He was often seen wearing sunglasses indoors, smoking a cigar, seated behind a microphone and surrounded by women. He would say things like, “I’m a realist, and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist.” His name is Andrew Tate, and before his online presence was eclipsed by charges of human trafficking and rape in 2023, he had already amassed a legion of bitter, lonely men and exacerbated the spread of an idea that has since become commonplace across social media — the “male loneliness epidemic.”
The term “male loneliness epidemic” insinuates that men are unique in their aloneness and incomparably helpless when finding friends and partners. But research suggests that isolation is a genderless issue spreading in America at such an alarming rate that the U.S. surgeon general declared it an epidemic in 2023.
There is no male loneliness epidemic. It is simply a loneliness epidemic. By arbitrarily gendering a universal loneliness, our fragmented society becomes further fractured, and the discourse surrounding relationships becomes a breeding ground for misogyny.
Likely contributing to the idea of an exclusively male loneliness crisis, a survey from the Survey Center of American Life released in 2021 found that 15% of men reported having no close friends, whereas 10% of women reported the same. The statistic was cited in articles by NPR, the Independent and Vox about male loneliness. However, that same year and two years prior, studies were released which found that not only do roughly the same number of men and women report being lonely, but they report equal levels of loneliness throughout their lives.
Loneliness is not a measure of how many friends one has or whether one is in a romantic relationship; it is the yearning for a greater social life. According to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 6 Americans are subject to feeling “lonely or isolated from those around them all or most of the time.” It’s a problem that only grows worse with time because, as technology advances, people’s sense of belonging regresses.
Swipe enough on social media and you will likely fall into the trap of social comparison. Maybe your friend seems to have a happier love life than your own, or that acquaintance from lecture you just followed on Instagram is a lot more photogenic than you. This kind of upward comparison brings out an isolating feeling of lagging behind one’s own peers. The platforms allow people to pick and choose the moments of their life they want publicized, and most users put up a facade of perfection.
This same inauthenticity is present on dating apps, where 21% of adults are reported to lie about their age, 12% lie about their height, and 14% lie about their interests and hobbies. In an environment where the entirety of a human being is reduced to a handful of images and bite-sized factoids, there will be an inevitable sect of stragglers who lie as a way to stand out and to ward off the dreaded left swipe.
In a survey conducted by Forbes, 79% of Gen Z dating app users reported feeling “burned out by dating apps sometimes, often or always.” The cycle of failed connections, rejections and catfishes is fatiguing for users. For the executives of these apps, this fatigue becomes revenue. The business models of dating apps hinge on their users growing so desperate for love that they start paying for monthly subscriptions and “super likes.” The exhaustion is the point.
Some of those who have fully given up opt to use the apps as their own personal validation mills via “ego-scrolling.” Like lab rats repeatedly pressing a button for their food pellet reward, these users scroll and swipe mindlessly for the dopamine rush of a new match. Then, they ghost.
Further fraying society’s ability to connect is the “manosphere.” Helmed by online personalities like the aforementioned Andrew Tate, the manosphere movement seeks to address men’s issues like dating and masculinity by steering its followers into misogyny and a cynically transactional view of relationships.
In order to find some semblance of intimacy, the manosphere has adopted as its modus operandi the tactics of pickup artistry popularized by Neil Strauss’ book “The Game.” Strauss, who refers to women as “targets,” argues that to successfully pick up women, one must peacock with their outfit, insult the target to undermine their confidence and be so aggressive with physical contact that the boundaries of the woman become worn out.
Through the lens of the manosphere, women are not people but mere games for which sex is the reward if played right. The manosphere’s culture tells men that their ability to win the game is solely defined by their sexual market value. This value is the sum total of traits they can and cannot control — such as confidence, age, fitness and attractiveness. This absolutist view on the dynamics of attraction has birthed a splinter group of men who believe that the game has been irreparably rigged against them from the start.
Enter the incel, short for involuntary celibate. In the nearly 30 years of its existence, the incel community has mutated from an online support group for the lonely to a nightmarish, entirely male circle whose members are misogynistic and self-loathing for not living up to its ideal.
“People who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community,” political scientist Robert Putnam said in an interview with the New York Times. “Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men.”
The manosphere and incel communities, as they are understood today, were not created in a vacuum. The profiteers of the manosphere convince men that the loneliness crisis is exclusive to them — that no one else could possibly understand their struggle. This narrative enables them to recruit these men into their own programs, like Tate’s Hustlers University or Man Camps, which charge exorbitant sums for these men to attain some semblance of community and allegedly reclaim their masculinity. Those left behind by the manosphere still hold on to the misogyny foundational to the movement and run the risk of becoming violent incels.
If the public is to seriously confront the growing crisis of loneliness, it cannot — must not — frame the crisis as something exclusive to men. To do so is to allow the manosphere to take ownership of the matter and entrench culture further into a contemptuous, misogynistic fugue.
Nicholas Sherwood is an Opinion Intern for the spring 2025 quarter. He can be reached at nesherwo@uci.edu.
Edited by Jaheem Conley.