Men, hug your bros. Grasp them by the shoulders, look deep into their eyes and tell them you cherish their friendship. For the good of us all.

We regret to inform you that there has been a discourse. Ian Dunt is worried about men getting laid. He's worried that all the advice for men on getting laid comes from right wing dipshits like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and that the left doesn't talk about it at all.

Literally he says that the "progressive left seemingly has no opinion on men getting laid." He then has some ground breaking advice like talking to women as if they're human beings. Pretending women are men to help you see them as people.

I'm actually not that mad at the advice – it's basic but there will always be people who need basic advice. What the problem is, what the problem always is, is that he doesn't appear all that interested in why (not all) men have to be told to see women as people in the first place.

Which is not that surprising when you consider that the progressive left has been talking about straight men and sex for genuinely decades. It's just that it's mostly been women talking, so I guess Ian Dunt hasn't noticed.

Women had an entire sexual revolution over what we're looking for in the bedroom and we have not shut up about it since. We've explained carefully in columns and books and movies and this very newsletter what it is we need; if you want a crib sheet on how to successfully bed a woman we have provided you with so many. They all boil down to one thing really: we want men to be willing to communicate with women in general well enough to learn what the specific woman they are into wants.

It's not that hard, but it's also actually beside the point because what these men want is not actually sex. It's what they believe sex represents.

It represents success. There are several different ways that manifests, for example: You are doing well at life, so you've attracted a quality mate. Or you manipulated another person into giving you want you want. You demonstrated that you have a degree of control not just over your own life but the people around you.

The way I've seen a lot of men online talk about sex it's clear they see it as an achievement. This, I think, is why they put such emphasis on bullshit concepts like high quality women, why they're resistant to the idea that we also want to have sex – casual sex even! Because if we're having sex with them simply because we want to it lessens their achievement. The sex is a trophy to show that they deserve sex and if someone is just offering sex for the fun of sex, well, where's the value in that?

They want to have sex because of what having it says about them. They want to have it because having it affirms their masculinity, which they are insecure about because they've bought into an ideal of masculinity that is deeply fucked up.

It's not new that. Behaving in dysfunctional ways to affirm a fucked up ideal of masculinity is ancient.

For example, duels. Duels worked thusly: you are a man. Not just a man, you are a gentleman. You are a gentleman and someone has insulted you. They have suggested you're dishonest, or that you've cheated at cards, or perhaps they've looked a little too long at your wife or sister or daughter. They've impugned your honour.

There is now no hope for you. If you don't challenge them to a duel everyone will think you're a coward. If you challenge them to a duel and they refuse to fight you, they are a coward. Someone said something rude about you and now the two of you have to shoot at each other in a field because if you don't everyone will know you lack some crucial kind of honour that you, as a man, are supposed to have.

Two hundred odd years ago, having bravely fought a duel, even if you didn't win, proved you were the right kind of man. This is what having sex proves to (not all) men right now.

The solution to men who don't know how to date is not helping them to date because because dating, relationships, sex – none of those things are the end goal. They are a means to an end, and women are just the tools necessary

In her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism* Kristen Ghodsee looks at the impact of financial security on women's sex lives. In the USSR (scandal noted), thanks to mandated gender equality in the work force and free childcare, women were on equal financial footing with men and as a result their dating habits changed. They didn't need men anymore, so they only bothered going out with men they actually liked.

She also notes that during this time what made life harder for women was a male refusal to contribute to the household. Women were working as much as men, but still expected to do all the housekeeping. It would be easy to dismiss this as just a form of laziness that's been permitted for so long it seems natural, but I suspect there's more too it than that.

Patriarchal societies have a tendency to dismiss work that is traditionally done by women. You can see this in the changing rates of pay in industries that have changed from one gender to the other. Coding, for example, used to be done by women. As men started taking on more of that work, the pay went up. The opposite happened with teaching.

So housework, cooking, childcare, these are women's work. I suspect that for a lot of (not all) men it felt demeaning to be expected to contribute. What kind of man puts on a pair of marigolds and scrubs a bath? So by and large women have had to do this work, whether or not they also have full time jobs.

This was used for capitalist propaganda when the iron curtain fell. Women shouldn't be in the workplace when they didn't need to be. They could go from working two jobs to just working one: wife and mother.

This meant that they were no longer earning their own money, and their dating habits changed again. They were no longer looking for a partner, they were looking for a provider and their standards adjusted accordingly, to the benefit of men.

In many ways the dating problem can be best understood by considering how long women have been required to get married in order to survive. How recently men became essentially optional.

The claim that the left needs to concern itself with the sex lives of straight men as a counter to the right seems, on its face, fair. After all, the right is setting their arguments within a broader call for the return to a system that deliberately subjugates women. Forced pregnancies, restrictions on education, tradwives – patriarchy classic rebranded for the internet age.

We have to find a way to meet the one need, without capitulating on all the other shit. Men are lonely, men want to get laid, these are realities we have to face up to and apparently we can't do anything about the fact that the onus is still always on women.

The problem is that romantic and sexual success isn't actually a cure for loneliness.

Something I've seen go around a few times is a discussion of how badly men fare outside of relationships. Five or six years ago it was pinned to millennial stress – there was an op ed about how millennial women were struggling with the burden of being their boyfriends' and husbands' only source of emotional support. A couple of decades it was pinned to celebrity divorce – I remember the same basic points being made in an article about how Tom Cruise was likely to find recovering from divorce harder than Nicole Kidman, because women tend to have strong friendships and men don't.

This is the problem.

A while ago I was talking to a friend who claimed that men who watch football don't know anything about football. He's a sport journalist so he spends a lot of time watching football, and he's observed that when he watches in a pub he finds the other men there completely unable to talk about the match they've just watched. They're not really paying attention most of the time.

They catch the goals, or the almost goals, but they miss all the other things that happen on the field – passes and blocks and whatever else. His conclusion is that they're not really there to watch the game. The game is there to facilitate their friendships, because without football they don't know what to do together.

He told me he's talked to men who genuinely never see their friends in the off season.

If we're going to take the male loneliness crisis seriously then we need to be honest about what the crisis is. The systemic, pervasive system of patriarchal expectation that punishes men for appearing too feminine, and that associates platonic intimacy with women.

In the olden times the person with whom you had the most significant relationship, from whom you drew the most emotional support, with whom you shared your most vulnerable moments, was someone of the same gender.

Even if you had a loving marriage, the roles of men and women in the past were so different that there were barriers to true emotional connections. Women weren't given the same level of education as men, their day to day responsibilities were so different, you get the idea.

(Broadly speaking, obviously, I'm mostly talking about the west because I am not so well versed in the history of other cultures, we're also always mostly talking about the upper classes because most of what we know about history centres the only people who had the time and ability to write things down. Disclaimer over.)

So, if you were a man, your most important relationship was probably with another man. The social norm was for platonic intimacy between men.

In the late 19th century, when sodomy laws began to be more regularly and publicly enforced, it became dangerous for men to appear too close.

The victorians invented no homo and society is yet to recover.

None of this is really news either. Again, women have been trying to tell everyone for years that the patriarchy hurts men too. This is what we mean. It's like male relationships are about being impressive rather than affectionate.

It's not just that no one is owed a date, no one is owed sex, no one is owed a relationship, although obviously all that is true. It's that none of those things will solve the actual problem. The problem is that too many men and boys never learn how to be vulnerable with each other.

Straight men on the left who want to provide an alternative to the manisphere, your job is actually quite simple: have friends. Invest in your friendships. Make plans to see each other where seeing each other is all you do. Talk about your problems. Invite your friends to talk about theirs. Hug each other. Be open and vulnerable and close.

I honestly believe you could change the world.

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