The current “male loneliness”/pushback discourse in my feed is like hearing completely accurate bell hooks quotes about patriarchy except they are read by snarky 90s radio morning show jocks with fart noises and air horns
As a sensitive boy under American patriarchy the broad messages you get from the Church, from the Right, and from the Left are all essentially Calvinist: you are inherently disposed toward total depravity.
Your sexuality is sinful. Either because of Adam/Eve, or because you can’t/won’t elevate philia over eros. Either way, your gross body is separate and fallen and you must conquer it and/or intellectually flense away the erotic element of your ache for Welcome. Place it beneath your feet.
Good boys don’t have eroticism intertwined with their need for companionship. Good boys are pure spirits. Good boys have done the self-work to extract their loneliness as a pristine feeling-gem buried beneath all their dirty, shameful, misdirected need to lose their borders in another’s skin.
The Right has easy answers as long as you’re cool with hating yourself.
The Left is where I found my liberation, my wholeness, my way forward. My holistic, self-accepting, many-faceted, deeply embodied interdependence. But I had to beat my way through miles of cartesian dualism and unconscious puritanism to get there.