When I was in graduate school, studying all things Tamil, I read one of Tamil literature’s classic works by one of its most revered poets - Tiruvalluvar.
Broadly what you say about male friendships rings true-- for college educated white upper middle class folks. I suspect there is a significant amount of reciprocal obligations that define friendships among especially non college educated whites and non-whites. Also, intimate male friendships are highly correlated with male control of public space. Historians and anthropologists who have studied male friendship have noted how its decline is strongly correlated with women entering the public sphere-- this appears to be true across cultures.
See, for example, Daphne Spain’s “The Spatial Foundations of Men’s Friendships and Men’s Power” from the edited volume by Peter Nardi Men’s Friendships.
Spain explores the hypotheses- 1) that male friendships are strongest in societies with a high degree of gender segregation and 2) this reinforces men’s power advantage relative to women.
What this line of thinking suggests is that the withering of robust male friendship-- at least among college educated upper middle class whites--is a casualty of greater gender equality between men and women in this group.
Karen, I don't believe that's what the comment above suggests. I think he is saying it is correlated with the rise of gender equlity (a desirable goal). I think what he is saying (chime in if I'm wrong, Victor), is that men in American society have largely FAILED to adjust their concept of friendship to accommodate that change.
I'd also point out that the article -- glaringly -- makes no mention of male-female platonic relationships, let alone non-heteronormative friendships (e.g., friendships between gay and straight men -- I have a dear friend who is my "gay big brother" -- it is much closer to a Tamil relationship, in that we are always in each others' lives, no matter what else is going on).
I don't believe that is what he is saying. I believe he is saying that as women, especially female partners, have gotten closer to "equal" in men's eyes, men have stopped looking for the companionship they would have sought in other men and just been content with the companionship they obtain from their female partners.
Sorry for responding to such an old comment - but I suspect you're really onto something here.
I'd add that many commentators (at least on Substack), have noted that with this injection of women where there were no women before has "feminized" our culture. This should not be immediately dismissed as criticism, but observation. Like our formerly "masculine" culture, it comes with upsides and downsides. One downside is that men are now expected to conform more to female sensibilities in the workplace or classroom, where an emphasis is less on alternating modes of collaboration and competition, but rather a consciousness about making others "feel welcome," prioritizing conformity over conflict (and that conflict, when it arises, has become more of the "passive aggressive" nature, than the sometimes brutally physical sort found in the masculine).
As we men are now cultural strangers in a strange land, perhaps we've lost some of the ability to bond with one another, as traditionally masculine behaviors (joking, teasing, physical interaction, boasting - jockeying for power instead of spreading it evenly around) become anywhere from passe to verboten (aka "toxic") in mixed company.
A casualty of greater gender equity? — or of the decline of male homosocial public spaces apart, say, from the gym? Go back to Alexander et al.’s A PATTERN LANGUAGE (1968?) — where are the spaces they describe as knitting together community life today?
Late in life, J. B. Jackson started digging into this too — looking at how front yards and garages figure as spaces of socialization — not to say skills reproduction — in Hispanic communities in the Southwest in a way that was already then, thirty+ years ago, no longer the case in the Anglo community. I seem to recall a couple of the essays in A SENSE OF PLACE, A SENSE OF TIME (1996) deal with this.
In INTO THE RIP (2021), Damien Cave, the inaugural NYT Sydney bureau chief, describes how uncomfortable he was made, initially, by the obligations of mateship when he moved with his family to Sydney. Even in affluent urban professional white communities there, it’s still a strong component of community life, and, from Cave’s pov as an introverted New Yorker (albeit one who had worked as a foreign correspondent in Iraq etc), the presumption of participation had a coercive tang not so dissimilar to what urban migrants from village societies describe of home life. Diffuse reciprocal indebtedness ›is‹ a powerful form of social glue. But it often shades into demand sharing in ways that even those raised in communities that place great emphasis on nurturing (and testing) relatedness find wearing.
John Cheever, who as a closeted bisexual man had, I can imagine, an especially fraught relationship with male friendship, was a careful observer of it. If you read through his collected stories (arranged chronologically) you can kind of see how it declines between the 1940s and 1980s. One way to read FARRAGUT, his last novel, is as a lament for male friendship — something that by the late 1970s, he could be saying, was only possible, for a man such as Farragut, in prison, and in the context of ambiguously transactional sex.
some well read commenters I have....I will add that gay sex (loosely defined) between straight male friends is not rare in India, it's just carefully repressed. Heck, the Gods in India are bisexual.
White people just want their "space". That's all. It was inevitable that male friendships would decline in the USA. Someone needs to create an app for it but then a lot of men would call it "gay" and not use it. They seem to like to stay home and curl up to a good video game and/or porn. And then complain about it and blame women for, get this -- their lack of MALE friendship. Go figure.
@ Bird Gp@uEny3RX2Z^Ui# "A casualty of greater gender equity? — or of the decline of male homosocial public spaces apart, say, from the gym? "
Spaces don't have to be "homosocial" for same-sex friends to hang out there. Go to a park. Go hiking in the woods. Go to the beach. Have a group dinner somewhere (or even in your home). Just because women might be there too doesn't mean you and your buddies can't hang.
"where are the spaces they describe as knitting together community life today?"
Places of worship like churches, mosques, synagogues, etc serve as such spaces. Towns have Facebook groups now where residents communicate and plan events together. Meetup.com is categorized via zip code and there are tons of meetup groups for every possible interest you can imagine. It's all out here. Some effort has to be made to connect to people face to face. I don't quite understand what men want "society" to do. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
I think that finding friends who "mainly become a source of entertainment" is definitely one of the most popular methods, but these friends *can* become close, and we can form caring relationships with them if we invest time—spend time together—which is really what makes all the difference.
I agree and have such a friend...but it’s a strange, low-yield approach to friend formation and reminds me a lot of dating (which also seemed like a volume proposition due to the failure rate)
Well done my friend. Very true. We can all exist almost without moving. Work from home. Get groceries delivered. Do everything online. Who needs friends? I feel lucky to have some very close friends. But I’m sober--I have a close 12-step community. Not everyone is so lucky. I like your writing. Glad I found you!
This is so interesting. I live in the UK and can really relate to this. The transactional aspect has been all but taken out of friendships, like you said, because we don't really need help with things - everything we need to do day to day has been streamlined for convenience. There is, however, still an exchange going on. I don't think meaningful friendships are all but gone; we just don't trust people as much, as the exchange is emotional. I have found myself slightly alienated from my usual group of friends as I had kids before anyone else. My problems became difficult for my friends to relate to, so even in my closest oldest friendships I can feel a little lonely. That's because with growing distance between friends more than just entertainment is lost - it's also the support and sharing of thoughts and ideas.
Sure, those are difficult friends to find but they're not superficial and not just for fun.
I don't know about male friendships to be honest. I'm sure what you say about those is much more true.
Think of arranged marriage as a sort of forced friendship. This is why matrimonial ads in India often have more information about the prospective spouse's family than about the spouse themselves.
That is because these are the people who will owe you favors, and whom you and your family will owe favors to.
I do a lot of work around community building. Organizing workshops and events. Working on projects with friends. Facilitating a lot of special and frequent moments.
I'm fortunate to have a lot of high quality relationships (a rarity these days for a 40 year old man) and owe it to a lot of intentional work. I've talked about it on a few podcasts and have started to write about it a little.
Figured I'd reach out in case you might have use for the content as a data point to reference, or have interest in a chat.
Were you staying in the homes of families? Did you see women coming and going from houses? Women in the streets - were they holding hands like the men did? Did you see groups of girls or women roaming about and hanging out?
Ah, this brought to mind for me Margaret Trawick's, 'love in a Tamil family' and the discussions of what familial love, obligation, affection and entanglement looks like. There's a problematic Subject : Object dichotomy at work in anthropolgy's classical model of doing fieldwork, and a load of colonial baggage too. But I still think that the work of talking back to euro-american capitalist societies via counter examples is worth doing. Thanks for this!
thanks for reading...as someone no longer involved in the field's debates, I am less concerned with the subject:object issue, which is part of human social life in general. Subjects are constantly objectifying others. The real colonial baggage is the depicting of societies as outside of history. Cross-cultural comparisons always run the risk of accidentally doing this.
As an introverted woman from a dysfunctional family, I thank my lucky stars to have been born in a place and time where I can live an independent life, and not have to depend on family or husband for my livelihood.
I tried to escape my dysfunctional family and start my career by going to law school. Yet my dysfunctional family and their tendencies repeatedly interfered with my education and professional development. So now, even almost four years after graduating, I'm still stuck at my dad's house, with no way out because the job market sucks for people in my shoes (i.e., finished law school, but not admitted to the bar yet), and living with my dad is pretty much incompatible with the sort of intensive study the bar exam requires. But I can't afford to move out until I find a job that pays well enough.
I am not so sure that Tamil type relationships is such a good thing. This seems more like the culture of poverty we see in the lives of some of our former foster kids and their children. The live in homes like rabbit warrens with people moving in and out as they get kicked out of one place where they have exhausted their welcome into another. It's no way to live in my view.
that's not a leap I could make myself...foster care kids are the exhaust of broken homes, marriages and social epidemics of drug addiction. Tamil friendship I describe emerges from all angles of male society, because it's a functional adaptation in urban India to get networked across lines of caste particularly.
But we don't have an Indian-style caste system. Here the population that uses this sort of friendship system are the very poor as I noted. In their culture, you have to take in family, and whoever they are currently fucking. One of the foster kids was living in a trailer with her boyfriend, who then proceeded to let his wife and mother-in-law in to live with them. Nobody was paying rent and soon all four were evicted.
When the entire population is in a situation where you have to rely on each other, then it can work because many of the people involved are going to be functional. But if you have a society in which functional people can manage on their own, they will do so, because living in this world of mutual obligations is not fun. People get on each other's nerves, something along the lines of Erik Hoel's gossip trap
Definitely rings true! I see it in rural Iowa where better-off transplants (like me I hate to say) often pay for a service that in "the old days" would've gotten done through relationships with neighbors. When we moved out here, I spent most of my time and emotional energy building those relationships with neighbors so they would call and us and we could call on them. I rejoice when it happens, though rarely. The suburbs are the worst this way with everyone's entry to their house through a garage closed before they get out of their car, all of them owning their own snowblower and lawnmower, hiring in a plumber or electrician...It breeds this false sense of individuality and independence. There's a loss there. Thank you for voicing it.
This is a topic of great interest to me. I am a 66-year-old male and I am a leadership and life coach. First of all, I would question if we have ever really had real male friendships in our culture. The saying "women talk to each other and men talk beside each" likely has been true for many generations. I believe male friendships are very challenging to obtain and sustain in our current North American culture for three main reasons:
1 - Our culture & prosperity has created a surfeit of easily accessible activities and distractions which prevent us from thinking of, let alone calling our friends.
2- Many men who are fathers are deeply (sometimes detrimentally too deeply) involved in their spousal and child relationships, i.e. helicopter parents
3 - Many men lack creativity and are just too damn lazy to pick up the phone and connect with or make plans with friends.
I have many friends, some very long-term, but it still takes major effort and planning to stay meaningfully connected.
Broadly what you say about male friendships rings true-- for college educated white upper middle class folks. I suspect there is a significant amount of reciprocal obligations that define friendships among especially non college educated whites and non-whites. Also, intimate male friendships are highly correlated with male control of public space. Historians and anthropologists who have studied male friendship have noted how its decline is strongly correlated with women entering the public sphere-- this appears to be true across cultures.
See, for example, Daphne Spain’s “The Spatial Foundations of Men’s Friendships and Men’s Power” from the edited volume by Peter Nardi Men’s Friendships.
Spain explores the hypotheses- 1) that male friendships are strongest in societies with a high degree of gender segregation and 2) this reinforces men’s power advantage relative to women.
What this line of thinking suggests is that the withering of robust male friendship-- at least among college educated upper middle class whites--is a casualty of greater gender equality between men and women in this group.
Karen, I don't believe that's what the comment above suggests. I think he is saying it is correlated with the rise of gender equlity (a desirable goal). I think what he is saying (chime in if I'm wrong, Victor), is that men in American society have largely FAILED to adjust their concept of friendship to accommodate that change.
I'd also point out that the article -- glaringly -- makes no mention of male-female platonic relationships, let alone non-heteronormative friendships (e.g., friendships between gay and straight men -- I have a dear friend who is my "gay big brother" -- it is much closer to a Tamil relationship, in that we are always in each others' lives, no matter what else is going on).
I don't believe that is what he is saying. I believe he is saying that as women, especially female partners, have gotten closer to "equal" in men's eyes, men have stopped looking for the companionship they would have sought in other men and just been content with the companionship they obtain from their female partners.
I agree with the link to feminism, absolutely. Yet, one spouse can not equal the social value of 6-8 close friends..not even close
Agree ❤️
It seems to me that young men online think a female partner is SUPPOSED to equal 6-8 friends though.
Sorry for responding to such an old comment - but I suspect you're really onto something here.
I'd add that many commentators (at least on Substack), have noted that with this injection of women where there were no women before has "feminized" our culture. This should not be immediately dismissed as criticism, but observation. Like our formerly "masculine" culture, it comes with upsides and downsides. One downside is that men are now expected to conform more to female sensibilities in the workplace or classroom, where an emphasis is less on alternating modes of collaboration and competition, but rather a consciousness about making others "feel welcome," prioritizing conformity over conflict (and that conflict, when it arises, has become more of the "passive aggressive" nature, than the sometimes brutally physical sort found in the masculine).
As we men are now cultural strangers in a strange land, perhaps we've lost some of the ability to bond with one another, as traditionally masculine behaviors (joking, teasing, physical interaction, boasting - jockeying for power instead of spreading it evenly around) become anywhere from passe to verboten (aka "toxic") in mixed company.
Create an app to meet guys and hang out at parks where you can joke, tease, physically interact, boast, etc.
A casualty of greater gender equity? — or of the decline of male homosocial public spaces apart, say, from the gym? Go back to Alexander et al.’s A PATTERN LANGUAGE (1968?) — where are the spaces they describe as knitting together community life today?
Late in life, J. B. Jackson started digging into this too — looking at how front yards and garages figure as spaces of socialization — not to say skills reproduction — in Hispanic communities in the Southwest in a way that was already then, thirty+ years ago, no longer the case in the Anglo community. I seem to recall a couple of the essays in A SENSE OF PLACE, A SENSE OF TIME (1996) deal with this.
In INTO THE RIP (2021), Damien Cave, the inaugural NYT Sydney bureau chief, describes how uncomfortable he was made, initially, by the obligations of mateship when he moved with his family to Sydney. Even in affluent urban professional white communities there, it’s still a strong component of community life, and, from Cave’s pov as an introverted New Yorker (albeit one who had worked as a foreign correspondent in Iraq etc), the presumption of participation had a coercive tang not so dissimilar to what urban migrants from village societies describe of home life. Diffuse reciprocal indebtedness ›is‹ a powerful form of social glue. But it often shades into demand sharing in ways that even those raised in communities that place great emphasis on nurturing (and testing) relatedness find wearing.
John Cheever, who as a closeted bisexual man had, I can imagine, an especially fraught relationship with male friendship, was a careful observer of it. If you read through his collected stories (arranged chronologically) you can kind of see how it declines between the 1940s and 1980s. One way to read FARRAGUT, his last novel, is as a lament for male friendship — something that by the late 1970s, he could be saying, was only possible, for a man such as Farragut, in prison, and in the context of ambiguously transactional sex.
some well read commenters I have....I will add that gay sex (loosely defined) between straight male friends is not rare in India, it's just carefully repressed. Heck, the Gods in India are bisexual.
Who are the bisexual Gods in India?
White people just want their "space". That's all. It was inevitable that male friendships would decline in the USA. Someone needs to create an app for it but then a lot of men would call it "gay" and not use it. They seem to like to stay home and curl up to a good video game and/or porn. And then complain about it and blame women for, get this -- their lack of MALE friendship. Go figure.
@ Bird Gp@uEny3RX2Z^Ui# "A casualty of greater gender equity? — or of the decline of male homosocial public spaces apart, say, from the gym? "
Spaces don't have to be "homosocial" for same-sex friends to hang out there. Go to a park. Go hiking in the woods. Go to the beach. Have a group dinner somewhere (or even in your home). Just because women might be there too doesn't mean you and your buddies can't hang.
"where are the spaces they describe as knitting together community life today?"
Places of worship like churches, mosques, synagogues, etc serve as such spaces. Towns have Facebook groups now where residents communicate and plan events together. Meetup.com is categorized via zip code and there are tons of meetup groups for every possible interest you can imagine. It's all out here. Some effort has to be made to connect to people face to face. I don't quite understand what men want "society" to do. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
I gathered some advice from movies on how to make friends in this post:
Movie Wisdom On Making Friends: 10 Movies For The Lonely And Misunderstood
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/movie-wisdom-on-making-friends
I think that finding friends who "mainly become a source of entertainment" is definitely one of the most popular methods, but these friends *can* become close, and we can form caring relationships with them if we invest time—spend time together—which is really what makes all the difference.
I agree and have such a friend...but it’s a strange, low-yield approach to friend formation and reminds me a lot of dating (which also seemed like a volume proposition due to the failure rate)
Don’t get me started on online dating 😬
This is a bit off topic but I'm very curious as to what drew you to studying the Tamil community. Why there?
🫰🫰
Well done my friend. Very true. We can all exist almost without moving. Work from home. Get groceries delivered. Do everything online. Who needs friends? I feel lucky to have some very close friends. But I’m sober--I have a close 12-step community. Not everyone is so lucky. I like your writing. Glad I found you!
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
This is so interesting. I live in the UK and can really relate to this. The transactional aspect has been all but taken out of friendships, like you said, because we don't really need help with things - everything we need to do day to day has been streamlined for convenience. There is, however, still an exchange going on. I don't think meaningful friendships are all but gone; we just don't trust people as much, as the exchange is emotional. I have found myself slightly alienated from my usual group of friends as I had kids before anyone else. My problems became difficult for my friends to relate to, so even in my closest oldest friendships I can feel a little lonely. That's because with growing distance between friends more than just entertainment is lost - it's also the support and sharing of thoughts and ideas.
Sure, those are difficult friends to find but they're not superficial and not just for fun.
I don't know about male friendships to be honest. I'm sure what you say about those is much more true.
thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Think of arranged marriage as a sort of forced friendship. This is why matrimonial ads in India often have more information about the prospective spouse's family than about the spouse themselves.
That is because these are the people who will owe you favors, and whom you and your family will owe favors to.
I do a lot of work around community building. Organizing workshops and events. Working on projects with friends. Facilitating a lot of special and frequent moments.
I'm fortunate to have a lot of high quality relationships (a rarity these days for a 40 year old man) and owe it to a lot of intentional work. I've talked about it on a few podcasts and have started to write about it a little.
Figured I'd reach out in case you might have use for the content as a data point to reference, or have interest in a chat.
https://www.elevatedspaces.ca/pages/about-us
https://jeffwaldman.substack.com/p/who-are-all-these-friends-scheduled
https://jeffwaldman.substack.com/p/whats-up-with-all-these-workshops
I have no friends and I'm better for it. There are people I love but they have a low bar for what they believe makes them a friend.
What were the friendships like amongst women in Tamil Nadu?
I had little access as a male..more focused on family than friends bridging families in a gender segregated culture...
Were you staying in the homes of families? Did you see women coming and going from houses? Women in the streets - were they holding hands like the men did? Did you see groups of girls or women roaming about and hanging out?
Ah, this brought to mind for me Margaret Trawick's, 'love in a Tamil family' and the discussions of what familial love, obligation, affection and entanglement looks like. There's a problematic Subject : Object dichotomy at work in anthropolgy's classical model of doing fieldwork, and a load of colonial baggage too. But I still think that the work of talking back to euro-american capitalist societies via counter examples is worth doing. Thanks for this!
thanks for reading...as someone no longer involved in the field's debates, I am less concerned with the subject:object issue, which is part of human social life in general. Subjects are constantly objectifying others. The real colonial baggage is the depicting of societies as outside of history. Cross-cultural comparisons always run the risk of accidentally doing this.
As an introverted woman from a dysfunctional family, I thank my lucky stars to have been born in a place and time where I can live an independent life, and not have to depend on family or husband for my livelihood.
this is our country's greatest strength, for sure...escaping and avoiding family dysfunction is easier in our labor market...
I guess that makes me an outlier, then.
I tried to escape my dysfunctional family and start my career by going to law school. Yet my dysfunctional family and their tendencies repeatedly interfered with my education and professional development. So now, even almost four years after graduating, I'm still stuck at my dad's house, with no way out because the job market sucks for people in my shoes (i.e., finished law school, but not admitted to the bar yet), and living with my dad is pretty much incompatible with the sort of intensive study the bar exam requires. But I can't afford to move out until I find a job that pays well enough.
I am not so sure that Tamil type relationships is such a good thing. This seems more like the culture of poverty we see in the lives of some of our former foster kids and their children. The live in homes like rabbit warrens with people moving in and out as they get kicked out of one place where they have exhausted their welcome into another. It's no way to live in my view.
that's not a leap I could make myself...foster care kids are the exhaust of broken homes, marriages and social epidemics of drug addiction. Tamil friendship I describe emerges from all angles of male society, because it's a functional adaptation in urban India to get networked across lines of caste particularly.
But we don't have an Indian-style caste system. Here the population that uses this sort of friendship system are the very poor as I noted. In their culture, you have to take in family, and whoever they are currently fucking. One of the foster kids was living in a trailer with her boyfriend, who then proceeded to let his wife and mother-in-law in to live with them. Nobody was paying rent and soon all four were evicted.
When the entire population is in a situation where you have to rely on each other, then it can work because many of the people involved are going to be functional. But if you have a society in which functional people can manage on their own, they will do so, because living in this world of mutual obligations is not fun. People get on each other's nerves, something along the lines of Erik Hoel's gossip trap
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap?utm_source=publication-search
This is a beautiful thing you are doing here. SO IMPORTANT -
Definitely rings true! I see it in rural Iowa where better-off transplants (like me I hate to say) often pay for a service that in "the old days" would've gotten done through relationships with neighbors. When we moved out here, I spent most of my time and emotional energy building those relationships with neighbors so they would call and us and we could call on them. I rejoice when it happens, though rarely. The suburbs are the worst this way with everyone's entry to their house through a garage closed before they get out of their car, all of them owning their own snowblower and lawnmower, hiring in a plumber or electrician...It breeds this false sense of individuality and independence. There's a loss there. Thank you for voicing it.
This is a topic of great interest to me. I am a 66-year-old male and I am a leadership and life coach. First of all, I would question if we have ever really had real male friendships in our culture. The saying "women talk to each other and men talk beside each" likely has been true for many generations. I believe male friendships are very challenging to obtain and sustain in our current North American culture for three main reasons:
1 - Our culture & prosperity has created a surfeit of easily accessible activities and distractions which prevent us from thinking of, let alone calling our friends.
2- Many men who are fathers are deeply (sometimes detrimentally too deeply) involved in their spousal and child relationships, i.e. helicopter parents
3 - Many men lack creativity and are just too damn lazy to pick up the phone and connect with or make plans with friends.
I have many friends, some very long-term, but it still takes major effort and planning to stay meaningfully connected.