Amba Azaad #sexist thenewinquiry.com

It is imperative to resist the disproportionate foregrounding of cishet male loneliness because the structurally oppressed manifest their benign loneliness symptoms differently from those who suffer from the malignant disease of thwarted entitlement. Buried inside the lonely-men essays is the threat disguised as suggestion that we feel concern for Lonely Men because Lonely Men can turn violent. This is a red herring in much the same way that alcoholism is used as an excuse for male violence; the problem isn’t alcohol or loneliness but patriarchal masculinity. Meanwhile no surgeon general is declaring racism or misogyny to be an epidemic despite the increasing number of people literally being killed by men “suffering” from these states of mind. It takes a special kind of self-centeredness to be able to cite stats that show that marriage hurts women’s life expectancy and continue to advocate it as a solution to save lonely men instead of trying to fix the toxic husband syndrome that is killing women. Men who demand that women concern themselves with the problem of lonely men in order to ensure their own safety are issuing the same hackneyed threats that patriarchy entrenches—a disguised demand that women invest their energy in socializing boys, in dating men, in doing even more care work than we already do.

Looking at some of the funded programs tackling the “epidemic” it becomes clear that creating spaces where men can feel free to be misogynists is one of the effects of how men warp community responses to loneliness. The first Men’s Shed—a community space where mostly older men could get together to work with their hands and socialize—was set up in Australia in 1998 and by 2010 was receiving funding from the Australian government under its National Male Health Policy. (There are no Men’s Sheds for any of the men trapped in Australia’s detention centers for the crime of being refugees on a boat.) According to the U.K. Men’s Shed Association the rate of growth of Men’s Sheds is between six and nine new sheds a month. (The U.K. government is planning to remove domestic-abuse shelters from housing benefits. On average in England men kill two women a week.) Public policy approves of self-segregating spaces with “old-fashioned mateship and . . . no pressure” (a liability-free way to say “No Homo No Feminist Cooties”) where men can be cajoled and lured into being cared for. Meanwhile sex workers, drug users, and transgender people are more likely to be harassed and jailed by police than be provided with spaces where they can be gently encouraged to talk about their loneliness.

Even though there’s scientific evidence that older people’s brains benefit from learning “something that is unfamiliar, and which requires prolonged and active mental engagement as you cultivate a new set of behaviors,” none of the men saving men seem to think of teaching men feminism. Or noncompetitive dancing instead of walking football. Or even just how to talk face to face. (Women’s magazines have been filled with helpful tips on how to attract a man for decades; perhaps the forlorn gentlemen looking for companionship might start with those?) In spite of all the studies pointing out how aged women have better coping skills—and, therefore, health—than aged men, toxic masculinity has conspired to misrepresent the happy ending of crones, hags, and witches as a scary fairytale. No lonely men talk about parenting, or about helping their male parent friends socialize their male kids in a less toxic fashion. All of them turn for advice to psychologists and sociologist experts, none suggest taking relationship advice from the demographic they keep citing as doing it better—women.

Individual loneliness is a fickle, nebulous sensation. Like other emotions, it is deeply situational—it makes a difference whether you feel lonely because every time you walk down the street a slur is shouted at you or you feel lonely because the spouse you beat every third night has finally left you. As individuals we are not owed freedom from loneliness any more than we can demand love from those we want it from. But collectively we can recognize patterns of loneliness as symptoms of awful structural injustices. And we can use our loneliness as impetus to work toward systems that ethically meet our social and emotional needs. The way to help alleviate the loneliness of the oppressed is to continue to destroy oppressive structures and support organizing and resistance. The only way to ethically survive loneliness is to look at labor: to ask who performs care work for me, who I perform it for, what systems are viable and where I transmute being abandoned to resistance.

Men who demand empathy for their gendered fear of dying un-cared-for, unwanted, and unmourned without referencing feminism are acting in bad faith—they would like us to pretend there is no distinction between the solitary deaths of an abuser and an abused person. They would like gendered consoling while remaining indifferent to the deaths they, as a gender, are responsible for. They would like cosmetic cultural change while believing that emasculation is bad, as though it is horrible to change out of being a toxic oppressor. They would like us to care about men as men, when there are people—disabled, old, sick, poor, queer, migrant, discriminated-against PEOPLE—who are dying and are lonely. Those are the ones we should be focused on. If some of them happen to be men, well, let us try to not hold it against them.

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