I have been going on more dates these days (woo), and finding that most of them are awful (boo). For years I was hesitant to see my experience as part of something larger. I didn’t want to make proclamations against men or apps or dating culture. Maybe it was just me. Maybe I was picking the wrong people, or looking for love via the wrong avenues. But then I started hearing it from everyone—friends who couldn’t seem to make a relationship last more than a few weeks, friends who had given up on dating altogether because it didn’t feel worth it. The more I dug into the very anecdotal data, it seemed that those with the most negative view on dating were not gay men or lesbians, but people of whatever gender who primarily date straight men, or, more accurately, who date people steeped in the culture of straight maleness (whether they’re straight or bi or whatever).
Perhaps that’s why everyone, according to countless TikToks and tweets, wants their man to be a little “zesty” these days: not because straight women are looking for gay men to date, but because men from a culture of zestiness do not come with all the problems that men from traditional, straight male culture do these days.
I’m starting to believe the problem is very simple, and also very large: straight male culture has been corrupted by profit-making forces that encourage men to, essentially, become worse.
There has been a lot, a lot, a lot, a LOT of talk in recent years about whether there is a male loneliness epidemic; whether men are becoming worse because they have become isolated from women and community writ large. People debate endlessly whether men deserve compassion for their predicament—should we do something specific to address men and their penchant for turning to the incel-filled far-right; or is this just a larger problem of loneliness in America (and many other countries)? In that view, men don’t deserve special treatment for turning into misogynists because of their isolation. They should deal with it like the rest of us.
I think a lot of this debate is mis-focused. What makes male loneliness unique is not maleness nor misogyny, but how those things are taken advantage of by bad actors. Loneliness may be hitting us all, but it has been turned into a profit-making machine that affects men in unique ways. Men are more prone to inceldom, more prone to misogyny, and thus more prone to become weirder and less able to relate to others for the same reason women are more prone to shilling for Mary Kay and Avon: there is a large and successful pyramid scheme being run on the backs of lonely men.