So Gen-Z incel infuencer brought the male loneliness epidemic concept, I understand that for many people loneliness isn’t a blessing, and know that it feel better to sleep in the arm of someone loving you than alone.
However, if I remember my English class, single women were mostly banned from immigrating to the US, and men were the one travelling to the far-west, so I expect a pretty bad gender-ratio, with many single men How was it managed at the time ? Did it led to societal scale problem ?
Never conflate loneliness with not getting laid. Thereby lies the first in a long streak of mistakes.
yep. the popular read on male lonliness skips over the detail that a huge chunk of these men are in relationships.
they are just in relationships with people who don’t care about them, and are aware of it. which, for me personally, is far worse than being actually alone.
The male loneliness epidemic isn’t only about the lack of romantic relationships.
It’s about a generalized lack of connection between men and other people, a lack of community where they can find support when times get tough and where they can find meaning by helping others.
I’m not too savy on the social context in the far west, but I’d wager that although there was a lack of women the relationships between men would be very strong. Since the environment is hostile to human presence (lack of water, infrastructure, no large settlement or very far apart at least in the beginning) men would need to rely on others for help very often.
Part of the problem, that I’ve personally witness, is groups/communities that form male social cohesion get attacked. They are considered wrong and bad for not including women, and therefore they must be evil.
So men are basically damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.
So the men in the old far west banged each other.
In short, yes
Bareback Mountain.
well there’s prairie madness
Makes a lot of sense. If I (an urban dweller) moved to the middle of nowhere and have to help build up all infrastructure while attempting to (barely) survive, I’d be pretty depressed.
🌈Prostitution🌈
The stories of early New Orleans are a good example of this. Men were lonely and wanted wives. They wrote letters to the church back home. The church provided prostitutes and other women of ill repute by the boat load.
Do you have a link or reference for that last part? Never heard of this.
I may have mixed up the church and the French government. Or the local tour guides’ accounts may conflict with what I’m finding online.
I’ll see what I can dig up. It was mentioned at this museum I went to during my last trip there.
I understand that for many people loneliness isn’t a blessing
I think there is a misunderstanding about the word “loneliness” here (which I used to share). I was skimming an academic article about this some time ago, and was very surprised when they gave a definition of loneliness that is apparently standard in academia: something like “your emotional needs are not met by the people around you/in your life”. It has nothing at all to do with whether or not or how many people are present in your life, and whether or not you like the company of other people. By this definition, you are not lonely, and furthermore loneliness is definitionally bad and cannot be a “blessing”.
Maybe I just personally never had a proper definition of “loneliness” in my head to begin with, but I think this rather technical usage of the word “lonely” is an extreme disconnect between researchers/academic writing and how the general populace interprets the word.
extreme disconnect between researchers/academic writing and how the general populace interprets the word
This is the bane of sciences communication. No, the way I’m using the word is not the same you use and therefore your interpretation of my research is wrong. Prescriptive arguments about semantics are irrelevant and don’t fix the situation in the slightest, if anything they muddy the waters and worsen the quality of the discussion.
The men doing the actual expedition had bigger problems than getting their dick wet, many of them simply died for various reasons. Civilization also wasn’t that far behind them, once you had a claim secured it was about getting a family.
they used to have travelling entertainment groups and for a fee you could take a peek at women’s panties.
Not ON a woman, just a hanging pair of panties behind a curtain.
and brothels
Being gay.
Violence.
So i had to look up what Far-West era was. It is 1800-1910. Basicallly when the Us was conquering the continent from the east coast to the west coast.
Since the Male Lonliness epidemic is nothing but a construct of incel social media, the incels of that era did the same thing that incels do now. They tweeted about it.
Ironically, dismissing it as just an incel thing is EXACTLY the problem. It’s not about women at all, it’s about friendship. And the social norm predates the internet, social media just exacerbated it (and for many women, too)
It can be hard for guys to make friends when they’ve lived their whole life in a “just man up” environment. I didn’t grow up in one of those and I still struggle to be vulnerable around my friends. I’m not an incel, it was just never taught to me so I had to figure it out myself.
The point of talking about the male loneliness epidemic is not to complain but to retire that type of male culture. Encourage men to be there for each other, put themselves out there, meet people and make friends.
The so called male loneliness epidemic isn’t a thing. It is a social media construct that has been weaponized by Incels to justify thier shitty world views.
Ok you seem like an expert on this so I’ll just trust you that there is not an aspect of popular male culture that makes many men lonely. It’s just social media incels.
The average adult man definitely socializes just as much as the average man. You’ve found that old guys have as many friends as old women in your research, right? There haven’t been studies about this going back decades or anything - it’s all incels on social media. My bad.
Everybody understands that men have issues. The problem is that the people promoting this use it as a stalking horse to oppose feminism.
Because that’s what they believe. The male loneliness epidemic, to them is explained by female autonomy and civil rights. Most of them won’t come right out and say this, so they bitch about suicide rates and the draft instead.
You’re conflating things here. Terminally-online incels are often racist, would you say racism is nothing but a construct of the incel social media?
I do agree that it gets weaponized by grifters and misinterpreted by many more but you are contributing to the problem by acting like it’s an idea spawned from bitter dudes online or that it’s an idea inseparable from misogyny.
Also had a convenient outlet for rape and murder of first nations I guess.
