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Haha, I immediately went and looked up the American Survey Centre link in my own past comments before realizing that your already linked it. Given that you did, im curious what led you to conclude there arent any significant differences.
Like, even with this new survey, they say in the summary that men and women have no difference in reported numbers of close friends, but when you dig into the data (in the "topline" section of the "how we did this" panel), there *is* a notable difference, both in the number of men who report having no close friends and the number who report only having one.
Not counting your family, do you have any close friends? (Men/Women)
Yes, one. 15/20
Yes, more than one 65/62
No 20/17
No answer * /1
All of those numbers are percentages.
Like, it's certainly less than the ASC survey, but that may also come from the difference in the type of questions, and general framing, considering that that other survey asked people to actually granularly break down the specific *number* of close friends they have, which might alter how people think about who counts as a truly close friend.
Like. Those aren't necessarily large percentage differences, but they are large numbers of people when applied to the American population. Even with these smaller gaps, three percent more men who have no close friends vs. women is, in hard numbers, an additional *five million totally isolated men*. It's also worth noting that that the datapoint i quoted above is an aggregate that isn't broken down by age cohort, and when it is, as in the ASC study, they note that men under thirty who report having no close friends is hovering more around 28 percent.
Like, I personally lean towards the interpretation that things are bad for everyone, so as a result people are particularly unlikely to care about it being worse for a particular group they aren't part of. That's sometimes due to it being viewed as "self inflicted" due to being a component of masculine socialization (and people being unable or unwilling to delineate between men as a demographic and patriarchy as a sociological force), and other times it's because people worry about it being weaponized against women by men who think the cure for that loneliness is women being forced to date them.
But it is a real issue, even as found by both studies you quoted, (even if one doesn't frame it that way unless you dig into the actual data) and I think it is worth caring about and taking steps to remedy. It's just become regrettably politicized, so that's unlikely to happen.
(Edit: holy damn Reddit absolutely mangled that table, so I have done what I can to make it readable)
There's nothing here!