LONELY BOY
Author explores why young men are facing an epidemic of loneliness,
Men in the modern world are facing a new deadly epidemic — a pervasive, unrelenting loneliness.
Author Stephen Marche touches upon this in his latest book, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about
Men and Women in the 21st Century, in which he explores the “complicated, changing relationship between men and women in today’s society.”
Marche spoke to the Star about what he thinks is behind the loneliness, why he hates the word “bro” and how Donald Trump is a good example of being caught between contradictory realities.
Why do you think loneliness in men has increased in recent years?
I think loneliness is swelling among everyone, but particularly among American men, there’s this sudden, sharp spike in mortality related to loneliness, and basically, they’re killing themselves and I think a big part of it is that men are totally incapable of dealing with gender issues.
Men are not talking about it and because they don’t talk about it, they don’t really know what is causing them to suffer so much.
What’s keeping men from reaching out to each other?
For men, culture tells them their friendships are primitive, literally — “the man cave,” right? Maturing for men means shedding their friendships, and this is a real disaster.
Research is pretty clear that exactly at the point when men lose their friendships, they start to have this heightened suicide risk and that’s because, despite our culture in which the icons of masculinity — the cowboy, the astronaut — are lonely figures, men are every bit as social as women and if you take away sociability, they die from it.
The rise in male loneliness coincides with the rise in “bro culture,” which seems to celebrate male bonding. How does that work?
Think how the word “bro” is used. It’s a pejorative term. “Bro” contains this sense that it’s a lesser form of society. Whenever somebody talks about “bromance,” they’re saying that male friendship is somehow weird. Maybe instead of dismissing male friendship as a kind of ridiculous idiocy, we should encourage it, because without it, people suffer.
So is it about changing the language around masculinity? It’s not that they’re not using the right language, it’s that they’re not using language at all. The way men talk about gender, there’s two ways to do it. You can either call yourself a feminist, which is defining yourself by the theory of another gender, and then men’s rights organizations, which are insane and require you to essentially discount the value of the equality of women. This is not a healthy way to talk about your own gender.
How do we change this?
Our gender debates are so consumed by outrage, but when you look at the underlying trends, everyone should be overwhelmed with hope. The situation is getting closer to equality, so I think the idea that we’re in a really terrible situation and we need to pull ourselves out is wrong.
The question is, how are we going to deal with it in our intimate lives? And there’s going to be a lot of turbulence around that.
What do you mean by “turbulence?”
In my book, I give this idea of the “hollow patriarchy” — as women grow in power in the middle class while being kept from top positions in all sorts of fields, it creates these bizarre parodies of masculinity and I can think of no better example of that than Donald Trump, who is in no sense a return to traditional masculinity. This is a man who cannot tie his tie properly and has to use tape on it. Figures like this are the result of this kind of moment where we’re caught between two very contradictory realities and we don’t quite know how to respond.
We use this phrase, ‘The battle of the sexes,’ and nothing could be more wrong. It’s not a battle that we’re in. We’re trying to figure out how to be just with each other while having male and female bodies, and that is the working out of a very beautiful problem rather than a catastrophe that we’re trying to avoid.