this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Oh wow, another meme completely disregarding a problem many are struggeling with. But don't worry guys and gals, it's okay because it's making fun of mens' suffering. And men can't be discriminated against.
On another note, has anyone figured out yet, why men are never emotionally available? It truly is a mystery 🤔
/s in case you can't tell.
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.
"I'm lonely."
"Well, you probably deserve it then."
There is a difference between thinking someone deserves it and them probably needing to do some introspection.
Making the blanket statement that anyone who believes male loneliness is an issue that in parts is outside of their control, is a clown, has nothing to do with introspection. It's a rude, unemphatic, misandric statement that has no constructive properties.
Unemphatic? Grown men seem to need more coddling than I got as a little girl. Do you guys know why women are so supportive of each other? They have to be to survive.
Sorry that evolution is hurting your brains right now
So the meme is making fun of "empathy is a weakness" and here you are unironically repeating it.
No, don’t you get it! Women just need to be nicer to “get their rights back”
Thank you for your empathy. You sure showed us.
Unfortunately, attitudes like these are why Democrats lost an election that they damn well should have won by a landslide.
You, as a woman, now have fewer rights than you did 5 years ago. Want to have those rights restored? Well, you need to actually win elections for that to happen.
Do you believe that taking this type of attitude with "all men" (Who make up 50% of all voters, by the way) will help you win those rights that you lost back?
oh look it's Not All Men, shocked I got this far through the thread without seeing you
Yeah, fun fact: It's wrong to stereotype people, and men happen to be people. Crazy, huh?
If I can correct men when they say dehumanizing and misogynist things about women, then you can correct women when they say dehumanizing and misandrist things about men.
This isn't hard to understand. Please don't be intentionally obtuse. It's not a good look for you.
I’m leaving for Canada. You guys can have your shit hole
Don't blame you one bit. Best of luck with that!
We don't fucking want you.
Is that borne from your fee fees or reality? You don’t know the first thing about me.
The fact you're using "fee fees" unironically says enough about you that I'm pretty sure that Canadians don't want you. We have enough assholes, thank you very much.
I’m so glad it doesn’t hinge on your opinion.
It hinges on whether Canadians will continue to tolerate Americans in general or not.
Signs point to "no", if prevailing trends are anything to go by.
Why don't you stay in your homeland and fix the problem you had a hand in creating instead of exporting it?
I’m married to a Canadian. Sorry to disappoint you
No need for coddling, just be quiet. It's not a big ask.
Ever heard the saying "If you have nothing good to say, don't say anything at all"?
Lmao keep sweet right
In my career, I have had a lot of contacts with Saudi Arabian men. I’ve sometimes been a bit jealous of the ease and familiarity of their male-male friendships in that culture.
They generally have no qualms about just hanging an arm over a friends shoulder and just keeping it there for a protracted side-hug, seemingly without a thought.
Sure, there are other aspects of the culture that give me pause, but the easy familiarity is something that I think is beautiful.
A good friend of mine and I were open enough to hug and say "I love you man" to each other, even at work. The engineering staff sort of tolerates us but thought we were weird for showing feelings, the shop floor staff immediately started with the gay rumour.
Yeah one of the many ways our culture is broken. :(
But did you double down on the affection after the gay rumors? Because, unless you feared violence, it seems like a great setup to mess with Straighty.
We had our photo taken together and framed it.
Made me think of that video of George W. Bush walking hand-in-hand with that Saudi royal (MBS maybe? Don't recall)
Yes, that snippet went viral because it is so incongruous in the USA, especially. But such things are common elsewhere and it is not perceived as ‘gay’ or negative in any way.
I think of my own experience of learning how to live as a gay man in the way our culture accepts. I just have to wonder how it would have been different if I had been raised seeing and experiencing males touching each other with casual affection and no overt sexual undertones.
I had to go to gay bars to first experience socially sanctioned touching between men. In the sexualized atmosphere of US gay bars, it was hard to just enjoy the closeness - because of the implications.
This is also why representation in media is so important. Kids need to see people like them represented as "normal".
The cumulative effect that the media has had on how Americans view homosexuality has changed so dramatically, even in my lifetime, and so much of that has to do with the media normalizing it.
It's also why conservatives are so terrified of it.
Yep, it is my civic duty to be visibly gay.
Look at you being all self-actualized... Stay safe though! Shit is crazy out there.
The lack of safety is exactly the reason I must do it. :(
Yeah, I think maybe you misunderstood the meme format? I don't think anyone is saying those things are equivalent...
Maybe, just maybe... men don't have deep friendships because "empathy is gay"?
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
It isn't being dismissed by this meme. It is being acknowledged as a real thing that really exists and is really a problem. You just don't like the solution it proposes: stop being an asshole.
But I suppose it's everyone else's fault, right?
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.
There is not JUST a male loneliness epidemic. Across all demographics, humans are experiencing more loneliness than twenty years ago, and more still from forty years ago.
The reasons that men, and especially young men, are doing considerably worse still than the general population with loneliness largely reflects on those men. We're doing stupid shit. And yeah, we need some help to stop doing stupid shit and instead start doing pro-social shit. But ultimately, that responsibility rests on us, not on those who would love to help us get our shit together.
And not to be cliche, but we're genuinely talking about "Not All Men." We're talking about men who say: women are dishwashers. Who think: empathy is weakness. Who excuse: all their hatred and selfishness. And then who blame: everyone else. If you don't see your self in this picture, why get worked up??
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 had me in the first half, ngl