The best way to help women? End the male loneliness epidemic

Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” the Greek philosopher Aristotle famously once said. He meant that those formative years are the most important – that the way we raise children when they’re young lays the foundations for the adults they will become.

For a 2,300-year-old theory, it’s aged remarkably well. Pretty much all modern psychotherapy is predicated on the premise that what happens in infancy and the relationship we have with our primary caregiver/s is fundamental to what we’re like (and the issues we’ll struggle with) later in life. And, arguably, his words could be just as relevant when it comes to what has been dubbed the “male loneliness epidemic”. The way we bring up boys seems to create lonely men; the negative consequences of this are being felt throughout society.

The fact that loneliness has been on the rise in recent years is well documented. In 2023, the World Health Organisation (WHO) went so far as to declare loneliness a “global health threat”. The US surgeon general, Dr Vivek Murthy, intentionally picked the term “epidemic” to hammer home the perceived health risks: research shows that loneliness is as bad for you as smoking a dozen cigarettes a day.

Age-wise, research has shown a “horseshoe effect”, with the oldest and youngest most at risk. One in four older people feel lonely, regardless of where they are in the world, while between 5 and 15 per cent of adolescents are lonely.

“There is evidence that loneliness has increased over time in places like the United Kingdom and Australia, with a notable rise during the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions,” says Marlee Bower, a research fellow at the University of Sydney, who co-wrote a paper entitled Predictors of male loneliness across life stages. While she thinks calling loneliness an “epidemic” can be slightly misleading – “since loneliness doesn’t spread like a contagious disease” – she agrees that the term “does capture the urgency of the issue” and the need to address it “at a societal level”.

Loneliness is, clearly, not unique to the male half of the population (and in fact men tend to underreport loneliness compared to women). Yet its effects can be more extreme in men. Rates of suicide in England and Wales, for example, are more than three times higher in men than women. According to a study from King’s College London, men who identified as lonely drank significantly more alcohol than their non-lonely counterparts. Lonely women, by contrast, drank less.

Certainly a lack of friendships, particularly intimate ones, is much more common to men. Research conducted in 2021 found that 15 per cent of men claimed to have no close friends, a whopping 12 per cent higher than 30 years ago. According to the King’s College study, older men rated their friendships as lower quality than women.

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More poignantly still, a 2023 study from non-profit Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice found that the majority of men agreed with the statement, “No one really knows me well”. Young men were by far the most likely to agree, totalling two thirds of those aged 18-23 years old.

“Think about that: two out of three men coming out of boyhood are in a state where they believe no one really knows who they are or understands what they’re feeling,” says Dr Michael Reichert, founding director of the Centre for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania and author of How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men. These numbers show that it’s not about an individual pathology, he tells me – it’s systemic and structural. There is something inherent in the way we raise boys that leads them to “live behind a mask” and feel isolated, not only from their peers, but from their parents and families too.

While a “boys will be boys” narrative attempts to pin unhealthy “masculine” behaviours on nature rather than nurture, the research paints a picture in which boys feel forced to retreat from intimate relationships. Much-cited research from Stanford lecturer Judy Chu in her book When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships and Masculinity found something disturbing starts happening from the age of four. She observed a group of a children over the course of two years; at first, the boys connected with each other physically and emotionally and engaged in tender displays of affection. But, as time went on, the dynamics of these friendships dramatically shifted as boys pulled away, avoiding vulnerability and creating emotional distance.

“They were receiving strong enough messages that they needed to ‘act like a boy’ that they radically changed over the course of the two years,” says Dr Reichert. “In that time they went from ‘present’ to ‘pretence’ by way of ‘posturing’ – they learned to act the part. But they weren’t doing it because they wanted to pretend; they were doing it because they felt that was required of them.”

Having set up the first ever “emotional literacy” programme at an all-boys school in the US, he has seen first hand that boys really do desire intimate connection. Though voluntary not mandatory, the programme has become one of the school’s most popular, providing an “oasis in a desert” where boys can share their emotions, peer to peer. “They flock to it,” says Dr Reichert. “What they exercise in there is what they’re dying to do but can’t give permission to themselves to do.”

Chu’s study also showed that boys started to change in how they bullied one another and the girls around them, creating “boys clubs” and ostracising girls from joining in with games. “We can start to see the ways that boys are taught to devalue women’s presence or femininity and dominate boys who don’t conform – for example, bullying a boy if he wants to play with ‘girl toys’,” explains Caroline Hayes, Equimundo’s senior strategic initiatives officer.

Clearly, media messaging and popular culture play a part. But parents are complicit too, even if unconsciously so. Research as part of the Global Boyhood Initiative based on interviews with fathers of boys in Bolivia found that 50.2 per cent said that they discouraged their sons from “acting like girls”; 77 per cent said that when they raise their boys, they teach them that care work is a woman’s responsibility. A 2020 survey of parents in the US revealed that 94 per cent believed being “emotionally strong” was the most important thing for their sons.

“Parents often unwittingly contribute to the problem,” agrees Melinda Wenner Moyer, a parenting and science journalist and author of How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes. “We know from the research that parents talk about emotions less with sons than daughters, and when they do talk about feelings with boys, they typically focus on anger. Mothers also smile less at their sons than their daughters, and when reading to boys, they sit further away, engage in less physical contact, and use a less pleasant tone of voice.”

This pattern of behaviour starts young. Baby boys’ brains are biologically more immature and vulnerable than girls’, making them less able to emotionally regulate, cry more often, and produce higher levels of the stress-hormone cortisol when separated from their mothers. But though they have a greater need for comfort, what they tend to get is significantly less nurturing and positive attention than same-aged girls.

The result? From an incredibly early age, “boys feel stuffed into a man box”, says Dr Reichert, forced to conform to narrow definitions of manhood that discourage openness and limit their emotional and social development. This not only damages them materially – leading to higher rates of depression and suicide ideation, plus drug and alcohol abuse – but can also push them towards ideologies that are harmful to women.

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Fuelled by the rise of smartphones and social media platforms and exacerbated by Covid lockdowns, young people’s lives have increasingly moved from the real world to the digital one. Equimundo research found that nearly 30 per cent of the young men surveyed said they hadn’t spent time with someone outside of their household in the past week, while nearly half (48 per cent) said their online lives were more “engaging and rewarding” than their offline ones.

When disengaged young men spend more time on the internet, the chances of them being pushed towards content affiliated with the “manosphere” and toxic hypermasculinity – the Andrew Tates of the world, for example – become greater. The massive monetisation of this rhetoric for both influencers and the online platforms themselves almost guarantees that boys and young men looking for support get nudged down certain pathways, says Hayes.

“There’s a funnel system whereby certain influencers or content creators are capitalising on very innocuous searches that boys and young men are looking for information about,” she tells me. These include romantic relationships and dating, physical appearance and fitness, wealth and financial advice, motivation and self-improvement. Bad actors are “threading those topic areas with more harmful or extreme narratives around gender politics.” A young man might go on YouTube and search “how to get a date”, and soon enough he’ll be served content that fuses this interest with gendered narratives “that validate men’s shame or frustration about why they’re not able to get a date,” says Hayes. Men experiencing legitimate feelings of shame or frustration or vulnerability in their lives are fed the message that “it’s all because of women and feminism”.

A vicious cycle emerges: boys and young men are encouraged by society to perform an unhealthy masculinity that sees them withdraw emotionally from friends and family; they feel lonely and go looking for connection and support online; they get purposefully shunted towards content that reinforces those damaging gender stereotypes and further isolates them from their peers, told that women are their inferiors and men their competition.

There’s a big cross-pollination in these spaces, claims Hayes, between misogynistic influencers and right-wing political messaging. Both use the same playbook: find boys in crisis, build a community around a victim narrative, and form a collective identity. Hayes points to the fact that soon-to-be vice-president JD Vance announced his Tiktok presence by partnering with the Nelk Boys, a duo of young Canadians whose brand is centred around hyper-masculine norms and frat boy humour. Vance’s first post on the social media site featured a nine-second video of him accepting a can of the Nelk Boys’ hard seltzer from co-founder Kyle Forgeard. The collaboration was part of a $20m US voter registration initiative launched by Trump allies and aimed at courting young men.

Many on the right have sought to associate manhood with politics; “If you are a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, recently proclaimed.

The real-world consequences of this were arguably evident this week as Donald Trump shocked the world to win the US presidential election. Some 54 per cent of men cast their ballot for the Republican, but perhaps one of the starkest demographical differences was between young men and women. Just under half (49 per cent) of the former aged 18-29 voted for Trump compared to 37 per cent of the latter. The Republican ticket was built on various issues, but continuing support for abortion bans and the rollback of nationwide reproductive rights was one of the campaign’s battlegrounds.

In the wake of the election, some women online drew links between male loneliness and the results – and they were very, very angry. “So I think it’s less of a ‘male loneliness’ epidemic and more of a ‘young men becoming nazis at a concerningly high rate’ epidemic,” tweeted one. “I hope the male loneliness epidemic eats you Maga scum alive,” posted another.

But what these social media users failed to see is that the culture of male loneliness – instilled from infancy in the warped way we socialise boys – may have been the very thing that led them down a rabbit hole of right-wing populism. Is it really fair to unequivocally pour scorn on men for an outcome that society as a whole has created and been complicit in? Loneliness isn’t just a male problem but an everyone problem – because “harmful manifestations of masculinity and manhood don’t just impact boys and men themselves, but also the women and girls and communities around them,” argues Hayes.

The best way to help women, then, may be to finally start helping boys – by scrapping outdated and damaging notions of what it is to be a man and encouraging them to be emotionally open and foster deeper relationships. As Wenner Moyer puts it: “If we gave boys permission to connect, the world would be a better place. When boys feel connected, they become healthier, happier humans – which benefits everyone.”