Are Men Okay?

This past week I caught myself asking the question out loud more than once. Are men okay? I mean that seriously, not rhetorically. Toxic male behavior keeps surfacing in the news, in workplaces, in the darkest corners of the internet where men gather to talk about how to control and abuse the women in their lives. Wars are still largely started and sustained by dominant, hierarchical men fighting over land, resources, and power. And just this past week, another website surfaced where men shared, in detail I will not repeat here, how to harm the women and girls around them.

When I sit with all of that, the question that keeps returning to me is simple. Are men okay? I do not believe they are. None of us are fully okay right now, women included, but today I want to speak specifically about men, and I want to do it without blame or shame. I want to ask the question the way you would ask someone you actually care about. Because when I was sitting with that question, I kept landing on a phrase that has been circulating on social media for a while: the male loneliness epidemic. 

It usually shows up as a reaction to feminism, to the women’s rights movement, to women no longer needing men the way they once did. The implication is that men are lonely because women have moved on without them. First of all, I think there is a real male loneliness epidemic, but I just do not think it is what most people believe it is.

Below you can watch our video about the male loneliness epidemic. Prefer to read on? Just scroll below the video.

What the Male Loneliness Epidemic Actually Is

When you look closely, the male loneliness epidemic has very little to do with women rejecting men. It is not an individual woman’s fault, and it is not women in general who caused it. When you zoom into what men are actually missing, you find a lack of emotional intimacy with themselves. Men are cut off from their own bodies, their own hurt, their own grief, their own joy, their own desire.

That disconnection then extends outward, into a lack of intimacy with their brothers, their friends, their fathers, nature, and life itself. Our society conditions boys out of this connection from a young age. Emotional intimacy gets coded as unmasculine, so boys learn to suppress it, harden around it, and bury it under layers of shame. What cannot be felt gets outsourced – mostly to women – instead.

How Men Learned to Outsource Their Emotional Intimacy

This outsourcing is not new. In a patriarchal, capitalistic, heteronormative, nuclear family structure, men have lacked emotional intimacy for generations because it was shamed out of them early. Before the women’s rights movement, women were financially and legally dependent on men. They could not own property, hold their own bank accounts, or vote. Because women needed men to survive, and because men were, in a sense, entitled to a woman’s presence in their life, men could outsource the emotional labor they were never taught to carry.

Women were conditioned to soothe, caretake, comfort, and mother the people around them, often at the cost of their own needs. As long as women depended on men, men never had to confront the emotional emptiness inside themselves. And there is nothing lonelier than spending a lifetime suppressing parts of who you are out of shame, fear of rejection, or fear of abandonment. Suppression like that carves out a gap, a wound, and that wound is what we experience as loneliness.

Why Feminism Left Men Behind

Feminism and the women’s rights movement changed something essential. Women were slowly allowed to integrate the traits they had always outsourced to men: assertiveness, ambition, autonomy, the traits we call masculine. As the shame around that integration lifted, women could grow into fuller, more whole versions of themselves. That shift deserves to be celebrated. I am pro women’s rights, pro feminism, and I consider myself a true feminist.

What I think we forgot, as a society, is to do the same work inside men. We never dismantled the patriarchy inside men themselves. We still shame men today for expressing the feminine traits they were told to outsource: vulnerability, softness, emotional openness. So while women were given room to expand, men were left standing exactly where they always stood, still believing that women hold something they themselves cannot have.

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