The cure for male loneliness is feminism. Seriously.

A certain kind of feminism.

Apparently, I like to copy and paste writing that blows my heart wide open. A few weeks back, I shared Clementine Morrigan’s argument for why a lot of sex between straight people is not so good and how men can do it better. This time, you have to see what Garrett Bucks just did. It’s a straight up mic drop. Nothing more needs to be said. Us men need to just do the thing.

What thing? Care. Just care. Just “show up for other people, actively and regularly,” as Bucks writes. “Not because they can do something for me (validate me, sleep with me, advance my career, temporarily quiet my doubt and self-loathing, etc.) but because we all share a world and therefore deserve to have one more person give a damn about us.”

Just text a friend who’s struggling. Just help clean up after friend’s party. Just do more housework and parenting (or at least talk to your partner about how they feel about the division of household labor). Just offer to watch your friend’s kids (or at least bring them a Tupperware of soup they can throw in the freezer for a busy weekday evening). Just show up to community meetings in your neighborhood. Just volunteer at your kid’s school. Just join a political organization like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and pitch in to all the back-end planning stuff that such an organization requires. Just organize a few neighbors to clean up trash on your street.

I’m writing “just” over and over again on purpose. Caring in these ways is so damn simple. The people who need care are around us all the time. But it’s also really, really hard. Especially for those of us who’ve been socialized as men. We’ve been told that anything outside of going to work or optimizing ourselves by lifting weights, sitting in ice baths, and pounding creatine isn’t worth much. That caring for others isn’t a “productive” or “efficient” use of our time. That someone else will always end up doing it. That we’re not supposed to do it because women are naturally, biologically designed for it and we’re not (which is untrue). That if we do it, we’re less valuable, like a woman, less of a man.

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I’m a therapist with a bunch of clients to care for, so you’d think I’d be good at this stuff.

I’m so bad at it. I feel like I’m coming up short for my people in all kinds of ways. I keep putting off visiting my grand-aunt Marion, even though her health issues are getting serious. I often avoid eye contact with neighbors so they don’t find out I’ve forgotten their name. I regularly have a bunch of texts from friends on “unread” so I can remember to respond eventually. I usually try to get out of cleaning the dishes at friends’ dinner parties.

But—and this is the finer point I want to put on what Bucks wrote—caring is good for us. “The more you care about others, the less lonely you are,” he writes. “You don’t cure disconnection through pandering, or even through proximity. True connection comes through interdependence, through bonds that emerge when people trust that you actually care about them, rather than viewing them as means to an end.”

That just hits for me. I recently volunteered to help plan a conference for a therapist organization I’m a member of. It felt good to raise my hand and get praise for stepping up. But then came the weeknight Zoom meetings after long days of work. Emails upon emails upon emails. Phone calls upon phone calls upon phone calls. And I’m not getting paid for any of it. Why did I do this to myself? Because underneath being annoyed, it feels good to be part of something. I’m getting closer with the other volunteers because we’re struggling for a common goal. My life feels fuller, less disconnected. I can’t wait to be part of the team at the conference. Even if I roll my eyes at every email.

And that’s why I think feminism is the answer.

Not the feminism aimed at merely—in the words of psychology professor Darby Saxbe—"emulating men and outcompeting them on the terrain they have constructed.” Not the feminism the late bell hooks called “trickle-down theory: the [flawed] assumption that having more women at the top of corporate hierarchies would make the work world better for all women, including women on the bottom.”

No, the feminism that fights for a society where everyone of all genders has more time and energy to care about people outside of work. The feminism that argues for the value of the “creation and maintenance of social bonds ... birthing and raising children and caring for the elderly [and] sustaining horizontal ties among friends, family, neighborhoods, and community,” as philosopher Nancy Fraser describes it. The feminism that says that the #tradwives are on to something but pointing the finger at the wrong enemy (feminism instead of capitalism).

That’s who taught me the value of caring. I read feminists like Silvia Federici, bell hooks, and Nancy Fraser. I learned that men devalue and exploit care work because capitalism as an economic system devalues and exploits care work. Then I read Bucks’s post, and it clicked. Caring more is good for us too.

We don’t realize it because we’ve been duped. There are indigenous societies who before colonization were not patriarchal, with fathers sharing heavily in parenting. The male body is entirely as capable of emotional intimacy as the female body. We tend to avoid caring not because of biology or longstanding tradition, but because of ideas in our head. Ideas about being a man that we learn from adults and other boys growing up. Ideas that rich and powerful men put a ton of effort and money into selling us. Ideas that allow those at the very top of the economy to keep exploiting all the unpaid caring that’s needed for a functioning society. Ideas that allow an estimated $11 trillion of domestic and care work to go unpaid worldwide each year, three-quarters of it falling on women.

Yes, we all need more time and resources to be able to care more without burning out. Yes, we need government policies that actually support families and communities—and the redistribution of wealth and power needed to pass those policies. But we can start caring today in little ways. Raising our hand to help. Saying “hi” to our neighbors. Making the soup. Cleaning the dishes. Texting a friend. Caring in some seemingly small, inconsequential way. And, as I’m learning, we’ll get something out of it too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—how do you care for your family and community? What keeps you from doing more of it? How do you feel about feminism?

— Jeremy