When I'm Lonely, it's a Tragedy. When You're Lonely, it's Funny

When it's "punching up" to pretend the other gender's loneliness crisis is self-imposed

Photo by Ahmed Nishaath on Unsplash

One of my favorite writers,

Derek Thompson

, became the subject of the Internet’s ire this week when he posted an excerpt from an article by Emily Witt in the London Review of Books that frames the “male loneliness crisis” as what she calls a “bitter joke.” She describes she and her friends making fun of men for attempting to make friends, performing any kind of masculinity, working out, or well…really doing anything at all.

Derek got a lot of agreement because he’s ostensibly right that it’s a bad look to make fun of people for being lonely (and continue to make fun of them for doing things to improve their situation) but he also got a lot of disagreement bordering on deep personal offense, with some accusing him of being a crypto-right-winger (first time? lol) mostly for the following reasons:

1. Disaffected men “fleeing the left” aren’t reading the London Review of Books. This one is fair. I’m a coastal elitist upper middle class libcuck female writer who did improv in high school and even I am not reading the London Review of Books. In fact *Trump voice* I’m just hearing about the London Review of Books for the first time, and I am frankly, a bit disappointed that it appears to be publishing articles unrelated to the reviewing of books.

2. It’s okay to make fun of men for being lonely because it’s “punching up.” As these critics say, men aren’t really lonely, their “loneliness” and “mental health” are just covers for being mad that they can’t grope women in the workplace and shout slurs in the middle of Times Square. If men don’t want to be mercilessly mocked on the London Review of Books, maybe they should grow a spine and get over it, and while they’re at it, sit their white asses down and listen to marginalized voices like women who write for, and are aware of the existence of, the London Review of Books.

3. The male loneliness crisis isn’t real because it’s not a male loneliness crisis. Women are, in fact, equally lonely (or similarly lonely) but nobody is getting upset about their plight. This one holds a bit more water, so I’ll link to where I first saw it, given that I’m not trying to clown on this person. In fact, they even cite Derek Thompson’s own data.

It’s not a wacky radical feminist argument to say that women are lonely too. This chart from the American Institute for Boys and Men indicates that both men and women are spending more time alone:

And the following Gallup poll chart has been used around the Internet to illustrate that the male loneliness epidemic is, in fact, a co-ed loneliness epidemic:

But I’ve noticed that these charts tend to to get dragged out not by people who want to address and fix the apparent co-ed loneliness epidemic, but rather refute the idea that loneliness is uniquely a men’s issue. It’s kind of like the men who respond to women’s stories about domestic abuse with “well actually, men get abused too” without really having any interest in solving the problem. But there’s another similar way that these types of charts are being interpreted, which is to completely invalidate one half of the loneliness epidemic as “self imposed” loneliness.