I’m unsure how this particular column got the job of public advocacy for male problems, but – relax, guys – I’m up for it. Think of it as the Mirror Universe version of when Tony Abbott appointed himself Minister for Women, except this time a feminist champions men’s social health and, you know, actually likes you.
This week, the male friendship recession is our subject of shared concern. The Guardian reported a month ago concerning data from (where else?) America, which spoke to an observable decline in the prevalence of male friendship, with some notable demographic implications.
Data from the Survey Center on American Life revealed 15% of men said they didn’t have “close friends” in 2021, compared with only 3% in 1990 while those reporting 10 or more close friends had decreased from 33% to 13% during the same period.
Acknowledging that these figures were skewed by more male loneliness among heterosexual men than their gay brothers, the Guardian interviewed men working to facilitate male friendship outside the “third spaces” of congregation, activity and entertainment outside the home and work that queer male communities built for themselves.
Creating better infrastructure for heterosexual male socialisation is a public health necessity, given that the isolation and loneliness reported in the wake of shrinking friendship networks has dire health implications. You can trust studies that repeatedly demonstrate that “those who experience social deficits, including isolation, loneliness, and poor-quality relationships, are more likely to die earlier, regardless of the cause of death”, or you can remember how mad we all went during Covid lockdowns and just imagine that being the rest of your life.
Sadly, the figures in Australia seem to be following the US pattern, with studies from 2020 showing similar implications: “men who reported lacking close friends or relatives were around twice as likely to have thought about suicide in the past 12 months”. Other local studies exposed the loneliest age group of Australian men was middle aged (35-49 years), who were “three times more likely to feel high-level loneliness than men aged over 65”.
It’s this demographic distinction amid rates of friendship decline that underscore how the phenomenon isn’t rooted in biological destiny, but rather in the way western culture’s changing paradigms of masculinity straitjacket modern straight men into rituals and behaviours that denude them of connections and expose them to harm.
Patriarchy – spoiler – is bad for men, too.
Claims that men struggle to form friendships because of traditions of stoic masculinity’s model of consistently performed toughness and invulnerability do not really square with older generations of men having more friends and being more socially integrated, when performances of toughness in previous eras included resolving conflicts through violence and conscription in actual war. My grandad saw active service in the second world war and was, by all reports, great fun at a party.
Claims that work obligations make it hard to find time to socialise also do not hold up to scrutiny because women of the same generational experience maintain powerful social connections despite their double modern burden of meeting work and care commitments.
Clearly, what we are doing to the loneliest cohort is cultural but also new. And it’s becoming more of a problem: a shocking 25% of US boys and men aged 15 to 35 reported “feeling lonely for a lot of the previous day” as per a recent Gallup poll.
It’s tempting to blame technology – but how do we explain the fact that women, girls and gay men have the same technology available to them but don’t seem to suffer the same misery? This also goes for the shrinking “third space” thesis, in which the fading social associations built around church attendance, union membership, and community and sporting clubs have impeded social connections, again, disproportionately.
Rather, we might consider that an intersecting number of cultural changes are meeting new variations of old gender roles in a particularly destructive way, and with fewer social points of connection to bulwark men against them.
If there is an explanation for the “skibidi toilet” theory of young male social detachment, in which “hyper-chaotic media serves as both entertainment and an ambient worldview for young men raised online” we can reasonably assume its generation “fluent in irony but starved for meaning” has been created from specific gender targeting that niche marketing delivers through the internet and other media, affirming and amplifying the kind of gender role modelling through which parents – often unwittingly – channel their children into by, for example, reading to their girls but not their boys.
For young men, whether it’s selling gaming consoles, supplements or Andrew Tate hate material, the convenient marketing message is instrumentalisation is more valuable to men than friendship.
This is to apportion zero blame to parents, given that parenting is hard and as subject to the forces of history as any other institution. It’s not only the bloody internet and ruthless marketeers and capitalist labour exploitation that have encouraged the desocialisation of men. It’s not only the prevalence of technology. It’s that the pre-internet “Satanic Panic” disinformation event of the 1980s fostered a “stranger danger” anxiety that relocated children from open world roaming to controlled environments, in which messaging – loaded with old gendered instructions and new microtargeting – can assume more heft than lived experience.
The children of the Satanic Panic generation are the lonely middle age men of today. Their isolation suggests the real “stranger danger” was who we let into the house.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor.
