liv | (Reply)

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liv

Totally excellent point! I personally am not that great at being nice and considerate and putting others first, so advice aimed at getting presumed-men to be nicer is quite often applicable to me. It's easy for me to be seen to be encouraging other women who are already quite self-sacrificing to be more so, which is a bad approach and you're right to call me on it.

I think where I'm trying to go with this is not necessarily about being nicer to lonely men and more sensitive to their feelings. It's about strategizing to see if we can deal with some of the underlying issues that lead to people, including men, being lonely and unhappy. Maybe those just boil down to the same thing.

I certainly don't think it's purely women's responsibility to fix men's loneliness. I guess I want to be in a position to say to these men, I can see you have a serious problem, if you have any ideas for how to tackle it I'm willing to pitch in. Especially because I am pretty sure that the feminist aims of making society more equal and less pointlessly, rigidly gendered would actually help a lot here. So it's not a zero-sum game, helping women to be free of sexism doesn't impair helping men to be free of loneliness and inadequacy.