As this is the week to give thanks and such sentiments, I thought I would pass along this piece full of sage advice for you to be thankful that I did so.

I am not sure if this was an assignment or if the young (very young) female who wrote it felt moved to do so by the ‘men’ in her orbit. Whatever the occasion for the research, she enlisted the help of three psychologists to dive into the apparently recent phenomena involving a purported lack of deeper boon companion relationships between members of the masculine sex.

Or as Kcruella and I have always referred to it: scummy male bonding.

The sweet young thing who wrote it doesn’t tweet much, but when she did, it was stuff like this…

Sometimes my boss says "I'm going to need you to watch the #JonasBrothers new music video" and I fall in love with my job all over againhttps://t.co/bfN49xGYkp

— Madeline Holcombe (@mnholcombe) March 1, 2019

…and her older articles got corrections like this.

To be fair, everyone makes mistakes – I am the Queen of Doozies – but I swear she’s still in Jonas Brothers squeee territory maturity-wise, forget any lived experience gravitas.

That will give you some perspective later on, when she and two female psychologists (along with one token guy) argle-bargle you about what you’re doing wrong as a guy. Or maybe what felt right to you as a knuckle-dragging Cro-Magnon – but it’s wrong as far as they’re concerned.

They’ve got a short laundry list of sections which kind of scream “men are such helpless losers” to me. YMMV.

Why it’s so hard for men to make close friends

…Why your partner isn’t enough

…How to build male friendships

The introduction is a sad tale, too. So many unhappy, friendless men.

…But making and retaining deep, meaningful friendships as an adult is hard, especially for men, according to research.

Less than half of men report being satisfied with their friendships, and only about 1 in 5 said they had received emotional support from a friend in the last week, compared with 4 in 10 women, according to a 2021 survey from the Survey Center on American Life.

The falling off of friendships between men begins around middle and late adolescence and grows starker in adulthood, said Judy Yi-Chung Chu, who teaches a class on boys’ psychological development at Stanford University. And those who do maintain friendships with other men say they tend to have lower levels of emotional intimacy than women report.

I’m no psychologist – I only play one here at HotAir – but even I can see a problem already with the premise, and we’re only, like, four paragraphs in. It’s contained in two words: either “compared with” or “than women.”

These brilliant products of our mental health establishment are comparing apples to oranges and wondering why the banana is green.

A truism:

MEN ≠ WOMEN

Not in sports, not in an argument, not in how many are required to go with you for any restroom visit, and sure as hell not in how they make and keep friends.

There is no using women’s friendships as metric in any measure for men’s. Not how we make girlfriends, keep them, relate to them, interact, or how many we have.

No one ever made a commercial this stupid – and this timeless – about women.

The reporter is too young to have ever seen it. The Experts™ she’s working with probably studied it for twenty minutes in anthropology class before moving on to four intense weeks of gender diversity in isolated Amazonian rainforest vegan pigmy tribes.

Masculinity is a foreign concept, less mind scummy male bonding. That is why military and especially combat unit cohesion baffles them so.

They don’t actually interview a single guy in this entire piece, so I have no idea if the males of the species they’re referring to are unhappy because they’re trying to live life the way women do, or the way women are telling them they should be living life and making friends. The pajama boy syndrome. Surely they consulted with no one like my husband, son or their buddies. All of them have friends they might not see or talk to for years at a pop but kick off instantly where they left off when they do touch base. You don’t have to live in each other’s pockets to have good friends and a full life.

It’s very odd, depressing, and seems horribly slanted.

You’ll be thrilled to know the one female has written a book on ‘THE CRISIS‘ with little boys making friends. Maybe if more shrinks and neurotic mothers stayed out of little boys’ friendships, schmaybe made them play outside together instead of buried in electronics 24/7, there’s be more “men” in the world and happier ones at that. But I’m just stabbing in the dark here.

And the line from the “professor of applied psychology” just cracks me up, even though I know I’m supposed to become concerned over the dire implications of what she’s saying.

…“Boys don’t start emotionally disconnected; they become emotionally disconnected,” said Dr. Niobe Way, a researcher and a professor of applied psychology at New York University.

I read that and all I hear in my head is “You’re damn right guys are ’emotionally disconnected’…” and then this meme pops right up…and I laugh. Because it’s true.

Although I can beautifully illustrate my point by highlighting a link the young author uses to emphasize a concept from Dr. Frank Sileo, the male she consulted.

…When Sileo first began conducting research on male friendships in 1995, many participants assumed his survey was about homosexuality, he said. Such stereotypes that male bonding would be, or become, sexual in nature are inaccurate but revealed some of what may be holding some men back from deep friendships, he added.

Assumptions nearly 30 years later might be different, but social pressures remain that make it difficult for men to express the vulnerability and intimacy needed for close friendships, Sileo said.

Ermagerd. The link on the phrase “…men to express the vulnerability and intimacy needed…” goes to this:

Yes, my good fellows.

CNN wants you all to be Prince Harry.

No Bass Pro Shops for you…unless the #StupidWife says okay.

Happy now?