At least in the bay area there are plenty of cuddle parties for platonic physical touch.
Feminism has a pretty convincing answer to the problem like I edited my original comment to include. Toxic masculinity is the social exclusion of deep emotional relationships between men, including the "suck it up" culture. The key is that only men can really participate in that healing because it's entirely a problem between men. Women, as I've observed, seek out deep emotional friendships with other women and have most of their emotional needs met that way. Men, for the most part, do not do that with other men.
"Cuddle parties" are not a substitute for sex, for men or women. Nor are "strong friendships", as you insinuate above.
Emotional intimacy, physical closeness, and sex are distinct and separable. Though they are linked for most people, for many no one of those is a substitute for any other.
"cuddle parties"... It's about as close to the real thing as jerking off to pornhub is to the happy marriage with a loving partner. It may take care of the immediate physiological urge, but that's it.
> At least in the bay area there are plenty of cuddle parties for platonic physical touch.
I never knew such a thing existed until you posted this, and perhaps I could have done with this at earlier points in my life. My receptivity would have varied greatly at different times though.
Fundamentally, I'm not sure it would have helped me as much as finding a therapist and talking about this stuff. Now that I'm out of the rut it would be much easier to approach a cuddle party.
Men struggle to see therapists as part of the "suck it up" culture so it's extremely difficult to get out of the existence once you are part of it. The system is self-protecting and does things to embed people deeper into the anti-feminist rut.
So feminism's answer to the the problem is "cuddle parties"? Are you serious?
I remember people used to argue that feminism was good because sexual liberation of women meant everyone was gonna get to have lots of sex. Obviously, these incels were not invited to the party. Women are having lots of sex, just not with them. And you actually believe "deep emotional relationships between men" are the cure for this unrest?
This is about deeper issues than friendship. It's about people's essential worth as human beings. People don't just have sex with anyone, they select partners and this implies selection criteria which implies value judgement. By seeking intimacy, we all risk judgement and rejection. Can you imagine what constant rejection by everyone must do to a person's self-worth?
"Cuddle parties" won't solve anything because they fail to understand the problem. Even proposing something like this compounds the issue because it's like saying "you are not good enough to have sex, enjoy this platonic activity instead". The root cause of this issue is society and women especially have decided these men are unattractive and therefore worthless. There is no fixing incels without fixing this inequality.
Jumping on somebody like that is seriously not ok on HN, and breaks the site guidelines badly ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.").
Taking the thread noticeably further into ideological and gender flamewar, as you did here and elsewhere, is also not ok.
You posted tons of flamewar comments in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. Please stop and don't do it again.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do this. Actually I just banned your account, but decided to unban it after looking a little bit closer. If you keep posting like this, though, we're going to have to.
We want thoughtful, substantive, curious conversation here, not bomb-throwing, fights to the death, and whatnot. You've posted a lot of serious flamebait. Please review the site guidelines and stop doing that. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
How do you reconcile that with the fact that one of the defining features of the last few decades of feminist writing has been intersectionality? And that some of the most prominent feminists are Black?
Kimberle Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality has been debunked using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was released just before she released her work into the world back in 1989. If you want to see the debunking head here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6g6D3Cc-Wc (Antonio Moore)
Intersectionality, as described by its creator, is simplistic and misleading. It completely ignores black male incarceration because all of the labor statistics preclude them. Black men's suffering has been erased and its causing a generation (or more) of people to treat them like they are the white patriarchy and that they have privilege they really don't when you look at the data.
Intersectionality has taken demographic disparities in isolation, say white mens rights versus white womens rights, and applied them to black people without nuance to the difference between how white men and black men are treated by institutions in the US.
It's given cover for Feminists to look past racial inequity that is the basis for much of black women's suffering. Go watch the video and look at the data, tell me what you think they got wrong.
Feminism has a pretty convincing answer to the problem like I edited my original comment to include. Toxic masculinity is the social exclusion of deep emotional relationships between men, including the "suck it up" culture. The key is that only men can really participate in that healing because it's entirely a problem between men. Women, as I've observed, seek out deep emotional friendships with other women and have most of their emotional needs met that way. Men, for the most part, do not do that with other men.