I appreciate your comment but I'm not the only one making that correlation. It's a widely studied and accepted one.
"Men aren’t allowed to admit to being lonely. 'Patriarchal masculinity is so impossible to achieve that admitting to loneliness would mean confronting our shame. Most men are living with that deep, deep, deep denial of how horrible patriarchy makes them feel and how their participation is causing the feelings that they refuse to feel,' he said."
"The University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox recently pointed out in The Atlantic that there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties. Following the seminal research of Emile Durkheim, he added that people — and especially men — are more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” (See, “What’s Driving Suicide Among Middle-Aged Men?”)
Wilcox goes on: “And over the last two decades, it’s men without college degrees who have ended up most disconnected from the core institutions of work, marriage, and civil society. Guess who is most likely to kill themselves? Men without college degrees.”
Men may believe that they are happy being self-sufficient and emotionally repressed because they have succeeded in meeting metrics they know are expected of them, but the same demographic that buys into that the most (white middle aged men) also has the highest suicide rate - by a lot (70%). The fact that even high school aged boys know that a part of what is expected of them is to police and bully each other into maintaining these norms clearly shows it's not natural. If it were, it wouldn't need to be enforced in that way. Combine that with what we know about humans as social animals and there is absolutely no question that the epidemic of loneliness, substance issues, and suicide in men is directly correlated to the societal demands on them to not be full human beings. Decreasing opportunities for men (and women) to have meaningful social connection in recent years is the culprit.
"Because we are such a social species, isolation and loneliness have high correlations with both physical and mental health problems. Lack of social connection has been shown to heighten health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes per day or having an alcohol use disorder and to be twice as damaging to both mental and physical health as obesity."
Our culture isn't being feminized - it's being humanized. It's moving towards allowing men to be all of who they naturally are, rather than the truncated version that patriarchy has demanded. The fact that you can only see the move away from the Man Box as feminizing demonstrates how deeply indoctrinated you are into the strict gender binaries of patriarchy. We're all a blend of Yin and Yang traits as humans and forcing men to only be Yang traits in extreme versions just isn't healthy. I don't blame you for believing that, but until men stop upholding patriarchy as the answer to their problems and see it as the source, they're going to keep being lonely, depressed, and suicidal in large numbers.
Also, you may want to do a bit more research yourself before passing along "everyone knows" kinds of platitudes that don't actually hold up to scrutiny. Single mothers tend to be harder on their boys than married ones simply because they are worried about them growing up to not be "masculine" enough.
"This is the issue Olga Silverstein tackles head-on in The Courage to Raise Good Men. Commenting that many people still believe that mothers compromise their sons’ masculinity, she writes: “Most women, like most men, feel that a mother’s influence will ultimately be harmful to a male child, that it will weaken him and that only the example of a man can lead a son into manhood. Single mothers in particular are haunted by the dread of producing a sissy.” Homophobia underlies the fear that allowing boys to feel will turn them gay; this fear is often most intense in single-parent homes. As a consequence mothers in these families may be overly harsh and profoundly emotionally withholding with their sons, believing that this treatment will help the boys to be more masculine."
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (pp. 45-46). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
(A very good book btw about how to create a world that allows for men to embrace their full humanity)
FYI - I'm a research based writer. Everything I put out there has been thoroughly investigated and cited - always from reputable sources.
Thanks for reading. If you want more on this, here’s the link to another similar story I wrote a while back.
