I'm continually amused by your seeming obsession with gendered groups and bonding, as if coed groups and bonding should be seen as less worthy.
Frankly I find gendered groups silly and outdated.
My research backed opinions will probably not change your opinion or other people's beliefs, but my explanations and sources provide context for my actions and beliefs.
Some undergraduate men in the 1870s from Paul Deslandes's
Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920 and cowboys in Jacqueline Moore's
Cowboys and Cattlemen: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865-1900 commented on the more gentle treatment of women in groups with predominantly men. The presence of women in those groups altered the dynamics between the men according to certain cowboys and undergraduates in the two mentioned books (Deslandes 170 and Moore 141-143), and reasonable people can extrapolate the same influence of women in men's spaces today. People might presently accept support groups only for women, yet men struggle in the formation of support groups for men only because some people perceive those support groups as sexist activities. Those people's hypocrisy prompted my current comment.
Those fraternal groups and male working class communities provided opportunities for men's drinking, gambling, practical jokes, male friendship, and animal fighting
And why is "Men's Drinking, etc" any more valuable than getting together after work with your coed friends for these same activities? What benefit does structuring these activities around a particular group's set of practices add? A lot of religions attempt to structure social activities around their practitioners as well to make them all included in part of the religion, and I find it similarly silly.
Drinking in the nineteenth century provided clean sources of hydration for people. Before the advent of universal urban water treatment and universal piped water in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, most nineteenth century Americans drank large amounts of very light beers for hydration compared to today. Beer uses boiled water in its production process, and boiled water in the nineteenth century killed potential pathogens in the beer and prevented outbreaks of cholera and other pathogens.
Social drinking in the nineteenth century promoted socialization among men occassionaly outside the influence of women. Drinking in the nineteenth century allowed for the promotion of entertainment through fighting with weapons, theaters, honor killings, animal ring fighting, and gambling among the working to upper classes of men in the first half of the nineteenth century. Drinking alcohol also promoted more spaces for socialization with other men in the nineteenth century compared to modern times because a woman's presence in many drinking locations might have degraded the woman's reputation until the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Through the later part of the nineteenth century, drinking became a focal point of social activities for people outside the confines of the domestic sphere and feminine influences from women. Men sought bonds with other men through the sharing of drinks outside the view of married and single women. While some married men loved their married wife, other men sought an escape from the perceived confining influence of marriage and femininity with the combined influences of alcohol, public entertainment, and female prostitution.
Rampant alcoholism, according to Richard Stott in chapter three of
Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America, in the nineteenth century also prompted legal reforms and social reforms from religious social reformers because changes in middle class masculinity and femininity, acceptance of new medical terms for sexual behaviors, and Protestant religious revivals in the early and late nineteenth century promoted people’s self-condemnation, self-restraint, and submission to the demands of advertising and corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth century.
These reasons prompted my commentary and writing of research papers on similar topics because our modern culture of labels, compartmentalization, and marketing of people for consumption promoted emotional restraint, social restraint, and legal consequences for people’s non-compliance with these restrictions. I cannot in good faith support those practices, and my shouting, yelling, and pushing people away will not fulfill this mission.
Dio, have you been contemplating alternative civilizing forces in society now that churches and families don't seem to be working, or at least now that the economy has mobilized and dispersed us? Something like this article?
https://yaelwolfe.medium.com/the-real-problem-when-46-year-old-women-are-crying-in-their-cars-7190de825c6b
I have been seeking alternative socialization opportunities for men only for over a decade because women socialize differently compared to men. Your article mentions the perspectives of a woman on loneliness, and I empathize with women's issues. Women often receive worse treatment in most social issues compared to men.
Men also often confront other issues more frequently and receive far less social support for those issues. Some people ignore the perspectives of men with the gendered inequalities in homelessness, unreported sexual harassment and violence against men, emotional abuse against men, inequalities in parenting for men, and higher rates of completed suicide in men. Some advocates even vilify certain men for stating their lived experiences. While anecdotes never adequately support an argument in the social sciences, compilations of examples in books like Niobe Way's
Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection and Twyman Towery's
Male Code: Rules Men Live and Love document issues with the social connections of men with other men in the United States of America from the 1980s through the last decade.
Only in the last couple of years have new non-misogynistic, non-sexual minorities, and non-religious organizations for men only sprung up in the digital and physical world. While I love socialization with modern women, modern men should not have to choose women exclusively for emotional support in a committed relationship or marriage. Some of the women in my life and other men's life degraded interactions and socialization with other men for various reasons.
Sources:
Deslandes, Paul R.
Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Moore, Jacqueline M.
Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865-1900. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Stott, Richard Briggs.
Jolly Fellows : Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Towery, Twyman L. Male Code : Rules Men Live and Love By. Lakewood, Colo: Glenbridge Pub., 1992.
Way, Niobe. Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
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