Men’s lack of deep, close friendships has been in the spotlight lately. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 54% of women say they turn to a friend for emotional support, but only 38% of men say they do. Essayist Sam Graham-Felsen and American Institute for Boys and Men CEO Richard Reeves join John Yang to discuss why some men seem to struggle with maintaining social connections.
    • Oxysis/Oxy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      A 16% difference is a huge gap!

      Let’s put that in context for a second here; let’s say you are a man with 100 friends, only 38 feel comfortable reaching out to you when they need help. The other 62 don’t feel comfortable reaching out for help, meaning they feel as if they have to deal with it alone.

      Now let’s consider if you were a woman in the same setting. 54 feel comfortable reaching out and 46 don’t feel comfortable.

      In this case that’s 16 more lives that are negatively impacted in men.

      Now when we factor in the actual population numbers for each group it gets significantly worse. And since this study is done on Americans let’s apply that to the entire population of the country using data from Neilsberg Research. With there being roughly 164,545,087 men and 167,842,453 women.

      For the men that means about 62,527,133 men feel comfortable asking for help, looks like a lot until we look at the remainder. 102,017,954, roughly, don’t feel comfortable reaching out. That’s nearly 2/3s of men aren’t getting help when they need to.

      For women about 90,634,925 are seeking help when they need it. That’s a gap of 28 million people from where the men are! While 77,207,528 are not getting help, 24,810,426 less women are not getting help.

      That’s what a 16% gap actually means and it’s insanely huge.

    • Soleos@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      That’s giving some all lives matter energy. We can talk about why everyone is so closed off in general, but this thread clearly focuses on a particular men’s issue under that umbrella issue. So no, we should talk about the topic, not hijack it for “a larger issue”.

      I’m a thread about the wage gap between men and women (10-15%), you don’t say “We should be talking about why the economy is struggling instead”

      In a thread about the incarceration gap between blacks and whites, you don’t say “We should be talking about why crime is up overall instead”

      You make a great point about society needing to change, and a particular men’s issue doesn’t mean only men need to change, it actually does speak to how broader society considers what it is to be a man. How men decide that for themselves, are socialized by their environment into it, and how they’re treated by other genders. Just as women’s issues are human issues, men’s issues are human issues too.

  • JTode@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    I made a lot of terrible choices in terms of friends. Not exclusively terrible ones, I have several high quality men that I still exchange emails with at least a few times per year, and we talk a lot about lunches and stuff that don’t happen… but they’re quality men, and we are still friends.

    Along with them, two or three times as many dudes who I should’ve just left where I found em, and who eventually forced me to do so, usually by treating someone else rather than me like shit.

    Some others that I know I should have tried harder to move acquaintance into the friendship category.

    • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, if someone in a red cap comes up to me lamenting about how life sucks due to inflation/lack of jobs, I’m gonna laugh right in their face.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    I think there’s a core difference in “support” that they just started to touch on right at the end of the discussion. Support can take two forms:

    • words
    • actions

    The thesis here seems almost entirely focused on “words”. As in, “Men do not reach out for words of support as often as women”. I would agree. However, when the support needed is “actions” I know myself and men are quick to ask and quick to respond to others asking.

    • Can you come over and help me move this piece of furniture?
    • My wife has been out of work taking care of our new child, just found out I lost my job. Can you put me in touch with that company that needed a worker for that thing?
    • I don’t have a post hole digger, do you have one I can borrow?
    • Can you show me how to fill out the tax form for that deduction?

    Also frequently while these acts of support are happening words of support are also exchanged. Only at the end of the article did they talk about a fitness group that turned into a community service organization. The actions of support are present here. So I’d argue that men in western society have a high ratio of actions but lower ratio of words of support.

    For women reading, how does this compare with relationships you have with other women in friendships? How much is words vs actions?