Excellent discussion here. Joe - Thank you for attempting this topic in a level professorial manner. I can’t be certain about your answers, but I like your questions.
Loved this a lot, Joe! Yeah it's a shame how many rely on misrepresenting data to get clicks. :( I get the pressure to write eye-catching headlines, but there's a way to do it without making up stories and distorting the data! Yeah I feel like a lot of the time, people aren't looking to be enlightened. They're just looking to have their viewpoint validated, whether that means bashing dating apps, porn, women's increasing economic power, or something else.
I love your insight at the end, too. That maybe we're just finding an easy target to blame, so that we don't have to do honest self-reflection and take responsibility for our lives. Avoiding the hard work and clinging onto clickbaity sensational articles, alas. Maybe the real epidemic is that most readers don't want to use their brains. 🤣
Ok maybe I'm being a bit harsh. I get that many people are overworked, exhausted, and the last thing they want to do when they're off work is to use their brains... However this is self-defeating. They keep chasing the adrenalin high of blaming someone or something for their problems, instead of seeing if they could change anything about their own lives to help themselves live a happier life.
No, a lot of this is 100% spot on and I think it’s not always a matter of laziness. Humanity had, for millennia, blamed sickness on demons and ghosts. Not their fault, they had no microscopes to see germs. And it’s no surprise that germ theory took anywhere from four centuries to 100 years to catch on, depending on when you demarcate the discovery (the first “vaccines” came about during the plague when they discovered that some of the puss of the nodes would inoculate people against infection). But even after germs were observed, it took a very long time for them to become accepted. As I said below, what I think irks me the most is the idea that we should blame this on porn/games/loss of gender roles and traditionalism/casual sex, etc., in other words, “vices,” is that it distracts from the deeper, more concrete issues like income inequality, the fact that so few people report having even a single close friend they can rely on, arguably because they’re straddled between jobs trying to scrape by and pay the rent. Hard to find the time to truly connect with friends when you never get a day off. It’s easier to just blame people for things like porn and games, labeling them “excessive vices” than it is to address the deeper problems at work. Marriage and kids shouldn’t be the bar for loneliness, how about the people who can’t list one single friend they can rely on?
Yeah! I appreciate your compassionate and also honest perspective. :) As you know, I have quite a lot of minority identities, so it would be easy for me to choose a target to blame, haha. Not saying systemic issues don't exist, but there are some things that are genuinely my fault. Not because I'm a horrible person, but because I was stuck in some unhelpful behavioral patterns that I need to change.
But yeah oh gosh to think of how long it took to discover microbes, and how long it took for folks to accept the ideas. :/ Yes, it's easy to blame it on "vices." I'm reading Devon Price's book, Unlearning Shame. A central premise there, is that we're taught to blame individuals for their actions, e.g. smoking. But we ignore the wider social context, such as tobacco companies actively promoting their products, and blaming smokers for having no self-control or willpower.
So yeah maybe it's harder for people to wrap their heads around less visible (to them) things, such as the need to work hard on their relationships, both platonic and romantic. And much easier to point the finger at concrete scapegoats, like porn, video games, outspoken feminists, more women getting advanced degrees, etc.
Oops just realized I kind of misunderstood your comment, lol. Yes, being so overworked just to make ends meet, doesn't help people at all when it comes to working on their relationships, with family, friends, and potential partners. This is why so many of us point to capitalism as the root of many problems... Though of course, some other people would argue that we blame capitalism for everything and take no responsibility for our own actions. XD But we can totally blame capitalism but still take responsibility for our actions...It's not either /or, after all.
- interested in this comment from your reply above -
“is that it distracts from the deeper, more concrete issues like income inequality”
I understood that income inequality is at an historic low - if you go back far enough? Aren’t people wealthier than ever?
I am not implying that you meant this but inequality is often mentioned in the same breath as anti-capitalism. My own self-confessed pet peeve is anti-capitalism (considering that technically capitalism means the ‘private’ as opposed to public/socialist/government/dictator/authoritarian ownership of resources). I agree government and regulation in many areas is not good enough at the moment but where are people heading with generalist anti-capitalism fervour? Careful what one wishes for.
So, my stance on this is, as usual, pretty nuanced.
I think the capitalism vs. X (socialism, communism) debate is unproductive for the same reason that The West vs. X culture (usually China) is unproductive—because it takes broad, heterogeneous, diverse cultures and lumps them together arbitrarily. This was never more clear, to me, than when I went to Iceland and Greece and discovered a very different flavor of capitalism than we have in the United States, which is different from Canada, Bulgaria, Mexico, Switzerland, etc., etc. “Capitalism” is just too broad of a term to be meaningful without some qualifiers. Typically, I like to address things more precisely.
If I do use the word "capitalism," I mean the U.S. variety, which is very, very different from the Icelandic flavor or the Greek iteration, etc. I don't think anyone else really compares to us in a lot of ways—nowhere else is between 40% and 60% of homeless people employed at jobs and careers. That's a uniquely U.S. thing, and nuances like that get missed when we just speak of "capitalism."
One doesn't need to be a Stalinist to believe that nobody working full-time shouldn't be homeless. That's just a pretty standard liberal view, one that was shared by some of our U.S. Founding Fathers (like Thomas Jefferson)—it's hardly Vladimir Lenin. I caution against conflating income inequality with (anti) capitalism, as there are plenty of capitalist countries without massive disparities in income/wealth.
Next, I think that scientific findings are fact-based, not ethics-based (as they should be). Just because the scientific data or consensus, or analysis, yields a certain result doesn’t mean it’s an endorsement of that thing— if I write that anal sex makes people uncomfortable, that doesn't mean I endorse either anal sex of discomfort. I seek to understand things to improve them, not, like countless people online, to "burn it all down" in a fit of rage.
You may not know this about me, but I worked in politics for thirteen years and my writing career began because I would write a lot in hotel rooms, traveling for various political causes would have me pick up and go to a new city every few weeks (or every month or so). I mention this because there are a lot of people online with strong, often confrontational political opinions, but who couldn't be bothered to lift a finger when it comes to actually working on things that help people...and I still volunteer my time weekly to do non-partisan voter registration and poll-watching to help people vote here.
So, I can say first-hand that even within the U.S., the problems people face aren't simple enough to be distilled into singular terms—they vary even between states. Example: I've worked in campaigns to solve the housing crisis in multiple states. In the U.S. generally, there is a shortage of housing across the board—there are only 37 homes for every 100 working-class families who need them. We need to build more housing. In California, the issue is also sheer numbers; there aren't enough houses for everyone, irrespective of how much people make. It's not a problem of just giving people more money because the houses don't exist. In Florida, it's different; there's an abundance of houses, but there aren't enough houses for the middle and lower classes (Orlando has the worst market in the country, only 11 homes for poor and middle-class houses for every 100 families who need them), while mansions for wealthy people sit vacant. That's a very different problem that requires different solutions, but none of those solutions are an authoritarian, dictatorial takeover of the United States, fortunately.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure where you heard that income inequality is at an all-time low. In the U.S., it's higher than it's ever been since we started keeping track in 1910. We rank very low (unequal) globally. Some countries are more unequal, like Columbia, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but among Western, Asian, and European countries, we're remarkably bad in this regard.
See how deep red we are (more unequal) on the map here:
Here's a much wider view of income inequality, probably the most important chart you can see on this topic and this one should explain everything as it pertains to the U.S. It shows how much worse it's gotten than it was for our parents and grandparents generations:
And, here you can see the U.S. data from 1980 until now (higher means less equal). This is from the Federal Reserve, in case you're worried about media spin. Notice the spike around the 1990s:
Most of these charts are using different data/metrics, but they're all coming to the same result: that income inequality is worse than at any point in U.S. history (since we've been keeping track) and it's been getting progressively worse for about forty years. To criticize this, doesn't mean I'm ready to sign up for the Red Army. I'm very pro-freedom and pro-democracy, and I'm acutely aware that authoritarianism is unkind to free-thinking people like myself.
All of this to say, it's no surprise that, if people have to work an average of 83 hours per week to rent a one-bedroom apartment (we do), that will certainly put a damper on their social lives. I worked two full-time jobs for about five years in my twenties, so I know first-hand how much that can interfere with maintaining friendships and, yes, it can lead to isolation and loneliness.
Hope this clarifies a bit of my perspective on things.
I’m lucky to have a happy marriage that’s not work. It’s easy. But there was a time when I did enjoy adventures. If we stopped categorizing people, that would be great. You can choose one thing at one stage of life and something else at a different time.
Women who want kids are generally going to want to marry when they’re younger and more fertile. So that’s no surprise. Men don’t have as much of a clock and can afford to wait a bit longer.
Really cool statistics deep dive! When I nestle this between another piece I read about fertility, and how the most fertile subcultures put rigid social controls on men, not women, as well as the weird, red pill pieces about the unfair hypergamy of women, I start to get a clear picture about what is happening here. It’s not, like, a pretty picture and we’re all doomed, of course…but it’s clear!
Your debunking is to consider it fine that a majority of young men are unloved? It's still a very bad thing if the typical man spends half of his life alone even if he eventually finds a partner.
Explaining the cause doesn't mean a solution is unnecessary.
Hey, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. I appreciate both. Sincerely. Although, I'm regretful to report, your comment misses the mark on what's being said here, so, I'll simplify it the best I can and hopefully that will help clarify it all.
1. I didn't say, "it's fine that a majority of young men are unloved."
2. I didn't say that because that's not in any of the data presented here.
3. It's not in any of the data presented here because it's untrue—long-term, spousal, romantic love isn't the only kind of love one can experience (familial love, friendship, love of your passion projects like hobbies or your career that's meaningful to you, etc.).
4. Why is that "a very bad thing" that people are single? See my footnote: what's implied in this idea that "it's still a very bad thing" is that only a very strict heteronormative structure is acceptable, when, we should all know by now, romantic love is nuanced and there is no "one size fits all" solution that works for everyone. Some people are gay, some people are queer, some people are asexual, some people are polyamorous; some people want to focus on their studies, some people want to just sleep around and have tons of uncommitted sex in their twenties before settling down; and still others have a very specific idea of the kind of partner or relationship they want, and they're willing to wait for that. The binary of single/relationship doesn't account for any of these factors—it just lets you know who's single, but not why.
5. That last part, #4, is pretty important, and I'm assuming you didn't read the entire article, or you must've missed the part where the same Pew Research study found that of the single people out there, 79% EXPRESSLY DID NOT WANT TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP. Almost all the single people out there are enjoying themselves in their singlehood.
So, if it's a bad thing that so many people are single, and you're saying this needs a solution, what's the solution? To force people who don't want to be in a relationship (yet) to get into a relationship? That sounds like it can only end in disaster. If people would rather not be in a relationship, that should be their free choice to do so, in my book.
Joe, most of what I've been reading lately suggests that class is related to the "loneliness" epidemic. For example...this study... Is it tainted by ideological bias as well?
Hey David, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment and give us some food for thought on this pertinent issue. Let me just be as clear as possible on this and state it unambiguously: I don't think boys and men are fine.
Our rates of entering colleges, of attaining degrees, of income, and a lot of other metrics of a good life are all dropping relative to women. These are awful things, and we need to figure out ways to get boys and men more involved in things that will help shape and build happy, prosperous futures for them. Ezra Klein recently did a throwback episode on this that was excellent on his Ezra Klein Show podcast, called The Men—and Boys—Are Not Alright.
Do I have the answers to these problems? Absolutely not, and I won't even pretend to. That said, this paper you just shared with me commits some of the same errors criticized here regarding family and relationships. First and foremost, it makes a couple of assumptions at the outset when discussing family:
1. that marriage rates are a perfect one-to-one reflection of family life. They aren't. Some people have very different dynamics, and marriage isn't the only metric of love in someone's life. I'm unmarried and will never be married. I have no desire to get married. This isn't a bad thing. I'm beyond happy with it. Yet, this paper itself says, "Family life, including marriage and parenting, plays a crucial role in personal well-being and stability." That's a pretty big assumption about people that might not be true (it's certainly not true for everyone).
2. That marriage rates aren't just declining for men or working-class men, they're falling for everyone. Is it possible marriage has outlived its usefulness as an institution and that other ways of harboring close connections are rising to take its place? I think so. The same goes for children—it's all assuming that everyone *wants* to get married and have kids, when many of us simply don't. This is in line with piles of data showing that as people get wealthier, they tend to want children less.
And here's the crux of my piece, which tracks with this line of thinking:
That same Pew research I mentioned found that 79% of single people *aren't looking for a relationship* (if we count those who only want casual sex). That's really the crux of the argument in the article because, if you believe, as some do, that people being single, unmarried, or not having kids (in their twenties) is a problem—what's the solution? Do we force people who don't want relationships to go and get into them?
I think it's a very bad assumption to say that because people are single, they're lonely and miserable. We should ask them if they're lonely and miserable instead, like I argued in the piece.
Now, I'm more worried about the working class—both women and men—not having close friends (economics aside). That's the bigger issue to me. A friendship isn't the same lifelong commitment that a marriage and kids are. And I think there's a good case to be made for a hypothesis about what's causing this—income inequality. Working-class people scarcely have time to build and maintain long-term friendships. Our time is increasingly swallowed up by the cost of living.
But none of the trends presented here in the FAMILY section are unique to men—everyone is experiencing them. 21% of men report having no close friends, 19% of women do. That should probably be reduced however we can. But what all of this data shows me doesn't tell a story about men, but about the nature of work in the United States. Look at the Marriage Rates Plummet For Working-Class Men, Exposing Large Class Divide section—the same is happening with women, people generally are getting married less frequently.
If anything, this is. great argument for greater income equality.
Edit: It's an argument for greater income equality AND removing the barriers to college education and meaningful work.
Yes, and honestly, that’s why stuff like what I mentioned in my article is so frustrating—because banning porn, attacking video games, and decrying the loss of traditional gender roles/marriage is actually a distraction from the real issues at hand; because the people pushing the stuff about porn and video games have a vested interest in not upsetting the economic order as it is.
They’re willing to throw their own children, especially boys, under the bus so they can maintain the status quo, where they’re quite conveniently comfortable on the social ladder. How few of these people ever stopped to question this narrative about porn and vide games and wonder if there was something that wasn’t “vice” related but had to do with structural and class inequality?
It also fits conveniently into the narrative we’ve heard for a long time about generations currently under 40—that we just don’t work as hard, that we’re just too lazy and that’s why we don’t have time or resources. “Damn kids! If they weren’t playing those video games, they’d be rich like we are!” while we’re working way over 40 hours per week for peanut wages. It really is a kind of collective gaslighting.
I share your broader frustration with media clickbait, and with the lazy misuse of statistics to confirm preexisting narratives. Confirmation bias is strong, you've linked to some good examples of that, and your post works great as a rebuttal to those specific claims. I happily subscribed.
Still, I wonder if your title goes a bit far in claiming to debunk "the male loneliness epidemic" overall. Your footnote 4 kind of admits this; but to be cheekier than you deserve, doesn't that make your headline kind of clickbaity too?
To elaborate: Most of your post seems to debunk one single misleading statistic from a Pew Research poll that some people were misusing. Maybe this specific 63% figure is not evidence of a male loneliness epidemic, nor of the partisan hobby horses these people want to tie that to, for all the reasons you say. But the thesis that there exists a male loneliness epidemic doesn't really hinge on that stat, nor on hookup culture stats, right?
I think a softer form of the male loneliness epidemic thesis might sound like this:
1. For a complex mix of reasons we need careful science to tease out (perhaps including more time spent online/on phones, the loss of free third spaces, people living farther from families, people moving more often and losing place-based community, high housing prices = less space to entertain, perhaps lower marriage rates or having fewer kids, pandemic disorientation and ensuing rise of remote work, and even longer term trends like those from "Bowling Alone," etc) self-reported loneliness has surged in recent years.
2. Men are especially vulnerable to this problem because they have fewer friends to begin with, and are socially stigmatized for showing the emotional vulnerability required for intimate connections with other people - and are grappling with this at the same time as the broad range of other problems affecting men you've already acknowledged. https://gender.stanford.edu/news/mens-loneliness-feminist-issue-men-without-men
If 1 and 2 are both true, is it really accurate to say you've "debunked" the male loneliness epidemic? And if all you meant by that was that you'd debunked a few narrow versions of the story peddled mostly by alt-news hucksters, and not the more mainstream version of the story reported by more credible outlets; AND that mainstream story is actually super important as a social issue, might that warrant clarification a bit earlier in the piece?
Hey Andrew, thanks for reading and chiming in. I appreciate both more than you know, and I’m super thankful for you subscribing. You raise an excellent question. There’s a lot here, but I’ll do my best to address everything, starting with the headline.
Just to put my cards out on the table where everyone can see them, I think you might be surprised by how much I toiled over this headline. I really took pains to try to come up with a headline that worked, and this wasn’t my first choice. My initial headline was "What's Up With the Male Loneliness Epidemic?" but that felt deceptively vague. I couldn’t think of a good way to phrase what I described in the piece after it was written, as the piece certainly does debunk a very specific idea that’s been thematized and that’s percolated throughout the Internet.
After consulting an editor and a writer who suggested I go with this one, I did, and, in the name of transparency, I opted to take additional pains to clarify, in the article—at several points—exactly what I was debunking, even going so far as to enumerate the items as pillars of the narrative I was razing. I then added more to the piece to be extra clear, so there was absolutely no ambiguity about what and whom I was talking about and, to me, this kind of transparency matters.
Now, this might also surprise you, but, I empathize with journalists who have to write headlines. I’ve been doing it professionally for 3/4s of a decade, I know firsthand how hard it is. It’s challenging to distill numerous whole concepts, with multiple variables, into a concise phrase. I think most bad headlines stem from limitations of creativity, rather than deceptive malice, which might be the case here.
But when your headline is provocative, AND you’re omitting swathes of statistics and chunks of the story, that’s no longer a limitation of creativity (or such a concise medium) and it starts bordering on active deception. It’s lies of omission, and it's framing things in a very specific way to produce a certain perception.
I couldn’t title the piece “Debunking a Very Specific View Shared by Right-Wingers and Some Academic Professionals by Showing Some of the Data They Leave Out.”
That just wouldn’t work. This isn’t the 17th century, my man.
I think there’s a miscommunication here, and I think it hinges on the use-mention distinction, though I may be wrong. To use Searle’s classic example, there’s “cheese” and then there’s “cheese” and they’re different—one of them is a white or yellow food item made from the milk of an animal and bacterial processes; the other is a word that’s used to describe said food item. Both the thing and the name/concept exist independently, but share the same name.
Bear with me, as this is the best example I could think of off the top of my head. Suppose I wrote an article “Debunking the Manosphere”—I’m not debunking the existence of the actual Manosphere (use) I’m debunking its ideas (mention, “Manosphere” here isn’t talking about the actual collective people so much as the idea or a specific idea they have). Similarly, “Debunking the Sexism of the Manosphere” could be interpreted in two ways: 1. Debunking the idea that the Manosphere is, in fact, sexist or, 2. debunking the sexist claims made by people in the Manosphere.
When you use the phrase “male loneliness epidemic” I think you envision an epidemic of lonely men (use). When I used the phrase, I was envisioning the name of a very specific phrase commonly used to describe a very specific set of ideas held by various people online (mention). I clarified as much repeatedly.
Believe it or not, I tried to overcome this by putting “male loneliness epidemic” in quotes like I did with Wordy, Nerdy History of ‘Gay’ and Wordy, Nerdy History of ‘Lesbian,’ both of which showed I was talking about the word—not denying the existence of LGBTQIA+ people.
But, in this case, that also could be interpreted in two different ways! It looked like I was being dismissive and sarcastic (like, sure, tell me more about this “male loneliness epidemic”). So, no quotes seemed the least awful choice.
I think everything else is downstream from this. Because pretty much everything you said here is what I said in the article itself. We’re in complete agreement, so the issue is semantic.
Examples…. You said:
“Maybe this specific 63% figure is not evidence of a male loneliness epidemic, nor of the partisan hobby horses these people want to tie that to, for all the reasons you say. But the thesis that there exists a male loneliness epidemic doesn't really hinge on that stat, nor on hookup culture stats, right?”
This is precisely the point I was making when I said:
"And there’s the rub. What irks me so much about this persistent narrative is the idea that just because someone is single, that means they’re lonely. That’s bullshit. People are lonely if they say they’re lonely—not because a survey found that they were single, rather than settled, at a later age than generations prior, or because the same discrepancy that’s always existed between men and women still exists."
And this:
“The U.S. Surgeon General released a whole report on the 'loneliness epidemic' last December.”
I’m not denying that a loneliness epidemic exists, I’m denying the (mention) concept that there is a loneliness epidemic that’s unique to men as it's been framed by specific people. I explained that in this paragraph:
"Now, just to be clear, the Washington Post and New York Times also wrote about the 'loneliness epidemic.' they’re talking about something else—that people report higher rates of loneliness than in decades past. That’s categorically different from the assumption that because people in their twenties are unmarried, they’re lonely."
I provided hyperlinks for readers to check those discussions out if they'd like. This transparency is the opposite of those aforementioned lies of omission and trying to sculpt a narrative by only presenting cherry-picked facts.
To answer your question:
"If 1 and 2 are both true, is it really accurate to say you've "debunked" the male loneliness epidemic?"
Yes, yes, it is accurate. Because it's not a "male" loneliness epidemic, and I don't think Dr. Murthy ever used those words. He describes a loneliness epidemic that's affecting many people, but it's affecting different demographics differently (man, woman, young, old, etc.) and says that it expresses itself in men uniquely (in some ways).
This wouldn’t be an issue if the political right and “alt-news hucksters” didn’t usurp these terms and pervert them for their ends. But two different groups are using roughly the same phrase to describe two very different concepts—the loneliness of Americans and how that sometimes specifically applies to men, and this weird self-victimization going on over on the political right that frames loneliness as a uniquely male thing that's because of our "vices" and a society that's slanted in favor of women at the expense of men.
Yeah I think we agree on the substance, and I didn't intend my comment to come off as especially critical. Headings are tricky, confusion isn't always intentional or avoidable, and my own newsletter's latest post starts with "The real reason for _____," - which is pretty textbook, OG, Buzzfeed style clickbait haha (Though my subheading gives a tldr, in fairness).
I just initially read your title differently than you intended it, didn't pick up on your meaning until midway through the piece, and suspect others may have also misread it (without necessarily reading far enough down to get to the "and there's the rub" paragraph). In the same way MRAs won't be motivated to closely scrutinize any data/headings they can cram into their narratives, I worried a lot of people resistant to talking about men's struggles could weaponize this one in a way you didn't intend.
I'd maybe have gone with "Being single is not the same as being lonely," (or maybe, "Single men are not necessarily lonely men,") subhead "Stop misusing statistics to confirm your pet gender narratives" or something along those lines. But again, not a huge deal, looking forward to your future content.
Those are pretty good suggestions, come to think of it.
As for MRAs, they're gonna do what they're gonna do, unfortunately.
Honestly, I am concerned about it, as one problem I really do see with men (that has nothing to do with dating and arguably little to do with loneliness) is this increasing radicalization. I honestly think that MRA extremists are just winning the ground game/culture war on this particular front. People look for all these reasons why this stuff is spreading—they blame economics, loneliness, etc.—but I think overall, the most uncomfortable fact is, sometimes, bad ideas just spread and appeal to people and there's nothing you can do about it but try to reason with them.
Anyways, great suggestions. Cheers, man. Good to have you around.
I agree. I don't mind his focus as a rhetorical move, as his response to you explains.
However, it causes him to make unwarranted logical leaps in the conclusion - basically not just to declare the Pew stat debunked but to opine that there, indeed, is no issue here for reasons that have basically always prevailed (love is hard and requires vulnerability, etc.).
I think it's quite hard to claim the data supports that conclusion; indeed, that seems more a flat misreading or mischaracterization of the data than a good faith interpretation of it.
Hey Paul, thanks for chiming in and keeping the conversation going. I think I'm straddling two separate things, here. One is the idea that these data show there's a loneliness epidemic. The other, as I said, and I was quite clear here:
"These kinds of headlines—whether about “hookup culture” or the “single young men epidemic” are a sort of plug-and-play that allows people to insert their frustrations into the data. Some people look at it and see porn as the problem, others social media, dating apps, video games, decadence, women’s equality, and more.
But what if it’s not that simple? What if we can’t cast blame on our favorite faceless technology, institution, or political policies because loving another human being is actually quite hard? It requires emotional, physical, personal, and financial risk. It requires a considerable investment of time. It requires humbling ourselves and curtailing our egos. What if, by doing so, we’re taking the easy way out, instead of undergoing the necessary self-reflection required to understand relationships?"
Like, I'm not saying, "The data says that love is hard." I'm pretty clearly saying that we can't, as those I criticized have done, just insert our technologies as scapegoats and blame them for being the reason that something that's, by its very nature, extremely complicated and difficult, isn't simple and easy. It doesn't work that way.
At this point, I'm not even trying to be dense here, but I sense this piece touched a nerve, so some people are overanalyzing it. In all honesty, this is one of the clearest pieces top-to-bottom on the subject, so I'm assuming there are some underlying biases at work preventing a few (but not most) people from seeing what seems to me to be spelled out clearly on the page.
It's obvious I wasn't speaking about the data here, but the narrative that's grown up around it.
It was obvious I wasn't speaking about the wider problem of loneliness, I included an entire paragraph saying as much, yet, that didn't stop Andrew from insisting that I was.
So, at this point, I'm going to ask that you read the actual words I said, not try to argue vibes. If you'd like to discuss words I actually said, I'm all about it—I'm right here any time and totally open to elaborating on them (or eating them). But that's not what's happening. Neither of you guys quoted me, instead, you kind of textbook straw-manned my argument and that's just kind of, idunno, gross and intellectually dishonest?
I choose my words prudently and if I made a mistake, I'll gladly own up to it, but you have to point to something I actually said in order for that to happen.
Like, no doubt, you have to see how utterly absurd it is to have one person effectively telling me that I didn't say the things that I actually did say, and that I should have said them (Andrew) and then someone else telling me I shouldn't have said the things that I didn't say (you).
It really is something, but that's what happens when you argue vibes.
I can only assume you're both simply bothered by the newness of the ideas put forth here and that the piece doesn't, as Andrew mentioned, merely echo what others have said on the topic (why else would he tell me that I didn't say what I actually did say, and that thing just so happens to be precisely what other people are saying on the subject?). But that's not writing, and it's arguably plagiarism. It's not thinking, either. ChatGPT can summarize the contents of his reply in seconds.
Either that, or you reflexively feel that I'm somehow being unfair to men, but can't locate a place in the text where I am so you can argue with the substance.
2. Women tend to prefer a partner with equal or higher educational achievement
Wouldn't that create an imbalance in demand, with women not having an available pool of men equal to the number of women? And that men without college degrees would have a smaller pool of women?
DJ, excellent questions. Thank you for reading and asking them. I'll flesh out this context a bit, as I've covered this a few times here on The Science of Sex, but I've never fully pieced it all together.
First, I'll start with the strongest evidence against this—if that were the case, that a disparity in educational attainment was causing a mismatch between men and women's ability to find a partner to marry/love, the trend of men marrying older than women wouldn't span back to 1890 and the disparity wouldn't be smaller than it's ever been. If it was an educational divide causing dating disparities, we'd expect them to start around 2010-2015, when women overtook men in college graduation rates, not dating back to 1890 and throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Second, I caution against using economic theory to understand dating and relationships, and here's why. The notion that family and sexual dynamics are "like an economy" stems from Nobel-Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, especially his work A Treatise on the Family in 1981, but it's certainly a terrible way to look at both family and sex. It views children as "expenses" and "costs" for example, so, while such the approach is cold and calculated (as economics tries to be), it ignores so many facts about relationship life, like that there's immense non-monetary joy that children bring to a marriage, joy that simply can't be viewed in terms of economic costs (and you probably don't want to view your wife or husband as an economic "cost" or "benefit" either). Joy doesn't easily boil down to cold numbers.
I think this really gets to the crux of the issue, as the way a lot of these questionnaires are laid out—and I read this research every single day—isn't always the best. When we ask people, "How much do you value a partner who has more education than you," what does "education" mean to that person? It might be, in that person's mind, a placeholder for "wealth" or "status" or "intelligence" or "conversational skills," or even "someone who's managed to be responsible enough to get through college will probably be more likely to do household chores and not dump them all on me," etc.—the questionnaire can't tell the difference. Such are the limits of questionnaires.
We see this every single day on Reddit, when people get together to form bonds over very niche passions (toads, wild mushroom hunting, etc.), and these, too, like the aforementioned children viewed as "costs," aren't easily quantified into a monetary or 'mate value' number. How do you measure how much someone's undying passion for toads brought them together with the love of their life???
Renata Ellera and I did a brief overview of some problems of the whole idea of a "mating market" here on The Science of Sex, and I've removed the paywall from this article for you, so you can read it if you'd like:
This is interesting, but look at the comment on that article? Her issue is that she can't find a man who puts any effort into his dating profile. This is something you hear over and over and over again in the dating world - women frustrated by their options.
I think that specifically pertains to dating apps only, and it's an outgrowth of sexual strategies. I've covered it here, and I've removed the paywall and linked the specific section in question, but I'll drop some of the important sections here in this comment:
"While 49% of men are looking for a hookup, only 15% of women report looking for a hookup. This means that even if you match with a person you find dead sexy, there’s still a significant chance the two of you want very different things from the experience."
Here's another:
"In the study, 33% of men reported casually swiping right on women’s profiles indiscriminately just to see what they ended up getting. If they were fishing, this is the equivalent of bottom trawling, shoving a huge net all the way down to the bottom of the ocean and catching everything that comes remotely near its path, sifting the trash and treasure alike later."
Conversely, "the women, of whom a full 93% said they would only swipe right and “like” a profile if they were explicitly attracted to the person. Women are much more selective than men, even on Tinder."
This signals a massive gap in how people are using these apps.
Many men, though not all, tend to go with the "put in very little effort and see what you get" method, while women are much more targeted in their use, putting in significant effort and hoping to attract the best. 1/3rd of men are swiping indiscriminately, with another 13% are swiping indiscriminately sometimes depending on the number of matches they have (making 46% of men who at least sometimes swipe indiscriminately), while almost all women are taking their time.
These different strategies lead to huge disparities that have been measured:
"Another study analyzed the data from 3,600 Tinder profile evaluations and found that, in total, men swiped right on over 60% of the profiles they encountered — women, on the other hand, swiped right on 4% of the profiles they encountered."
This study didn't ask people questions on a survey, it actually monitored their habits while they used the app, which basically confirms the above surveys.
But dating apps are neither the end-all-be-all of dating nor are they particularly effective:
"In a study that sought to understand the experiences of Tinder users, A First Look at User Activity on Tinder, researchers found that for 73% of the participants, meeting up with a match happened less than 10% of the time. This means that even if you match with a drop-dead gorgeous person who shares all of your interests, the chances for most people are less than 10% that you’ll actually meet your match."
That's a really low success rate, I'd venture to say that the low success rate of dating apps is due to how we perceive apps (like the options are infinite, they're on our phones so they're competing with countless other notifications vying for our attention, etc.).
I think we'd be smart to adopt a wider strategy when it comes to dating, mixing very minor use of dating apps (say, thirty minutes a day) with in-person dating and widening our social circles of friends and acquaintances to meet more people generally, and hopefully, that helps people find matches better.
White-incels should NOT be allowed in other countries. Due to your low-T, you couldn't handle your own women. Now you will go to other countries and again spread your degenerate, shitty, western culture.
Beta whiteys will turn even religious ethnic women into feminist-karens. Instead of traveling overseas, whiteys should learn to be a man and control his slutty white women.
People's personal pov are the foundation for any analysis on any subject no matter how and the fact that you admit that you never want to get married tells us everything. Your mindset is totally detached from it and snide remarks about MRAs is damning. This attitude also explains how you can't really understand the whole concept of male loneliness itself. The old phrase lies, damned lies and statistics come to mind when you compare the ages of marriage from eras before the advent of the contraceptive pill when both bride and groom would have been with a very low if not even zero number of partners beforehand .This changed for more and more marriage partners in the generations after the contraceptive pill induced "permissive society ".Currently males between the ages of 18 to 30 are half as likely to have had sex in the last year as their female counterparts. This tallies with the stat for STIs in the same age group where females register 2x the rate. But then a 2nd sexual revolution has been brought about by the abortion pill ushering in a massive wave of female promiscuity who are the type that certainly aren't in any danger of catching "feels ".
Or the men under 30 dating multiple women at the same time.
But what about all the women out there dating multiple men at the same time...
Thanks for this in-depth analysis. Couldn’t here the headlines any more either
Thanks for reading it. Much appreciated.
Good article. Thanks.
Thank you, Morgan.
Excellent discussion here. Joe - Thank you for attempting this topic in a level professorial manner. I can’t be certain about your answers, but I like your questions.
Thank you.
Loved this a lot, Joe! Yeah it's a shame how many rely on misrepresenting data to get clicks. :( I get the pressure to write eye-catching headlines, but there's a way to do it without making up stories and distorting the data! Yeah I feel like a lot of the time, people aren't looking to be enlightened. They're just looking to have their viewpoint validated, whether that means bashing dating apps, porn, women's increasing economic power, or something else.
I love your insight at the end, too. That maybe we're just finding an easy target to blame, so that we don't have to do honest self-reflection and take responsibility for our lives. Avoiding the hard work and clinging onto clickbaity sensational articles, alas. Maybe the real epidemic is that most readers don't want to use their brains. 🤣
Ok maybe I'm being a bit harsh. I get that many people are overworked, exhausted, and the last thing they want to do when they're off work is to use their brains... However this is self-defeating. They keep chasing the adrenalin high of blaming someone or something for their problems, instead of seeing if they could change anything about their own lives to help themselves live a happier life.
No, a lot of this is 100% spot on and I think it’s not always a matter of laziness. Humanity had, for millennia, blamed sickness on demons and ghosts. Not their fault, they had no microscopes to see germs. And it’s no surprise that germ theory took anywhere from four centuries to 100 years to catch on, depending on when you demarcate the discovery (the first “vaccines” came about during the plague when they discovered that some of the puss of the nodes would inoculate people against infection). But even after germs were observed, it took a very long time for them to become accepted. As I said below, what I think irks me the most is the idea that we should blame this on porn/games/loss of gender roles and traditionalism/casual sex, etc., in other words, “vices,” is that it distracts from the deeper, more concrete issues like income inequality, the fact that so few people report having even a single close friend they can rely on, arguably because they’re straddled between jobs trying to scrape by and pay the rent. Hard to find the time to truly connect with friends when you never get a day off. It’s easier to just blame people for things like porn and games, labeling them “excessive vices” than it is to address the deeper problems at work. Marriage and kids shouldn’t be the bar for loneliness, how about the people who can’t list one single friend they can rely on?
Yeah! I appreciate your compassionate and also honest perspective. :) As you know, I have quite a lot of minority identities, so it would be easy for me to choose a target to blame, haha. Not saying systemic issues don't exist, but there are some things that are genuinely my fault. Not because I'm a horrible person, but because I was stuck in some unhelpful behavioral patterns that I need to change.
But yeah oh gosh to think of how long it took to discover microbes, and how long it took for folks to accept the ideas. :/ Yes, it's easy to blame it on "vices." I'm reading Devon Price's book, Unlearning Shame. A central premise there, is that we're taught to blame individuals for their actions, e.g. smoking. But we ignore the wider social context, such as tobacco companies actively promoting their products, and blaming smokers for having no self-control or willpower.
So yeah maybe it's harder for people to wrap their heads around less visible (to them) things, such as the need to work hard on their relationships, both platonic and romantic. And much easier to point the finger at concrete scapegoats, like porn, video games, outspoken feminists, more women getting advanced degrees, etc.
Oops just realized I kind of misunderstood your comment, lol. Yes, being so overworked just to make ends meet, doesn't help people at all when it comes to working on their relationships, with family, friends, and potential partners. This is why so many of us point to capitalism as the root of many problems... Though of course, some other people would argue that we blame capitalism for everything and take no responsibility for our own actions. XD But we can totally blame capitalism but still take responsibility for our actions...It's not either /or, after all.
Hi Joe
Great article as always
- interested in this comment from your reply above -
“is that it distracts from the deeper, more concrete issues like income inequality”
I understood that income inequality is at an historic low - if you go back far enough? Aren’t people wealthier than ever?
I am not implying that you meant this but inequality is often mentioned in the same breath as anti-capitalism. My own self-confessed pet peeve is anti-capitalism (considering that technically capitalism means the ‘private’ as opposed to public/socialist/government/dictator/authoritarian ownership of resources). I agree government and regulation in many areas is not good enough at the moment but where are people heading with generalist anti-capitalism fervour? Careful what one wishes for.
Nina, good to see you around, it’s been a minute.
So, my stance on this is, as usual, pretty nuanced.
I think the capitalism vs. X (socialism, communism) debate is unproductive for the same reason that The West vs. X culture (usually China) is unproductive—because it takes broad, heterogeneous, diverse cultures and lumps them together arbitrarily. This was never more clear, to me, than when I went to Iceland and Greece and discovered a very different flavor of capitalism than we have in the United States, which is different from Canada, Bulgaria, Mexico, Switzerland, etc., etc. “Capitalism” is just too broad of a term to be meaningful without some qualifiers. Typically, I like to address things more precisely.
If I do use the word "capitalism," I mean the U.S. variety, which is very, very different from the Icelandic flavor or the Greek iteration, etc. I don't think anyone else really compares to us in a lot of ways—nowhere else is between 40% and 60% of homeless people employed at jobs and careers. That's a uniquely U.S. thing, and nuances like that get missed when we just speak of "capitalism."
One doesn't need to be a Stalinist to believe that nobody working full-time shouldn't be homeless. That's just a pretty standard liberal view, one that was shared by some of our U.S. Founding Fathers (like Thomas Jefferson)—it's hardly Vladimir Lenin. I caution against conflating income inequality with (anti) capitalism, as there are plenty of capitalist countries without massive disparities in income/wealth.
Next, I think that scientific findings are fact-based, not ethics-based (as they should be). Just because the scientific data or consensus, or analysis, yields a certain result doesn’t mean it’s an endorsement of that thing— if I write that anal sex makes people uncomfortable, that doesn't mean I endorse either anal sex of discomfort. I seek to understand things to improve them, not, like countless people online, to "burn it all down" in a fit of rage.
You may not know this about me, but I worked in politics for thirteen years and my writing career began because I would write a lot in hotel rooms, traveling for various political causes would have me pick up and go to a new city every few weeks (or every month or so). I mention this because there are a lot of people online with strong, often confrontational political opinions, but who couldn't be bothered to lift a finger when it comes to actually working on things that help people...and I still volunteer my time weekly to do non-partisan voter registration and poll-watching to help people vote here.
So, I can say first-hand that even within the U.S., the problems people face aren't simple enough to be distilled into singular terms—they vary even between states. Example: I've worked in campaigns to solve the housing crisis in multiple states. In the U.S. generally, there is a shortage of housing across the board—there are only 37 homes for every 100 working-class families who need them. We need to build more housing. In California, the issue is also sheer numbers; there aren't enough houses for everyone, irrespective of how much people make. It's not a problem of just giving people more money because the houses don't exist. In Florida, it's different; there's an abundance of houses, but there aren't enough houses for the middle and lower classes (Orlando has the worst market in the country, only 11 homes for poor and middle-class houses for every 100 families who need them), while mansions for wealthy people sit vacant. That's a very different problem that requires different solutions, but none of those solutions are an authoritarian, dictatorial takeover of the United States, fortunately.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure where you heard that income inequality is at an all-time low. In the U.S., it's higher than it's ever been since we started keeping track in 1910. We rank very low (unequal) globally. Some countries are more unequal, like Columbia, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but among Western, Asian, and European countries, we're remarkably bad in this regard.
See how deep red we are (more unequal) on the map here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:Map_of_countries_by_GINI_coefficient_(1990_to_2020).svg
Here's a much wider view of income inequality, probably the most important chart you can see on this topic and this one should explain everything as it pertains to the U.S. It shows how much worse it's gotten than it was for our parents and grandparents generations:
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/assets/4227239/usa_historical.png
And, here you can see the U.S. data from 1980 until now (higher means less equal). This is from the Federal Reserve, in case you're worried about media spin. Notice the spike around the 1990s:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
Most of these charts are using different data/metrics, but they're all coming to the same result: that income inequality is worse than at any point in U.S. history (since we've been keeping track) and it's been getting progressively worse for about forty years. To criticize this, doesn't mean I'm ready to sign up for the Red Army. I'm very pro-freedom and pro-democracy, and I'm acutely aware that authoritarianism is unkind to free-thinking people like myself.
All of this to say, it's no surprise that, if people have to work an average of 83 hours per week to rent a one-bedroom apartment (we do), that will certainly put a damper on their social lives. I worked two full-time jobs for about five years in my twenties, so I know first-hand how much that can interfere with maintaining friendships and, yes, it can lead to isolation and loneliness.
Hope this clarifies a bit of my perspective on things.
I’m lucky to have a happy marriage that’s not work. It’s easy. But there was a time when I did enjoy adventures. If we stopped categorizing people, that would be great. You can choose one thing at one stage of life and something else at a different time.
Women who want kids are generally going to want to marry when they’re younger and more fertile. So that’s no surprise. Men don’t have as much of a clock and can afford to wait a bit longer.
Really cool statistics deep dive! When I nestle this between another piece I read about fertility, and how the most fertile subcultures put rigid social controls on men, not women, as well as the weird, red pill pieces about the unfair hypergamy of women, I start to get a clear picture about what is happening here. It’s not, like, a pretty picture and we’re all doomed, of course…but it’s clear!
Interesting. And thanks for reading. I'd be interested to hear/read more about this.
Your debunking is to consider it fine that a majority of young men are unloved? It's still a very bad thing if the typical man spends half of his life alone even if he eventually finds a partner.
Explaining the cause doesn't mean a solution is unnecessary.
Hey, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. I appreciate both. Sincerely. Although, I'm regretful to report, your comment misses the mark on what's being said here, so, I'll simplify it the best I can and hopefully that will help clarify it all.
1. I didn't say, "it's fine that a majority of young men are unloved."
2. I didn't say that because that's not in any of the data presented here.
3. It's not in any of the data presented here because it's untrue—long-term, spousal, romantic love isn't the only kind of love one can experience (familial love, friendship, love of your passion projects like hobbies or your career that's meaningful to you, etc.).
4. Why is that "a very bad thing" that people are single? See my footnote: what's implied in this idea that "it's still a very bad thing" is that only a very strict heteronormative structure is acceptable, when, we should all know by now, romantic love is nuanced and there is no "one size fits all" solution that works for everyone. Some people are gay, some people are queer, some people are asexual, some people are polyamorous; some people want to focus on their studies, some people want to just sleep around and have tons of uncommitted sex in their twenties before settling down; and still others have a very specific idea of the kind of partner or relationship they want, and they're willing to wait for that. The binary of single/relationship doesn't account for any of these factors—it just lets you know who's single, but not why.
5. That last part, #4, is pretty important, and I'm assuming you didn't read the entire article, or you must've missed the part where the same Pew Research study found that of the single people out there, 79% EXPRESSLY DID NOT WANT TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP. Almost all the single people out there are enjoying themselves in their singlehood.
So, if it's a bad thing that so many people are single, and you're saying this needs a solution, what's the solution? To force people who don't want to be in a relationship (yet) to get into a relationship? That sounds like it can only end in disaster. If people would rather not be in a relationship, that should be their free choice to do so, in my book.
Joe, most of what I've been reading lately suggests that class is related to the "loneliness" epidemic. For example...this study... Is it tainted by ideological bias as well?
https://aibm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WORKINGCLASS_FORPUB.pdf
Hey David, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment and give us some food for thought on this pertinent issue. Let me just be as clear as possible on this and state it unambiguously: I don't think boys and men are fine.
Our rates of entering colleges, of attaining degrees, of income, and a lot of other metrics of a good life are all dropping relative to women. These are awful things, and we need to figure out ways to get boys and men more involved in things that will help shape and build happy, prosperous futures for them. Ezra Klein recently did a throwback episode on this that was excellent on his Ezra Klein Show podcast, called The Men—and Boys—Are Not Alright.
Do I have the answers to these problems? Absolutely not, and I won't even pretend to. That said, this paper you just shared with me commits some of the same errors criticized here regarding family and relationships. First and foremost, it makes a couple of assumptions at the outset when discussing family:
1. that marriage rates are a perfect one-to-one reflection of family life. They aren't. Some people have very different dynamics, and marriage isn't the only metric of love in someone's life. I'm unmarried and will never be married. I have no desire to get married. This isn't a bad thing. I'm beyond happy with it. Yet, this paper itself says, "Family life, including marriage and parenting, plays a crucial role in personal well-being and stability." That's a pretty big assumption about people that might not be true (it's certainly not true for everyone).
2. That marriage rates aren't just declining for men or working-class men, they're falling for everyone. Is it possible marriage has outlived its usefulness as an institution and that other ways of harboring close connections are rising to take its place? I think so. The same goes for children—it's all assuming that everyone *wants* to get married and have kids, when many of us simply don't. This is in line with piles of data showing that as people get wealthier, they tend to want children less.
And here's the crux of my piece, which tracks with this line of thinking:
That same Pew research I mentioned found that 79% of single people *aren't looking for a relationship* (if we count those who only want casual sex). That's really the crux of the argument in the article because, if you believe, as some do, that people being single, unmarried, or not having kids (in their twenties) is a problem—what's the solution? Do we force people who don't want relationships to go and get into them?
I think it's a very bad assumption to say that because people are single, they're lonely and miserable. We should ask them if they're lonely and miserable instead, like I argued in the piece.
Now, I'm more worried about the working class—both women and men—not having close friends (economics aside). That's the bigger issue to me. A friendship isn't the same lifelong commitment that a marriage and kids are. And I think there's a good case to be made for a hypothesis about what's causing this—income inequality. Working-class people scarcely have time to build and maintain long-term friendships. Our time is increasingly swallowed up by the cost of living.
But none of the trends presented here in the FAMILY section are unique to men—everyone is experiencing them. 21% of men report having no close friends, 19% of women do. That should probably be reduced however we can. But what all of this data shows me doesn't tell a story about men, but about the nature of work in the United States. Look at the Marriage Rates Plummet For Working-Class Men, Exposing Large Class Divide section—the same is happening with women, people generally are getting married less frequently.
If anything, this is. great argument for greater income equality.
Edit: It's an argument for greater income equality AND removing the barriers to college education and meaningful work.
Thanks for a thoughtful reply, Joe.
Sure thing. No worries.
Actually, thank YOU for giving me a whole lot more on the subject to talk about.
Btw. I agree that income inequality (or as I put it, social immobility) is the problem.
Yes, and honestly, that’s why stuff like what I mentioned in my article is so frustrating—because banning porn, attacking video games, and decrying the loss of traditional gender roles/marriage is actually a distraction from the real issues at hand; because the people pushing the stuff about porn and video games have a vested interest in not upsetting the economic order as it is.
They’re willing to throw their own children, especially boys, under the bus so they can maintain the status quo, where they’re quite conveniently comfortable on the social ladder. How few of these people ever stopped to question this narrative about porn and vide games and wonder if there was something that wasn’t “vice” related but had to do with structural and class inequality?
It also fits conveniently into the narrative we’ve heard for a long time about generations currently under 40—that we just don’t work as hard, that we’re just too lazy and that’s why we don’t have time or resources. “Damn kids! If they weren’t playing those video games, they’d be rich like we are!” while we’re working way over 40 hours per week for peanut wages. It really is a kind of collective gaslighting.
Male loneliness, isolation and suicide skew older when you look at national datasets…definitely not young adults…
I share your broader frustration with media clickbait, and with the lazy misuse of statistics to confirm preexisting narratives. Confirmation bias is strong, you've linked to some good examples of that, and your post works great as a rebuttal to those specific claims. I happily subscribed.
Still, I wonder if your title goes a bit far in claiming to debunk "the male loneliness epidemic" overall. Your footnote 4 kind of admits this; but to be cheekier than you deserve, doesn't that make your headline kind of clickbaity too?
To elaborate: Most of your post seems to debunk one single misleading statistic from a Pew Research poll that some people were misusing. Maybe this specific 63% figure is not evidence of a male loneliness epidemic, nor of the partisan hobby horses these people want to tie that to, for all the reasons you say. But the thesis that there exists a male loneliness epidemic doesn't really hinge on that stat, nor on hookup culture stats, right?
The U.S. Surgeon General released a whole report on the "loneliness epidemic" last December. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/connection/index.html?utm_source=osg_social&utm_medium=osg_social&utm_campaign=osg_sg_gov_vm . He has also spoken about the "crisis" facing men in particular: https://the.ink/p/free-for-all-dr-vivek-murthy-men-in-crisis, and there are plenty of arguments citing other data about male loneliness that don't rely on your Pew survey. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mens-mental-health-matters/202301/why-men-are-lonelier-than-ever. As you acknowledged in another comment, men as a whole are not doing well on a whole lot of indicators that intuitively overlap with loneliness, like deaths of despair.
I think a softer form of the male loneliness epidemic thesis might sound like this:
1. For a complex mix of reasons we need careful science to tease out (perhaps including more time spent online/on phones, the loss of free third spaces, people living farther from families, people moving more often and losing place-based community, high housing prices = less space to entertain, perhaps lower marriage rates or having fewer kids, pandemic disorientation and ensuing rise of remote work, and even longer term trends like those from "Bowling Alone," etc) self-reported loneliness has surged in recent years.
2. Men are especially vulnerable to this problem because they have fewer friends to begin with, and are socially stigmatized for showing the emotional vulnerability required for intimate connections with other people - and are grappling with this at the same time as the broad range of other problems affecting men you've already acknowledged. https://gender.stanford.edu/news/mens-loneliness-feminist-issue-men-without-men
If 1 and 2 are both true, is it really accurate to say you've "debunked" the male loneliness epidemic? And if all you meant by that was that you'd debunked a few narrow versions of the story peddled mostly by alt-news hucksters, and not the more mainstream version of the story reported by more credible outlets; AND that mainstream story is actually super important as a social issue, might that warrant clarification a bit earlier in the piece?
Hey Andrew, thanks for reading and chiming in. I appreciate both more than you know, and I’m super thankful for you subscribing. You raise an excellent question. There’s a lot here, but I’ll do my best to address everything, starting with the headline.
Just to put my cards out on the table where everyone can see them, I think you might be surprised by how much I toiled over this headline. I really took pains to try to come up with a headline that worked, and this wasn’t my first choice. My initial headline was "What's Up With the Male Loneliness Epidemic?" but that felt deceptively vague. I couldn’t think of a good way to phrase what I described in the piece after it was written, as the piece certainly does debunk a very specific idea that’s been thematized and that’s percolated throughout the Internet.
After consulting an editor and a writer who suggested I go with this one, I did, and, in the name of transparency, I opted to take additional pains to clarify, in the article—at several points—exactly what I was debunking, even going so far as to enumerate the items as pillars of the narrative I was razing. I then added more to the piece to be extra clear, so there was absolutely no ambiguity about what and whom I was talking about and, to me, this kind of transparency matters.
Now, this might also surprise you, but, I empathize with journalists who have to write headlines. I’ve been doing it professionally for 3/4s of a decade, I know firsthand how hard it is. It’s challenging to distill numerous whole concepts, with multiple variables, into a concise phrase. I think most bad headlines stem from limitations of creativity, rather than deceptive malice, which might be the case here.
But when your headline is provocative, AND you’re omitting swathes of statistics and chunks of the story, that’s no longer a limitation of creativity (or such a concise medium) and it starts bordering on active deception. It’s lies of omission, and it's framing things in a very specific way to produce a certain perception.
I couldn’t title the piece “Debunking a Very Specific View Shared by Right-Wingers and Some Academic Professionals by Showing Some of the Data They Leave Out.”
That just wouldn’t work. This isn’t the 17th century, my man.
I think there’s a miscommunication here, and I think it hinges on the use-mention distinction, though I may be wrong. To use Searle’s classic example, there’s “cheese” and then there’s “cheese” and they’re different—one of them is a white or yellow food item made from the milk of an animal and bacterial processes; the other is a word that’s used to describe said food item. Both the thing and the name/concept exist independently, but share the same name.
Bear with me, as this is the best example I could think of off the top of my head. Suppose I wrote an article “Debunking the Manosphere”—I’m not debunking the existence of the actual Manosphere (use) I’m debunking its ideas (mention, “Manosphere” here isn’t talking about the actual collective people so much as the idea or a specific idea they have). Similarly, “Debunking the Sexism of the Manosphere” could be interpreted in two ways: 1. Debunking the idea that the Manosphere is, in fact, sexist or, 2. debunking the sexist claims made by people in the Manosphere.
When you use the phrase “male loneliness epidemic” I think you envision an epidemic of lonely men (use). When I used the phrase, I was envisioning the name of a very specific phrase commonly used to describe a very specific set of ideas held by various people online (mention). I clarified as much repeatedly.
Believe it or not, I tried to overcome this by putting “male loneliness epidemic” in quotes like I did with Wordy, Nerdy History of ‘Gay’ and Wordy, Nerdy History of ‘Lesbian,’ both of which showed I was talking about the word—not denying the existence of LGBTQIA+ people.
But, in this case, that also could be interpreted in two different ways! It looked like I was being dismissive and sarcastic (like, sure, tell me more about this “male loneliness epidemic”). So, no quotes seemed the least awful choice.
See this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction
I think everything else is downstream from this. Because pretty much everything you said here is what I said in the article itself. We’re in complete agreement, so the issue is semantic.
Examples…. You said:
“Maybe this specific 63% figure is not evidence of a male loneliness epidemic, nor of the partisan hobby horses these people want to tie that to, for all the reasons you say. But the thesis that there exists a male loneliness epidemic doesn't really hinge on that stat, nor on hookup culture stats, right?”
This is precisely the point I was making when I said:
"And there’s the rub. What irks me so much about this persistent narrative is the idea that just because someone is single, that means they’re lonely. That’s bullshit. People are lonely if they say they’re lonely—not because a survey found that they were single, rather than settled, at a later age than generations prior, or because the same discrepancy that’s always existed between men and women still exists."
And this:
“The U.S. Surgeon General released a whole report on the 'loneliness epidemic' last December.”
I’m not denying that a loneliness epidemic exists, I’m denying the (mention) concept that there is a loneliness epidemic that’s unique to men as it's been framed by specific people. I explained that in this paragraph:
"Now, just to be clear, the Washington Post and New York Times also wrote about the 'loneliness epidemic.' they’re talking about something else—that people report higher rates of loneliness than in decades past. That’s categorically different from the assumption that because people in their twenties are unmarried, they’re lonely."
I provided hyperlinks for readers to check those discussions out if they'd like. This transparency is the opposite of those aforementioned lies of omission and trying to sculpt a narrative by only presenting cherry-picked facts.
To answer your question:
"If 1 and 2 are both true, is it really accurate to say you've "debunked" the male loneliness epidemic?"
Yes, yes, it is accurate. Because it's not a "male" loneliness epidemic, and I don't think Dr. Murthy ever used those words. He describes a loneliness epidemic that's affecting many people, but it's affecting different demographics differently (man, woman, young, old, etc.) and says that it expresses itself in men uniquely (in some ways).
This wouldn’t be an issue if the political right and “alt-news hucksters” didn’t usurp these terms and pervert them for their ends. But two different groups are using roughly the same phrase to describe two very different concepts—the loneliness of Americans and how that sometimes specifically applies to men, and this weird self-victimization going on over on the political right that frames loneliness as a uniquely male thing that's because of our "vices" and a society that's slanted in favor of women at the expense of men.
That clear things up a bit?
Yeah I think we agree on the substance, and I didn't intend my comment to come off as especially critical. Headings are tricky, confusion isn't always intentional or avoidable, and my own newsletter's latest post starts with "The real reason for _____," - which is pretty textbook, OG, Buzzfeed style clickbait haha (Though my subheading gives a tldr, in fairness).
I just initially read your title differently than you intended it, didn't pick up on your meaning until midway through the piece, and suspect others may have also misread it (without necessarily reading far enough down to get to the "and there's the rub" paragraph). In the same way MRAs won't be motivated to closely scrutinize any data/headings they can cram into their narratives, I worried a lot of people resistant to talking about men's struggles could weaponize this one in a way you didn't intend.
I'd maybe have gone with "Being single is not the same as being lonely," (or maybe, "Single men are not necessarily lonely men,") subhead "Stop misusing statistics to confirm your pet gender narratives" or something along those lines. But again, not a huge deal, looking forward to your future content.
Yeah, for sure, man. It can be tough.
Those are pretty good suggestions, come to think of it.
As for MRAs, they're gonna do what they're gonna do, unfortunately.
Honestly, I am concerned about it, as one problem I really do see with men (that has nothing to do with dating and arguably little to do with loneliness) is this increasing radicalization. I honestly think that MRA extremists are just winning the ground game/culture war on this particular front. People look for all these reasons why this stuff is spreading—they blame economics, loneliness, etc.—but I think overall, the most uncomfortable fact is, sometimes, bad ideas just spread and appeal to people and there's nothing you can do about it but try to reason with them.
Anyways, great suggestions. Cheers, man. Good to have you around.
I agree. I don't mind his focus as a rhetorical move, as his response to you explains.
However, it causes him to make unwarranted logical leaps in the conclusion - basically not just to declare the Pew stat debunked but to opine that there, indeed, is no issue here for reasons that have basically always prevailed (love is hard and requires vulnerability, etc.).
I think it's quite hard to claim the data supports that conclusion; indeed, that seems more a flat misreading or mischaracterization of the data than a good faith interpretation of it.
Hey Paul, thanks for chiming in and keeping the conversation going. I think I'm straddling two separate things, here. One is the idea that these data show there's a loneliness epidemic. The other, as I said, and I was quite clear here:
"These kinds of headlines—whether about “hookup culture” or the “single young men epidemic” are a sort of plug-and-play that allows people to insert their frustrations into the data. Some people look at it and see porn as the problem, others social media, dating apps, video games, decadence, women’s equality, and more.
But what if it’s not that simple? What if we can’t cast blame on our favorite faceless technology, institution, or political policies because loving another human being is actually quite hard? It requires emotional, physical, personal, and financial risk. It requires a considerable investment of time. It requires humbling ourselves and curtailing our egos. What if, by doing so, we’re taking the easy way out, instead of undergoing the necessary self-reflection required to understand relationships?"
Like, I'm not saying, "The data says that love is hard." I'm pretty clearly saying that we can't, as those I criticized have done, just insert our technologies as scapegoats and blame them for being the reason that something that's, by its very nature, extremely complicated and difficult, isn't simple and easy. It doesn't work that way.
At this point, I'm not even trying to be dense here, but I sense this piece touched a nerve, so some people are overanalyzing it. In all honesty, this is one of the clearest pieces top-to-bottom on the subject, so I'm assuming there are some underlying biases at work preventing a few (but not most) people from seeing what seems to me to be spelled out clearly on the page.
It's obvious I wasn't speaking about the data here, but the narrative that's grown up around it.
It was obvious I wasn't speaking about the wider problem of loneliness, I included an entire paragraph saying as much, yet, that didn't stop Andrew from insisting that I was.
So, at this point, I'm going to ask that you read the actual words I said, not try to argue vibes. If you'd like to discuss words I actually said, I'm all about it—I'm right here any time and totally open to elaborating on them (or eating them). But that's not what's happening. Neither of you guys quoted me, instead, you kind of textbook straw-manned my argument and that's just kind of, idunno, gross and intellectually dishonest?
I choose my words prudently and if I made a mistake, I'll gladly own up to it, but you have to point to something I actually said in order for that to happen.
Like, no doubt, you have to see how utterly absurd it is to have one person effectively telling me that I didn't say the things that I actually did say, and that I should have said them (Andrew) and then someone else telling me I shouldn't have said the things that I didn't say (you).
It really is something, but that's what happens when you argue vibes.
I can only assume you're both simply bothered by the newness of the ideas put forth here and that the piece doesn't, as Andrew mentioned, merely echo what others have said on the topic (why else would he tell me that I didn't say what I actually did say, and that thing just so happens to be precisely what other people are saying on the subject?). But that's not writing, and it's arguably plagiarism. It's not thinking, either. ChatGPT can summarize the contents of his reply in seconds.
Either that, or you reflexively feel that I'm somehow being unfair to men, but can't locate a place in the text where I am so you can argue with the substance.
How does marriage rate correlate (or not) with educational attainment, and how does the imbalance in college education by gender affect that?
Hey DJ, sorry for the delay, I've been swamped with notifications over this piece. Could you clarify your question? What are you asking specifically?
Most statistics I've seen suggest that:
1. More women go to and finish college than men
2. Women tend to prefer a partner with equal or higher educational achievement
Wouldn't that create an imbalance in demand, with women not having an available pool of men equal to the number of women? And that men without college degrees would have a smaller pool of women?
DJ, excellent questions. Thank you for reading and asking them. I'll flesh out this context a bit, as I've covered this a few times here on The Science of Sex, but I've never fully pieced it all together.
First, I'll start with the strongest evidence against this—if that were the case, that a disparity in educational attainment was causing a mismatch between men and women's ability to find a partner to marry/love, the trend of men marrying older than women wouldn't span back to 1890 and the disparity wouldn't be smaller than it's ever been. If it was an educational divide causing dating disparities, we'd expect them to start around 2010-2015, when women overtook men in college graduation rates, not dating back to 1890 and throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Second, I caution against using economic theory to understand dating and relationships, and here's why. The notion that family and sexual dynamics are "like an economy" stems from Nobel-Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, especially his work A Treatise on the Family in 1981, but it's certainly a terrible way to look at both family and sex. It views children as "expenses" and "costs" for example, so, while such the approach is cold and calculated (as economics tries to be), it ignores so many facts about relationship life, like that there's immense non-monetary joy that children bring to a marriage, joy that simply can't be viewed in terms of economic costs (and you probably don't want to view your wife or husband as an economic "cost" or "benefit" either). Joy doesn't easily boil down to cold numbers.
I think this really gets to the crux of the issue, as the way a lot of these questionnaires are laid out—and I read this research every single day—isn't always the best. When we ask people, "How much do you value a partner who has more education than you," what does "education" mean to that person? It might be, in that person's mind, a placeholder for "wealth" or "status" or "intelligence" or "conversational skills," or even "someone who's managed to be responsible enough to get through college will probably be more likely to do household chores and not dump them all on me," etc.—the questionnaire can't tell the difference. Such are the limits of questionnaires.
We see this every single day on Reddit, when people get together to form bonds over very niche passions (toads, wild mushroom hunting, etc.), and these, too, like the aforementioned children viewed as "costs," aren't easily quantified into a monetary or 'mate value' number. How do you measure how much someone's undying passion for toads brought them together with the love of their life???
Renata Ellera and I did a brief overview of some problems of the whole idea of a "mating market" here on The Science of Sex, and I've removed the paywall from this article for you, so you can read it if you'd like:
https://thescienceofsex.substack.com/p/falling-in-love-isnt-a-math-equation
Let me know if this clears things up or if you have any more questions.
This is interesting, but look at the comment on that article? Her issue is that she can't find a man who puts any effort into his dating profile. This is something you hear over and over and over again in the dating world - women frustrated by their options.
Which article do you mean?
I think that specifically pertains to dating apps only, and it's an outgrowth of sexual strategies. I've covered it here, and I've removed the paywall and linked the specific section in question, but I'll drop some of the important sections here in this comment:
https://thescienceofsex.substack.com/i/51449926/the-science-of-tinder-usage
Here's one big disparity:
"While 49% of men are looking for a hookup, only 15% of women report looking for a hookup. This means that even if you match with a person you find dead sexy, there’s still a significant chance the two of you want very different things from the experience."
Here's another:
"In the study, 33% of men reported casually swiping right on women’s profiles indiscriminately just to see what they ended up getting. If they were fishing, this is the equivalent of bottom trawling, shoving a huge net all the way down to the bottom of the ocean and catching everything that comes remotely near its path, sifting the trash and treasure alike later."
Conversely, "the women, of whom a full 93% said they would only swipe right and “like” a profile if they were explicitly attracted to the person. Women are much more selective than men, even on Tinder."
This signals a massive gap in how people are using these apps.
Many men, though not all, tend to go with the "put in very little effort and see what you get" method, while women are much more targeted in their use, putting in significant effort and hoping to attract the best. 1/3rd of men are swiping indiscriminately, with another 13% are swiping indiscriminately sometimes depending on the number of matches they have (making 46% of men who at least sometimes swipe indiscriminately), while almost all women are taking their time.
These different strategies lead to huge disparities that have been measured:
"Another study analyzed the data from 3,600 Tinder profile evaluations and found that, in total, men swiped right on over 60% of the profiles they encountered — women, on the other hand, swiped right on 4% of the profiles they encountered."
This study didn't ask people questions on a survey, it actually monitored their habits while they used the app, which basically confirms the above surveys.
But dating apps are neither the end-all-be-all of dating nor are they particularly effective:
"In a study that sought to understand the experiences of Tinder users, A First Look at User Activity on Tinder, researchers found that for 73% of the participants, meeting up with a match happened less than 10% of the time. This means that even if you match with a drop-dead gorgeous person who shares all of your interests, the chances for most people are less than 10% that you’ll actually meet your match."
That's a really low success rate, I'd venture to say that the low success rate of dating apps is due to how we perceive apps (like the options are infinite, they're on our phones so they're competing with countless other notifications vying for our attention, etc.).
I think we'd be smart to adopt a wider strategy when it comes to dating, mixing very minor use of dating apps (say, thirty minutes a day) with in-person dating and widening our social circles of friends and acquaintances to meet more people generally, and hopefully, that helps people find matches better.
White-incels should NOT be allowed in other countries. Due to your low-T, you couldn't handle your own women. Now you will go to other countries and again spread your degenerate, shitty, western culture.
Beta whiteys will turn even religious ethnic women into feminist-karens. Instead of traveling overseas, whiteys should learn to be a man and control his slutty white women.
Nice article with amazing sources. Thanks for sharing!
People's personal pov are the foundation for any analysis on any subject no matter how and the fact that you admit that you never want to get married tells us everything. Your mindset is totally detached from it and snide remarks about MRAs is damning. This attitude also explains how you can't really understand the whole concept of male loneliness itself. The old phrase lies, damned lies and statistics come to mind when you compare the ages of marriage from eras before the advent of the contraceptive pill when both bride and groom would have been with a very low if not even zero number of partners beforehand .This changed for more and more marriage partners in the generations after the contraceptive pill induced "permissive society ".Currently males between the ages of 18 to 30 are half as likely to have had sex in the last year as their female counterparts. This tallies with the stat for STIs in the same age group where females register 2x the rate. But then a 2nd sexual revolution has been brought about by the abortion pill ushering in a massive wave of female promiscuity who are the type that certainly aren't in any danger of catching "feels ".
This is excellent work. Nicely done and thanks for doing it.