White Heterosexual Men Have the Fewest Friends

Studies indicate that white heterosexual men have the fewest close friends.  A piece in Salon looks at the issue:

Of all people in America, adult, white, heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Moreover, the friendships they have, if they’re with other men, provide less emotional support and involve lower levels of self-disclosure and trust than other types of friendships. When men get together, they’re more likely to do stuff than have a conversation. Friendship scholar Geoffrey Greif calls these “shoulder-to-shoulder” friendships, contrasting them to the “face-to-face” friendships that many women enjoy. If a man does have a confidant, three-quarters of the time it’s a woman, and there’s a good chance she’s his wife or girlfriend.

[R]esearch shows that boys are just as likely as girls to disclose personal feelings to their same-sex friends and they are just as talented at being able to sense their friends’ emotional states.

But, at about age 15 to 16 — right at the same age that the suicide rate of boys increases to four times the rate of girls — boys start reporting that they don’t have friends and don’t need them. Because Way interviewed young men across each year of high school, she was able to document this shift. One boy, Justin, said this in his first year, when he was 15:

[My best friend and I] love each other… that’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it.

By his senior year, however, this is what he had to say about friendship:

[My friend and I] we mostly joke around. It’s not like really anything serious or whatever… I don’t talk to nobody about serious stuff…

Why?  Some posit that it's because of the (in my view) sick macho mentality in which men are raised and taught to hide their feelings and never show weakness or any traits that might suggest femininity.  And then there is the so-called gay panic syndrome: men cannot show affection towards without facing possible accusations of being gay.  Andrew Sullivan looks at these toxic causes.  Here are highlights:

Lisa Wade blames the conditioning boys undergo in their teens:

[M]en are pressed — from the time they’re very young — to disassociate from everything feminine. This imperative is incredibly limiting for them. Paradoxically, it makes men feel good because of a social agreement that masculine things are better than feminine things, but it’s not the same thing as freedom. It’s restrictive and dehumanizing. It’s oppression all dressed up as awesomeness. And it is part of why men have a hard time being friends.

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

Katy Waldman thinks it’s also about gay panic: 

Wade doesn’t mention the rainbow elephant in the room, but I wonder whether men are less afraid of girliness here than homosexuality. In many ways, it’s a distinction without a difference, since homophobes tend to imagine gay men as effete.

Daisy Buchanan believes one solution is to battle the stigma against boys making friends with girls:

I don’t believe men are naturally wired to be any less intimate and caring than women are. But if young boys grow up in a world where they’re mocked for pursuing friendships with girls, and don’t see enough examples of friendships between older men, it’s going to cause huge problems for men and women later in life. Without a network of friends, boys are going to grow up to feel confused, lonely and alienated.

Personally, I think the American image of manliness is very fu*ked up.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I never fit the societal model and always found that, with a few exceptions, I usually had girls as my closest friends.  Being gay even though in the closet for decades possibly a part of the reason I did not fit the supposed idealized male stereotype.  I will say that since coming out, I have developed many more friendships with other males than in all the years prior to coming out.