I don’t really know if I agree with your comment or the one you’re responding to. But here are my two cents: having good friendships with guys is difficult.
In middle-school (I’m European but using the American terms idk why) I had a number of good male friends but come highschool they all got addicted to drugs or video games and became a drag. I finally found friends in what one might call the “theater kids” group, which was exclusively female (there was a lot of stigma against these folks among guys and I burned a lot of bridges). The only close male friend I had left, I was only friends with through competitive sports and come 10th grade, it turns out he was a total toxic asshole (cheating on gf, racist, violent, etc; all developed over the course of maybe 4 months). So I end up having literally only female friends for the rest of highschool and much of college.
As a guy, that was kinda a bummer. It’s good to have some friends or really anyone close to you of the same gender, and I was a nerdy guy growing up with a single mother and no male friends or role models whatsoever. Luckily that turned me into a radical progressive and feminist, mostly due to my mother’s politics and hopefully common sense, and not a incel or neon-nazi.
This is just all to say that having a male support group is easier said then done. I don’t know if it’s because they really are losers—all the guys around me certainly felt like that—or because of social stigma against it. But teenage me definitely needed something like that when there wasn’t anything to be found.
Ultimately I turned out fine though, hopefully. I wonder, though, if some of the guys I knew in highschool would have been less icky if there had been less social pressure to basically be a toxic ass. I don’t know how to go about changing at least a century or social norms, but I think the people who got the worst of it were the guys I was friends with in middle-school, guys who were as smart and mature as my theater-group friends, but somehow pushed into toxic masculinity.
Ok, that’s a bit much for two cents. Hopefully I didn’t go on for two long… pretty bad pun, but I couldn’t help myself :P
I don’t really know if I agree with your comment or the one you’re responding to. But here are my two cents: having good friendships with guys is difficult.
In middle-school (I’m European but using the American terms idk why) I had a number of good male friends but come highschool they all got addicted to drugs or video games and became a drag. I finally found friends in what one might call the “theater kids” group, which was exclusively female (there was a lot of stigma against these folks among guys and I burned a lot of bridges). The only close male friend I had left, I was only friends with through competitive sports and come 10th grade, it turns out he was a total toxic asshole (cheating on gf, racist, violent, etc; all developed over the course of maybe 4 months). So I end up having literally only female friends for the rest of highschool and much of college.
As a guy, that was kinda a bummer. It’s good to have some friends or really anyone close to you of the same gender, and I was a nerdy guy growing up with a single mother and no male friends or role models whatsoever. Luckily that turned me into a radical progressive and feminist, mostly due to my mother’s politics and hopefully common sense, and not a incel or neon-nazi.
This is just all to say that having a male support group is easier said then done. I don’t know if it’s because they really are losers—all the guys around me certainly felt like that—or because of social stigma against it. But teenage me definitely needed something like that when there wasn’t anything to be found.
Ultimately I turned out fine though, hopefully. I wonder, though, if some of the guys I knew in highschool would have been less icky if there had been less social pressure to basically be a toxic ass. I don’t know how to go about changing at least a century or social norms, but I think the people who got the worst of it were the guys I was friends with in middle-school, guys who were as smart and mature as my theater-group friends, but somehow pushed into toxic masculinity.
Ok, that’s a bit much for two cents. Hopefully I didn’t go on for two long… pretty bad pun, but I couldn’t help myself :P