[leeroyjenkins11]

Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships. Create a stigma to encourage people to only have sex inside of committed marriage relationships so when they get older the have a lasting relationship with someone.

Also it's would help killing the sex trade as a young man will pe willing to pay for it via websites or in person, but don't form those long term relationships before it's too late.

[nemothekid]

These christian-adjacent solutions seem completely bizarre to me. They smell like solutions that have been worked backwards from ideology than actual data.

South Korea is a christian nation; forget prostitution, even pornography is banned in South Korea. South Korea, while being largely agnostic (~49%), is largely a christian nation by largest sect. If your prescriptions worked, South Korea would be a poster child for christian conservative values, but alas here we are reading about South Korean middle aged men.

I don't know what it is about the refusal acknowledge the clear economic failures happening right now and to completely ignore that those grievances of the progressive left while hyperfocusing on more feminist policies. People simply cannot afford to do anything other than work, and it's somehow shocking that people who spend all their time working don't have time to form meaningful relationships or even plan for children.

[throwawaysleep]

The monogamy argument is basically to force women into relationships with these men rather than using their current choice to not marry men they find undesirable.

[starkd]

Who is being forced into relationships with these men? How undesirable could they be having slept with them at least once?

[acdha]

Is there anyone you’ve ever met that you could imagine having sex with but wouldn’t want to be around for the rest of your life, linking your finances to, or raising children with? Think of how many times you’ve heard about someone changing after starting a relationship - whether that’s cheating, putting more effort into dating than they do to maintaining a relationship or, especially given the culture in question, thinking that the woman should be doing all of the domestic work and child rearing even if that means giving up career prospects?

That last part is really important to understand for these discussions: people sometimes talk about dating like a market but notice how rarely the proposed answer is helping men be better partners rather than pressuring women to accept less.

[starkd]

I think women benefit when they raise the standards on who they decide to sleep with. Women are pretty good at that when they want to, and men tend to benefit when women hold them to a higher standard.

[ramblerman]

> What are some examples of proposed solutions that the progressive left would oppose?

[mbrameld]

It sounds like you're suggesting the reason these people are struggling socially in middle age is that they were overly social as younger people. Seems unlikely to me.

[orwin]

Like I said in a sister comment, you have 108 male to 100 female at birth (correction: 105 to 100[0] in the US), so what do you do with the 'leftovers'?

And if some females don't want to play house now that they can survive on their own, do you force them to play?

[0] https://www.who.int/data/maternal-newborn-child-adolescent-a...

[throwaway290]

Excess at-birth human males die way younger than females. From other males and higher genetic variance. It evens out and even skews the other way.

[bradlys]

Just look at age bar charts and you’ll see this isn’t accurate for developed countries…

[throwaway290]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sex-ratio-by-age?time=195...

Seriously, assuming the problem of loneliness is 8% extra males born is naive to the point of harmfulness. The notions of "pairing" and "leftovers" have died decade ago, not to mention people come in and out given country. The problem in Korea is cultural, mental health stigma is strong, classism and the pressure to succeed is beyond ridiculous, your worth measured by how expensive a cat you drive, etc.

[foobarian]

Maybe it's an adaptation that arose as a result of the constant state of war, which is now gone.

[virtual_void]

Not everyone is heterosexual…

[woodruffw]

None of these things stop anyone (including men) from dying alone.

Stigmatization itself is the root of the problem here: lonely people, and particular men, do not want to admit that they are lonely.

[DangitBobby]

I doubt that's the problem. It takes effort to go out and try to make friends. Even trying does not guarantee success. I'm barely thirty and I can't remember the last time I made a friend on my own. There are people in my orbit (family) who help me meet new people and stay connected. I'd be doing a really bad job without them.

My lonely friend who moved away regularly says he is lonely, but also hasn't really made any new friends where he lives. They decided to move to another state where there are more people who speak his wife's native language, but neither of them know anyone there, despite living there for a couple of years now. Knowing you are lonely and telling others you are lonely doesn't help if you don't have a support network or community.

[gernb]

How does as man admitting that he's lonely help?

[woodruffw]

“Admit” as in “enable social structures around,” not “confess to random strangers.”

As a concrete (and tiny) example: we enforce loneliness at the physical and policy levels by subsiding the construction of car-dependent suburbs: human socialization becomes defined by points of interaction (driving to the bowling alley, except you have no friends to bowl with), rather than transitory areas of interaction.

[DangitBobby]

This is very different your original statement. Social structures that create loneliness are not the same as "stigmatizing" loneliness. And this doesn't explain how the supposed stigma around loneliness causes loneliness in men.

[woodruffw]

> Social structures that create loneliness are not the same as "stigmatizing" loneliness.

I didn't say that they were the same: I said that expressions of loneliness are stigmatized in men, and that we've developed social structures that create and enforce loneliness. They're separate points.

The stigma around loneliness doesn't as much cause loneliness as it ensures that the causes of loneliness can't be meaningfully ameliorated. To use a popular phrase: "the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem."

[acdha]

> Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships

Who told you that “the progressive left” opposes that? The major marriage-related shifts in the last century were expanding marriage benefits to everyone (interracial, homosexual) and opposition was distinctly right-wing.

Now, perhaps this was code for rolling back equal rights so more women would be pressured to enter into or remain in unsatisfactory marriages but as we saw that’s a recipe for more rather than less unhappiness.

[tshaddox]

> Who told you that “the progressive left” opposes that?

> Now, perhaps this was code for…

Yes, what they probably mean by “Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships” is “stigmatize, vilify, and legally disincentivize or even prohibit things with don’t fall into ‘traditional’ monogamous (and presumably heterosexual) marriage.” Which many on the progressive left would indeed oppose.

[acdha]

It’s really interesting seeing the intersection of people who talk about marriage as both the bedrock of society and something which isn’t desirable enough to survive without massive social pressure. Having been happily married for a long time that view seems bizarre to me but I know many people who hold it.