[“Loneliness and recognition anxiety are not the same thing. Their symptoms sometimes overlap—withdrawal, irritability, vulnerability—but their origins and impacts differ. As posed, however, the question makes it impossible to distinguish between loneliness (a deficit of intimacy and connection) and what I would call a plea for recognition: the belief that one’s reality, perspective, authority, and inner life should be legible and prioritized by others and society, particularly by women, as a matter of social order.
Battiloro, for instance, didn’t lack Niotis’s company or friendship so much as he was angered by her refusal to prioritize him in her considerations. Nor did he escalate because she hated him; he did so because she ignored him. Her indifference was the insult that he couldn’t tolerate.
Loneliness is an emotional state, but recognition panic is a defensive reaction to a perceived threat to status and the entitlements that come with it. Collapsing them is unhelpful and has consequences. (See footnote 2 below for more.)
Among men, the “male loneliness crisis” as a political and media phenomenon is doing very specific work. Mainstream political and media coverage of male loneliness implicitly centers white, college-educated, and economically middle-class men. It centers, in other words, the emotional distress of the group least accustomed to being ignored, while rendering invisible men who are structurally abandoned and women more broadly. This strongly suggests that the real grievance is the loss of centrality and recognition, not social isolation per se.
Even when advocates go out of their way to provide intersectional analyses, the media strips out gender, class, and race specificity. Among Black men, for instance, suicide rates have risen significantly over the past ten years. Yet this shift receives only a fraction of the attention devoted to the more extensive male loneliness narrative. Poor and working-class men are also lonelier and more at risk than higher-wage-earning men, and yet there is no particular focus on either.
Here’s what definitely doesn’t and won’t work: Teaching boys that they will feel better if they are always centered does not prepare them for a world in which they will not be the way they once were. This only produces stressed-out and status-anxious men, as we are seeing so vividly today, who experience equality of any kind as erasure and threat. Yet, many well-meaning attempts to address men’s distress deepen complex problems by doubling down on men’s centrality rather than widening the field of both problems and solutions.
Precarious manhood is at the heart of masculinity crises.
At the core of this issue and the violence it breeds is that our society continues to essentially tell boys and men they have no intrinsic self-worth. Masculinity, in other words, as sociologist have explained for decades, a precarious state. Masculine identity, in theory a biological state that is fixed, is really an achievement that has to be earned, publicly performed, and reconfirmed continuously. It has to be proved over and over.
This means, for instance, that a single perceived failure — maybe a woman who outperforms a man or withholds deference or a person who doesn’t conform to hegemonic cis hetero norms — registers as a threat, propelling aggressive and disproportionate reactions.
This is also why trans people are so threatening. Conservatives keep the focus of their scapegoating on “men in women’s sports and bathrooms” as a danger. However, the real threat is to precarious manhood on multiple levels. Trans existence makes the performance of gender explicit. If manhood can be given up, transitioned into, or claimed by anyone, then it can’t be the fixed, essential category that the entire edifice of male supremacy is built on. I’m not suggesting this is a logical argument being consciously made, but this is why right-wing reaction to trans life is so disproportionate to the actual social or political footprint of trans people.
Today, queer and trans people’s lives are threatening male supremacy for the same reason women’s independence is threatening: all refuse the terms on which patriarchal masculinity depends. You cannot perpetuate precarious manhood without the gender binary. But to have the binary you have to police and enforce it at all times. The violence we live with follows from this logic to a tee.
From this perspective, the Manosphere as a Precarious Manhood Pyramid Scheme comes sharply into focus. What is a man, in this frame, if he cannot effortlessly demonstrate dominance over women, or gain access to them, or prove their dependence on him? If he has to compete against a woman and loses? If he has to earn women’s regard rather than assume it? He doesn’t just lose a relationship or work; he loses legibility within the system of male supremacist hierarchy on which his sense of self has been built. In fast-changing, uncertain times, boys and men are particularly vulnerable to pressure to “self-optimize” to keep up and compete for women, jobs, status, cars, and money. Online or off, the rage and contempt directed at women, especially those who distance themselves from men for any reason at all, is real, but its primary audience isn’t women but other men.
Recognition in crisis is the engine of the backlash politics, the vicious assemblies, and the firehose of assaults on women that we see every day. Men and male supremacist institutions are defensively responding to the withdrawal of a default centrality with the full range of tools and weapons available to them: from legislation to lawsuits to public harassment to interpersonal and political violence.”]
On decentering men, loneliness, men's desire for recognition, and why persistently misdiagnosing men's crises is making everything worse for
