Original article
I know you don’t like my posting replies to your stuff, but one should not dismiss or understate the impact of homophobia on (American) men. I don’t have a problem hugging or complimenting certain of my male friends (including most of my gay friends), but I wouldn’t do it in front of just anybody (including fathers, brothers, uncles, etc.), since it would put us both in danger, as would doing it with any guy with whom it had not been well established. I could go on for pages about this.
Have you ever heard of a lesbian being beaten to death, or lashed to a tree or fence and set on fire, or dragged to death behind a car? A “dragging” or a “bashing” are so common and so iconically terrifying that they get their own shorthands. I’ve had gay friends describe walking hand-in-hand (which is common in Arabic countries by the way) on the street and have a car screech to a halt and guys with bats and sticks pour out “like a clown car” and beat them half to death. Again, the shorthand of “I wear this leather jacket because I got bashed last month”.
So it’s not that “guys just need to loosen up (and have guy friends)”—it’s not individual guys, it’s everybody else. Men are not sympathetic, nor are the police or the courts, and that’s what’s terrifying. So yeah, men aren’t willing to have free emotional and physical intimacy with each other in large part because they face a long history of unchecked ostracization and deadly violence. Just saying “aw, c’mon guys” isn’t going to erase that, certainly not overnight.
So yes, men are only allowed physical and emotional intimacy with women. I’m not saying that’s good, or that it shouldn’t be changed, but that seems to be how it is, a fact to be faced, and homophobia is a big part of it.
I’ll sleep in the same bed with male relatives and friends in places like Europe and Japan, or with such people in the US, but in the US it’s out of the question.
Slightly off on a tangent, I once kissed a French woman (in Japan) on the cheeks, and she said, “wait, you Americans don’t do that.” Of course Australians seem to get away with it.
Self-imposed? Maybe in kind of a Nashian prisoners’ dilemma game theory kind of way, but that doesn’t really help anybody, does it?
You don’t have to be gay to be the victim of homophobic violence, and it’s constant. A typical “guys night” of cigars, beer, and BBQ consists of endless sublimated homoerotic references to the phallic cigars, etc., etc., underscoring how we’re all thinking about it and the disapproval and the concomitant thinly-veiled threat.
I won’t say that homophobia is all there is to male loneliness—in fact I regard it as more of a kind of symptom than anything—but it definitely can’t be dismissed or ignored.
If you’ve never been gay-bashed or had a friend who has, then it might be hard to appreciate.
I have lost good friends because they saw me hug another man. This is what we’re up against. It’s horrible to think that friends’ dads, friends we’ve known for a long time could dump us just because of some display of intimacy, but that’s the harsh reality.
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The male loneliness epidemic is nothing new. It’s unclear if it’s even “gotten worse” or it’s just that men are finally talking about it (which would be a good thing, right?).
The classic male life cycle is maybe have friends in school, then leave most of them behind in exchange for work friends. Back in the day when men got married, the people he went out with were his wife’s friends, and the wife may have tried to wean him away from his own friends (mine did, fairly aggressively, eg, “oh, you’ve known Ralph for twenty years, in school, as a roommate, etc. oh, we need to get rid of him, I don’t like him “). So when he changes jobs or gets fired he loses all his work friends, probably never see them again, and when he gets divorced he loses all his (wife’s) friends … and his kids.
You could say that men just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but the social expectations of work and marriage exert pressure. Most of my friends were work friends, because I was there ten hours a day and on weekends, and how many people can you keep track of? Does my wife want to buddy up to all my friends, or is it easier for her for me to just get to know hers? Obviously she’s not going to get to know most of my work colleagues.
Pretty grim for starters. Who knows? Men’s situation may be aggravated by the job market going to hell and things like dating apps coming in and destroying the landscape for most men. That’s a whole other discussion.
The point is that men have always been desperately lonely, and everybody knows it. The English-speaking world is really bad, there may be others which are considerably better, maybe not.
Has it gotten worse? Are we at a breaking point? Or are we just talking about it more (which should be a good thing, no?)?
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