Content Warning: This essay contains descriptions of sexism, violence, and sexual assault.
In a high school locker room, a group of teenage boys laugh about the party last Friday night. They throw their jerseys on and lace up their shoes, telling stories about beer pong trick shots and hooking up with a drunk girl in the bathroom. It’s fun. It’s loud. It’s easy. No one mentions feeling anxious. No one talks about their fathers. No one asks how anyone’s really doing. There are no meaningful hugs, just back slaps and fist bumps. This lack of emotional intimacy is taught young and never questioned. And when practice starts, they run out onto the field like nothing ever happened.
But you almost forgot about the drunk girl. And they already have.
This scene is not unusual or made up. It is a reflection of a broader culture where emotional repression, peer pressure, and hegemonic masculinity are interconnected. The effects are not just internal, but contagious, gendered, and too often, deadly. This essay explores how male loneliness, shaped by social norms around masculinity and friendship, places a disproportionate emotional and physical burden on women.
To explore the roots and repercussions of the male loneliness epidemic, this paper will focus on three central themes. First, I will examine the sociocultural factors that contribute to the restrictive nature of men’s friendships and subsequent isolation. Then, I will analyze the emotional toll this loneliness takes on the women in their lives. Lastly, I will consider the physical consequences, including manifestations of violence and harm towards women. Considering these factors are a critical step in shedding light on this factitious problem and understanding how to hold men accountable to ultimately protect women.
For the purposes of this project, I will be discussing the experiences of men who subscribe to traditional, hegemonic masculine ideals. The claims presented here reflect research of large populations rather than individual experiences. This essay was unable to explore other diverse demographics of men, such as queer men, transgender men, disabled men, or other marginalized groups. It is important to recognize that despite varied identities and experiences, the problem of male violence against women is spread throughout all parts of society and has harmful effects on everyone.
WHY ARE MEN LONELY?
The idea of a loneliness epidemic is a popular and contentious one. In news, social media, and academic research, people are worrying about isolation and its consequences. The phrase “friendship recession” has become so popular that it has garnered its own Wikipedia page, as pointed out by Fischer (2024). Though his work points to many examples that show that we may not actually be living at a uniquely lonely point in time, even Fischer himself admits that if any group has cause to be concerned, it is young men in the 2010s. And he is not the only one who thinks so. Whether or not the loneliness epidemic is real, people are talking about it – and they are often talking about it in relation to men. There have been dozens of news articles published in the last few years on the topic of male loneliness. People are searching for answers about how it affects fathers, young boys, and students. To understand this phenomenon and its consequences, we need to look at what is causing men to feel so lonely.
It comes as no surprise that men and women both desire closeness. Yet, research consistently finds that in comparison to female friendships, male friendships are less intimate, supportive, and open, while also being more competitive and emotionally restrained. (Morman, Schrodt, and Tornes 2013). The first and easiest reason for this is that friendships are structured differently depending on gender. Men’s friendships often center around a “closeness in the doing”, whereas women’s friendships are based on a “closeness in the dialogue” (Morman et al. 2013). This means that men are more likely to bond over doing activities like sports and women are more likely to bond through their conversations, a pattern many can observe in everyday interactions. This helps explain why men may be less open and more competitive in their friendships than their female counterparts, simply because they spend less time talking to each other and more time engaged in activities. This idea alone, however, does not account for all of the differences between opposingly gendered friendships. Research has also found that male friendships involve less self-disclosure than female friendships. Self-disclosure, in this instance, refers to revealing information about yourself to another. Thus, not only are we seeing less conversations between men, the conversations we do see have a distinct lack of personal information disclosure. This is a problem because lack of self-disclosure correlates with lower satisfaction and commitment in male friendship.
Another important point in male friendships is the role of masculinity. A recent meta-synthesis by Vierra, Beltran, and Robnett (2023) looked at the wide body of research on male friendships and found that adherence to masculine norms is the key factor that contributes to the deterioration and absence of close relationships between boys and men. Over a multitude of different articles and research, the strictness of these masculine norms was found as an overarching theme in almost all of them. Within this, two sub-themes that arose were homophobia and stoicism. These factored into hindering emotional closeness and increasing aggression within men. Homophobia in particular has been found to be a key barrier to intimacy and the open expression of feelings. The fear of being labelled homosexual prevents heterosexual men from engaging in any sort of behaviour that could be perceived as feminine or intimate with other men (Pope 1993). This stops men from using words like “love” and “caring” to describe their close male friendships, and also contributes to mens’ affinity for basing friendships off of shared activities rather than emotional disclosure. Further, homophobia induces men to maintain a traditionally male role in society and their relationships. When this fear becomes threatening, many heterosexual men exhibit homophobic acts to ensure their own sense of masculinity (Pope 1993). They perceive homosexual men as more emotional, weak, and most significantly, more feminine. I believe that what this suggests is that for straight men, homophobia is not just a hatred of queerness, it is a hatred of femininity, which ultimately manifests itself as misogyny and the dehumanization of women. These factors can lead to dangerous consequences, as explored later in this paper.
It is relevant to consider the possibility that men simply do not need to have close, intimate friendships. Eramian, Mallory, and Herbert (2016) challenged the common conception that all instances of loneliness are negative by conducting research of friendless people. Their work suggests that there is a duality of disconnection in which it can be celebrated and lamented. However, while that may be true for certain individuals or in specific contexts, the same cannot be said broadly for men’s experiences with social disconnection. It has been found that men’s lack of friendships negatively impacts their well-being, especially through poor self-esteem and impaired psychological health (Vierra et al. 2023). Therefore, loneliness may not be universally harmful, but for many men, the absence of emotionally supportive friendships results in tangible, long-term consequences. These consequences are evidently detrimental to men’s mental health and their social support networks. The less evident consequences, however, lie in the ways that men negotiate and replace this lack of emotional intimacy.
MANKEEPING AND EMOTIONAL LABOUR
We have determined that the policing of masculinity is a crucial cause of men’s lack of close friendships and leaves them with less emotional support. However, it is thoughtless to assume that this means then men do not desire or have need of intimacy. Thus, if they are not receiving it through their friendships, it means that someone else will have to provide that emotional connection. That someone is often a woman. Vierra et al. (2023) found that men’s social relationships with women are often more intimate and confiding than their relationships with other men. Because of this, men often heavily rely on their partners for emotional support, which can sometimes lead to overburdening them. A similar pattern showed up in parts of McCabe’s studies with college men and their female partners. McCabe noted that the boyfriends in her study tended to lean on their girlfriends more for emotional support than they would their same-sex friends (2016). Unequal dynamics like this seem to exist throughout research and popular culture.
This common problem has been conceptualized as “mankeeping”. Proposed by Ferrara and Vergara (2024), this term looks to explain the labour that women take on to compensate for losses in men’s social networks. Mankeeping involves increased emotional support, facilitative labour, and a subsequent burden (Ferrara and Vergara 2024). Facilitative labour is the work that is performed in order to ensure that men receive support, such as coordinating care or social interactions on behalf of men. Crucially, these factors of mankeeping then result in an emotional and temporal burden on women. This burden arises from the negative effects of increasing support and labour and the lack of reciprocation from their male partner. Mankeeping is time consuming and exhausting, and it is not only limited to romantic relationships. Mothers and sons or male friends and female friends can experience this as well, and suffer similar outcomes. Research has shown that unequal emotional work within relationships has negative effects on women, especially in their experience of the relationship, their mental health, and their time and participation in other activities outside of marriage and family (Ferrara and Vergara 2024). In some cases, this can lead to unmitigated communion, in which the overfocus on their partner’s needs can lead to women neglecting their own.
The emotional imbalance of mankeeping is not just a relationship issue but a structural one. Predictably, it is rooted in hegemonically masculine ideals in which men are taught to seek care from women without offering it in return. As women continue to carry this unseen burden, the emotional consequences deepen, and so too do the social ones. When male emotional repression is left unchallenged, and intimacy is outsourced rather than shared, the pressure placed on women does not just exhaust them. It endangers them. In the most extreme cases, this imbalance manifests not just in neglect, but in violence. To understand the full scope of this danger, we must turn to the ways hegemonic masculinity contributes to gender-based violence.
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Gender-based violence is a serious and prevalent issue. However, only 10% of all incidents of intimate violence result from mental disorders (DeKeseredy 2013). This means that although some batterers have psychological problems, most abusive men are less pathological than one might expect. Thus, the issue of gender-based violence must be observed through a sociological lens rather than a purely psychological one in order to properly be understood and challenged. To tackle this, it is imperative to explore male peer support theory. Derived from Cohen and Wills’ social support theory (1985), which was used to explain the role of social support in health maintenance and disease prevention, Walter DeKeseredy altered their theory into a friendship context in 1988 for the first iteration of his idea. Male peer support theory posits that attachments to male peers and the resources that these men provide encourage and justify the abuse of women. It has been studied and observed in a variety of contexts, but most frequently in fraternities and group contact sports such as football, rugby, and hockey. DeKesedery’s research has ample evidence to show that male peer support is a powerful determinant of harm against women. It has been found that the messages and support provided by male peers in favour of establishing power and dominance over women can be statistically linked to a variety of harms, including rape, sexual assault, physical violence, and sexual harassment (DeKesedery 2013).
Through male peer support theory, we can see how friends’ attitudes and behaviours can become risk factors for sexual aggression. One case study of this in practice was a longitudinal study of young single men in 2015. In this study, researchers found that observing how friends talk about women allowed them to predict future sexual aggression towards women (Jacques-Tiura et al. 2015). Men were asked what kind of statements they used to describe women with their friends. These statements were divided into two categories: objectifying and egalitarian. In the former, comments like “I would tear that up” and “Bro, I hit that last night!” were common and some of the least graphic examples. In comparison, the egalitarian category included comments like “She had good conversation” or “She is beautiful”. When comparing these two groups of statements, researchers found that the use of derogatory language in the objectifying category over egalitarian language toward women was a significant predictor of physical and psychological dating violence perpetration approximately 5 years later. These are incredibly sobering results, and show the real-life impacts of comments that are more than just ‘locker room talk’ or ‘boys being boys’. In fact, roughly 25%, or 108, of the men in this study reported having engaged in some sort of sexual act with a woman who they knew was unwilling to consent in the previous year (Jacques-Tiura et al. 2015). Or in other words, at least 108 women unfairly faced devastating consequences of mens’ dehumanizing perspectives in that year alone. While not every man in the study committed a nonconsensual sexual act, it is unclear, and virtually impossible to determine, how many of the men may have made a comment or provided an opinion to a friend that may have ultimately led to gender-based violence.
DeKederesy would likely argue that these results happened in part because peer selection and pressure reinforce each other in men’s friendships, encouraging the use of coercive strategies to obtain sex. Conversation becomes a key factor in this process, serving as a means to establish, test, and clarify shared norms about expected and appropriate sexual behaviour. Within these discussions, one common strategy to prove one’s masculinity and achieve status is through treating sex as a commodity rather than an act of intimacy (Jacques-Tiura et al. 2015). This framing contributes to the objectification of women, making violence against them seem more justifiable. Peer selection, working as a form of homophily, creates and supports dangerously homogenous friend groups of men that lack a dissenting voice and push men to fit in with their male social role. This is male peer support theory in action. This is how seemingly casual conversations among men normalize misogyny and foster environments where sexual coercion and violence are tolerated, and even encouraged, as markers of masculine belonging.
INTERVENTIONS
Now, this all points to the question of how we might begin to improve male friendships, and subsequently, reduce the harm on women. The first step is promoting the awareness of this issue. Noticeably, while there are many articles denoting the causes and speculating on solutions for men’s loneliness, there are less on how it impacts women. These patterns often intersect with lived experiences in ways that shape our understanding of these issues, and thus it is imperative to shed light on women’s crucial perspectives. One essential factor in developing and sustaining higher-quality friendships among men is through the act of revealing personal thoughts and feelings. We have become aware that the act of self-disclosure plays a key role in deepening emotional bonds. Interestingly, research shows that men who identify with traditionally feminine traits such as gentleness, supportiveness, and friendliness are more likely to self-disclose to their male friends (Morman et al. 2013). Therefore, tackling misogyny at its core is key, as femininity positively predicts self-disclosure. Encouraging the development of these communal, traditionally ‘feminine’ traits could enhance the quality of male friendships, reducing the emotional burden that often falls on women as a result.
However, ideas like these are only small chips at a much larger boulder, and cannot undo the harm already done. The loneliness epidemic is not gender-neutral. Its consequences have disproportionately fallen on women, who have been expected to shoulder the emotional labor men often lack from each other. As scholars have pointed out, addressing these inequalities requires more than just individual growth; it calls for collective action. They advocate for systemic interventions, such as bystander training and educational programs, aimed at challenging harmful norms, fostering open conversations around masculinity, and promoting healthier emotional connections. Further, we need to reframe how we think about men’s social networks, and consider the consequences for women. Pushing for structural changes in how we socialize boys and open conversations about mental health, sexism, and friendship are essential steps toward creating emotional spaces that do not rely on women to do all the heavy lifting. The problem is structural and embedded into our society, and therefore the solution must be as well.
CONCLUSION
All of these factors together contribute to this paper’s primary claim that male loneliness kills women through the dangerous mechanism of hegemonic masculinity. Firstly, mens’ friendships are negatively impacted by traditional and harmful masculine norms. Homophobia, stoicism, and a lack of self-disclosure hinder men’s friendships, creating surface-level relationships that are built on activity sharing and a fear of appearing feminine. This emotional repression then causes loneliness and negative impacts on mens’ well-being. In turn, men are then pushed to instead rely on their relationships with women for closeness and intimacy. This leads to mankeeping, an unequal amount of emotion work from women that is burdening and unreciprocated. Women face consequences to their mental health, their relationship, and their time as a result of this emotional labour. Further, mens’ need to be seen in a masculine role pushes them to hate and objectify the feminine. This creates opportunities for derogatory discussions with their friends about women that foster norms of sexual aggression. Through these conversations, they justify and normalize acts of objectification, and in many cases, lead them to commit actual violence and sexual assault. Even those who do not act in violent ways are still susceptible to inadvertently contributing to a culture that allows this behaviour. Men are surrounded by and then in turn perpetuate the very hegemonic ideals that prevent them from being soft, weak, or emotional. Mentally, emotionally, and physically: the male loneliness epidemic is killing women.
After practice, the boys come piling back into the locker room. The sweat is dripping down their foreheads as they make plans for the next Friday night rager. They have long forgotten about the girl in the bathroom.
But she hadn’t forgotten about them. And she wouldn’t. Not until she understood, years later, the very patterns that allowed it to happen in the first place. Because while the repercussions of their emotional disconnection were tough for them, they were worse for her.
References
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Jacques-Tiura, A. J., Abbey, A., Wegner, R., Pierce, J., Pegram, S. E., & Woerner, J. (2015). Friends matter: protective and harmful aspects of male friendships associated with past-year sexual aggression in a community sample of young men. American journal of public health, 105(5), 1001–1007. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302472
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