Women have such different lives. It's things like this that make it so painfully obvious why single men are isolated and alone in modern society.
For whatever reason, I think men are a lot less likely to engage in this kind of social behavior, even if they are roommates. They're also a lot less likely to engage in spontaneous dance parties or enjoy group hip hop twerking exercises. Basically, a lot of the benefits of having roommates that the author describes are experienced far less often by men with roommates
I’ve always been a primarily homosocial guy, and I’ve never felt like I was lacking any of this stuff. Whether it’s someone to play videogames with, someone to cook dinner for, someone to cuddle with, someone to rant to, someone to debate or deliberate or just discuss - I’ve always had male friends close to me who care about me, who listen to me, and for whom I try my best to return the favour, when it comes around.
As a matter of fact I haven’t found my female friends to be any better at any of that than my male friends - and a couple of my best friends in particular are women.
Maybe I’m just lucky? Maybe other men are just doing it wrong?
I really do find the more I’ve grown up, the less I have any use or respect for all this traditional gender stuff. Why are we still pretending it’s valid? Why don’t we just grow out of it already?
Whether men just sitting down and talking openly about their feelings comes from the “men should be more sensitive and willing to share their feelings with others” take or the “bbq and beers with the boys in the backyard” take, the same point stands regardless.
Like, guys in a group relaxing over beers or bbq and just talking about their feelings (just without using this specific terminology) has been a thing since forever ago in the US. I cannot speak for all countries ever, but in Russia (since before soviet union even existed), sauna+alcohol after+snacks along with the boys just talking about anything weighing on their mind has been a thing too. From what I know about ancient Greece, they had an equivalent of it as well.
Regional/cultural equivalents aside, this seems like a somewhat common experience/ behavior across time, and painting it as some new thing that comes from the same place as “it is so cool and progressive for men to be into group twerking exercises” is disingenuous.
This is basically my point. Adult women can live together, adult men cannot.
Plus, I know you probably don’t mean it this way, but - your phrasing basically invalidates every same-sex partnership. Again, here I have spent the last ten years living with my partner, and we are both of us adult men. Clearly adult men can live together.
I think that maybe you just need to meet better men - your beliefs about gender stink.
I mean, we didn’t twerk together. But it was fun to have a guy to plop down on the couch and watch play videogames, talk about Romans with, or whatever other male-coded quirkiness you want to pull up.
We often say “normalize <whatever>” to the point where it has become a bit of a trite phrase. But, there’s a lot of social pressure for men to be isolated. We should normalize living with your bros. It shouldn’t just be the wall-punchers that live together. (I mean, it isn’t).