Desire without respect: how men are socialised to want women but not value them

We are told we are living through a male loneliness epidemic. The phrase is repeated so often that it has hardened into common sense. Newspaper columns mourn isolated men, politicians warn of drifting boys, endless podcasters ask, with furrowed brows, what has happened to masculinity?

And yet research keeps quietly contradicting the premise. Everyone is lonelier. Women report rising loneliness, so do non-binary people, so do the elderly, the young, the partnered, and the single. Loneliness is not a male anomaly; it is a structural feature of contemporary life, shaped by economic precarity, the erosion of public space, overwork, housing instability, and the slow collapse of the institutions that once allowed people to find one another outside of work and the nuclear family. So why is men’s loneliness the version treated as a crisis?

Part of the answer is not that men suffer more, but that they suffer in ways that make institutions nervous. Men are more likely to externalise distress. They are more likely to turn isolation into rage, grievance, and political backlash. Men’s loneliness is more likely to result in men harming themselves and other people. This pattern is visible in men’s higher rates of suicide, online grievance cultures, radicalisation pipelines, and comment sections that transform women’s autonomy into evidence of male dispossession. In a patriarchal society, women’s loneliness is expected to be endured quietly, folded into emotional self-management and unpaid care, while men’s loneliness becomes a public emergency because of what it is feared to produce.

And yet it’s not framed that way. We still hand-wring about male loneliness as if loneliness were the problem, when it’s not – men’s reaction to loneliness is the problem: their rage, their anger, their violence, their misogyny, their self-loathing, their self-harm. All of these reactions to loneliness are due to patriarchal ideas of how men should react to vulnerability: that they should hide their struggles, they shouldn’t admit vulnerability, they shouldn’t seek out connection because doing so is “weak”, and that the only acceptable emotions to express are anger and rage – and anger and rage have to be directed at something. Sometimes men direct it at themselves, resulting in mental health issues, low self-worth and all too often, suicide. Other times, men direct their rage outwards: at women, at immigrants, at anyone more vulnerable than them in order to try feel more powerful.

We don’t have a male loneliness epidemic. We have patriarchy.

To understand how this system produces isolation and resentment in equal measure, we need to talk about homosociality. Homosociality describes the way men are socially organised around other men. It does not refer to sexual desire, but to the direction of recognition and value. In patriarchal cultures, masculinity is something conferred by men upon other men. Status, legitimacy, and belonging are earned in male company. Homosociality names the fact that while many straight men seek sex, care, and intimacy from women, their sense of worth, identity, and belonging is overwhelmingly shaped by the approval of other men.

Women are who men date, but men are who men turn to for validation, approval, respect, and status. It shows up in social media feeds dominated by gym bodies, cars, watches, fish photos and crypto screenshots, performances aimed less at attracting women than at impressing other men. It shows up in men’s derision of culture, interests or hobbies that are coded as feminine, men’s ongoing refusal to read female authors, watch female-centric pop culture, listen to women-hosted podcasts and media. Heterosexual men are socialized to desire women, but they’re only taught to like and respect other men.

This distinction matters because it shapes the entire emotional economy of heterosexual life. Many straight men grow up performing masculinity for male approval while seeking intimacy, care, and reassurance from women. Validation flows in one direction, emotional sustenance in another, producing a fundamental split between who men want to be seen by and who they rely on to survive emotionally.

bell hooks articulated this with devastating precision in The Will to Change. “Patriarchal masculinity,” she writes, “insists that real men must prove their manhood by idealizing aloneness and disconnection.” Under patriarchy, masculinity becomes less a way of living and more a performance staged under constant surveillance.

From boyhood onward, masculinity is constantly policed. Boys learn what is acceptable from adults, from the media, and from one another. And what they learn, under the framework of traditional gender roles and patriarchal society, is deeply limiting: Emotional openness invites ridicule, tenderness threatens credibility, vulnerability risks social exile. Boys learn early the vocabulary of correction: “Man up”, “Don’t be a pussy”, “Stop being so emotional.” Approval must be earned through toughness, conquest, competitiveness, or visible success in arenas that other men already agree are impressive.

As bell hooks writes, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

This is not a personality flaw. It is a curriculum. That curriculum requires men to develop contempt for anything coded feminine, because hierarchy is difficult to maintain without something beneath it. “Avoiding femininity” becomes a masculine discipline.

Girls may become tomboys and still remain intelligible, but boys who drift toward femininity are corrected. Romance novels, pop music, skincare, fashion, celebrity gossip, emotional fluency, and visible enthusiasm all become suspect. These preferences are policed by fathers, peers, and online male spaces where mockery is framed as humour. A man can spend twelve hours watching football and be understood as having interests, while a woman can spend the same amount of time reading romance and be told she has no inner life. This is not about taste – it is about whose interests are deemed valuable, and whose interiority is allowed to count.

Men are not socialised to be interested in women. They are socialised to value masculinity. Because femininity is positioned as lesser, taking women seriously becomes a liability. Respect flows upward toward masculine-coded pursuits and sideways toward other men who successfully embody them.

The predictable result is that many men reach adulthood fluent in hierarchy but illiterate in intimacy. They know how to compete, posture, and rank themselves against others. They know how to earn approval from men. What they often lack is the capacity to cultivate curiosity, emotional attentiveness, or genuine interest in women as people.

This helps explain a dynamic many women recognise immediately, even if they struggle to articulate it: being energetically pursued yet barely known. Attention toward women’s bodies can be intense, even obsessive, while interest in their inner lives remains minimal. Desire is expressed loudly, but curiosity is strangely absent. (Please see: Men Don’t Ask Questions On Dates – And It’s Hurting Us All).

Within homosocial logic, a girlfriend is not a partner but a credential, proof of desirability legible to other men. Her value is symbolic long before it becomes relational. At the same time, the posturing required to enact traditional masculinity makes authentic male intimacy extraordinarily difficult. Emotional openness between men threatens status. Care must be disguised as humour or aggression. Vulnerability must be minimised, mocked, or displaced. Men are encouraged to seek approval from other men, while being denied the emotional tools necessary to form sustaining connections with them. This contradiction leaves women as the fallback.

As hooks writes, patriarchy teaches men that women exist to meet their needs, but does not teach men how to meet women as equals. Care is feminised, naturalised, and quietly framed as women’s moral responsibility. Men are taught to expect care without learning how to practice it, while women are taught to provide it without being allowed to refuse.

This logic appears everywhere once you start looking. From newspaper columns lamenting single men to viral posts insisting women should lower their standards for the sake of social stability. When men speak about loneliness in public discourse, the proposed solutions are rarely collective or structural. They are intimate and individual: Men need girlfriends, men need wives, men need female sexual partners, men need women to be more understanding, more patient, more emotionally available, more sexually available. Loneliness is framed not as a failure of male socialisation or community, but as a shortage of female partnership. In this framing, women are positioned as the intervention.

hooks observes that when men describe feeling unloved, many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Men’s suffering is narrated in a way that subtly assigns responsibility: if men are lonely, women must be too selective, too independent, too cold, too feminist. The emotional deficit becomes a moral one, and women are asked to correct it through care.

This is how women become the emotional infrastructure of heterosexual life. Daily emotional check-ins, reassurance after rejection, encouragement toward therapy that may never be taken up, and the quiet management of men’s moods become expected rather than exceptional. Girlfriends and wives are expected to absorb fear, grief, shame, and uncertainty that men have been trained not to share with one another. She becomes not only a partner, but a regulator and stabiliser, the person who manages emotional crises, remembers appointments, encourages friendships, monitors mental health, and reassures him that he is still worthy of love.

It is not unusual to hear men describe a female partner as the only person they can talk to. This is rarely treated as a warning sign or an indictment of the man’s ability to connect with others – it is instead framed as devotion, intimacy, even romance. Research tells a less sentimental story. A 2017 study published in Psychology of Gender and Health found that men who strongly adhere to traditional masculinity norms are significantly less likely to seek emotional support from friends or family, instead relying almost entirely on intimate partners. This pattern places disproportionate strain on heterosexual relationships, as women are expected to provide the emotional labour of an entire social network.

In practice, it is an immense structural load placed on a single relationship, with one woman asked to compensate for the absence of community, friendship, and emotional literacy. When that arrangement begins to crack, as it inevitably does, women’s requests for reciprocity are often interpreted as rejection. Asking men to cultivate friendships, develop emotional language, or shoulder their share of relational labour is experienced not as a bid for mutuality, but as criticism. When women assert boundaries around care, the fantasy of unconditional emotional access collapses. Instead of interrogating the system that taught men to seek approval from men while outsourcing intimacy to women, resentment is frequently redirected at the women themselves. This is where loneliness curdles into hostility. It is also where desire becomes split from status.

Publicly, men are trained to treat certain women as embarrassing to want. Recent red-pill manosphere discourse talks about “high-value women”, placing conventional beauty standards and sexual purity as the most important traits in a woman. Fat women in particular are positioned as jokes, warnings, or moral failures. Attraction to them is framed not as preference, but as deficiency. Privately, however, the data tells a different story. Annual trend reports from adult websites consistently show high engagement with categories centred on bigger bodies. The contradiction is revealing. What governs men’s desire is often not attraction itself, but approval. The question is rarely what they want, and far more often whether other men will respect them for wanting it. Desire that threatens status becomes something to hide, laugh off, or distance oneself from, sometimes even turning into contempt for the very thing that is privately desired.

bell hooks describes the psychic cost of this kind of masculinity with devastating clarity. In patriarchal culture, she writes, men are not allowed simply to be who they are; their value is always measured by what they do and how convincingly they perform manhood. Over time, this constant self-monitoring requires a quiet form of self-betrayal. Feelings are dulled, longings are suppressed, and emotional numbness is mistaken for strength. When men lose the ability to feel, hooks argues, they also lose the ability to love.

Seen through this lens, the simultaneous rise of male loneliness and misogyny is not confusing or contradictory. It follows a clear logic. When men are socially dependent on male approval but emotionally dependent on women, rejection does not land as ordinary disappointment. It feels like humiliation. In a patriarchal system where access to women is treated as evidence of masculine worth, its absence registers not as sadness, but as failure.

The so-called male loneliness epidemic, then, is not primarily about sex. It is about relational deprivation produced by patriarchal socialisation. Many men lack emotionally sustaining friendships with other men. They lack permission to grieve, to depend, to soften. Patriarchy promised independence but only taught men to fear dependence while ensuring they could not survive without it. This vulnerability is now deeply profitable. Technology platforms monetise dissatisfaction; influencer masculinity pathologises empathy while selling mastery; dating apps depend on frustration to function; AI companions promise intimacy without reciprocity; and political movements convert male pain into grievance into votes. A lonely man is a reliable consumer and often a reliable recruit. Many people are benefitting from orchestrating and perpetuating men’s loneliness and isolation – but it’s not women, and it’s certainly not ordinary men themselves.

If men are to become less lonely, women cannot function as the default solution. More patience, greater availability, or lower standards cannot repair an injury produced by the structure of masculinity itself. What would change if men were encouraged not merely to desire women, but to genuinely like them, not as symbols of status or proof of worth, but as social equals with interior lives that do not exist for male validation?

Such a shift would require grieving a masculinity that promised power without connection and status without tenderness. It would require building emotional lives that extend beyond heterosexual partnerships rather than extracting intimacy from them.

hooks insists that men are not incapable of change, only afraid of it, writing, “It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. It is true that masses of men haven’t even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.” Until that happens, loneliness will persist not because intimacy is unattainable, but because patriarchy teaches men to seek belonging where love cannot sustainably live.

The gender divide is not widening because men and women want incompatible things. It is widening because one group has been trained to pursue approval over attachment, dominance over reciprocity, and validation over care. Loneliness is not cured by access. It is cured by relation. And until masculinity itself is restructured to make room for that truth, heterosexual intimacy will remain distorted by a hunger it was never meant to satisfy.