All in This Together

All in This Together

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This week I made the error of responding to a video where a person made fun of men feeling lonely. All I said was that videos like this one (and there are many, many of them on the internet) act as obstacles for men to open up about their emotions. Men are encouraged to talk about their mental health (rightly so), and are then made fun of for it when they do eventually open up. It almost feels like a trap. And doing this is one factor to why men are reluctant to engage with their emotions.

I think this is a reasonable take. Uncontroversial. Vanilla. But on the internet there are no such things as reasonable takes. The person who made the video happened to be a woman, and so my comments wre full of people implying I was a sexist, that I was a misogynist. None of which are true – the words being used only to try and keep me quiet.

What I found interesting is that I wasn’t even talking about women. I was talking about how men are mocked for being vulnerable. But my comments section were brimming with people making the conversation about men vs women. What men struggle with vs what women struggle with. And I found it bizarre.

There’s this thing that happens online. If you talk about one issue people will assume gleefully that it means you are denying the existence of another issue. That, because you are specifying an issue you car about it means you do not care about other problems faced by people. Which is of course, nonsense. I actively don’t try to divide discourse, pitting one group of people against another. But a lot of people seemed primed to do exactly this, and I’m curious about the intention of this.

I think we’d be much better served if we looked at all the issues different groups face as a collective issue. Together, rather than divided. Because, at the end of the day, we are all affected by these issues. We are all affected by the male suicide rate and violence against women. So we should address these issues together, rather than pointing fingers of blame at individuals.

Because, if someone is talking about the male suicide rate and the comment begin to pour in that sound like, ‘but women experience loneliness too,’ – I agree, they do. But you’re missing the point. Doing this is similar to the ‘not all men’ lads who pipe up when we talk about male violence. Making the conversation about yourself when we are talking about quite a serious topic helps no one.