grow old enough to understand that the phrase can be homophobic, it’s likely that the phrase “don’t be gay” has already been repeated enough that it creates an unconscious tension to still try to “not be gay”, even if the phrase isn’t used anymore because “that would be gay.”

I think confronting children’s fear of appearing “lame” would go a long way in promoting men’s willingness to discover how to have deeper bonds with each other, even if it could be awkward at first.

edit: wording

No. You, and the meme, are talking about men who are sexist and men who are lonely as if they are synonymous. Whereas, I’m taking a half second and thinking that maybe men are not biologically evil, and that there could exist a man who is not sexist and still feels lonely because male communication styles highly discourage intimacy.

The “not all men” cliche doesn’t fit here. That cliché is about the context of women talking about woman’s issues and/or experiences being dismissed or diminished by men who assert that because they specifically did not perform the action that women are wrong. This is different than saying that men are not a monolith and differences do exist between men that can be categorized.

Case in point: yes, I absolutely relate to the feeling of being lonely. I’ve been the 20 year old boy, living alone in a fly-infested apartment who thought to himself that he is going to die alone. I grew up with a dad who couldn’t handle that I bought a school folder with a cat on it because it was too girly. Even if I wanted to express what I was feeling, I never developed the skills to even identify what I was feeling to even begin talking about it.

It took three years of work before I was able to understand that I was able to want things for myself. I cried in the car after I finally let myself buy a fun treat for myself, and not as part of any reward for something I did, but just because I wanted to.

So yeah, I do get worked up when I see posts like this, because posts like this is everything that I’d see when I was trying to find out why I was feeling so lonely. And the advice they gave then was the same advice you’re giving now: “there is something wrong with you, fix your loneliness by yourself”. And maybe I feel like things can be just a bit easier.

You miss, and reinforce my point.

This meme says the solution to male loneliness is to “stop being an asshole”. Which immediately presumes that the only reason a man could be lonely is because they are bad. It is telling you that entertaining the idea that men are suffering is pointless because their suffering is self-inflicted and the pain will obviously stop once the man takes responsibility and “stops being an asshole”.

But, and this is a wild thought here, what if not all male loneliness is caused by men acting like assholes?

Yes, it is obvious that someone who pushes people away will eventually find themselves with no one. But that is a one way street. It is not true that everyone who finds themselves with no one must have pushed everyone away.

Edit: And to respond to the “it’s someone else’s fault.” It may very well be that men are lonely due to their own fault. After all, people who are alone because they pushed everyone away will still exist.

There is a fear in these conversations that solutions will always take the form of, “what do we do for lonely men”. But flip the script for a moment and try to answer, “what can a lonely man do?” And I hope that in finding answers to these questions that lonely men can learn for themselves how to form deeper bonds.

Thank you for your empathy. You sure showed us.

Silly men just need to understand that saying “I’m lonely” and “women belong in the kitchen” are equivalent. So don’t you dare ever talk or reach out if you’re lonely.

It’s a real shame that male loneliness is so quickly dismissed because it would be a great starting point to begin talking about how traditional male friendships tend to keep each other at a distance, and maybe come up with ways to bridge the gap so existing friendships can become deeper.

Instead it feels like the conversation just gets to this point where we all collectively shrug and say, “shame” and never really talk about it more than this.