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View all search resultsWomen are leaving what no longer serves them
Patriarchy damages a potentially powerful force of mature masculinity, one that could have been emotionally grounded, ethically strong and socially accountable
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Participants march during a protest organized by the Indonesian Women's Alliance (API) on the 50th International Women's Day demanding labor rights, gender equality and protections, in Jakarta on March 8, 2025. (JP/Muhammad Zaenuddin)
T
he "male loneliness epidemic" has recently become a trending concern across social media, often framed as a tragic by-product of women’s empowerment. Men, we are told, are now isolated, romantically abandoned and emotionally adrift in a world that no longer needs them.
What this narrative rarely confronts is a far less sentimental truth: many women did not abandon men. They withdrew from boys who never grew up.
Women did not suddenly become cold. They became tired, tired of carrying conversations, emotions, domestic responsibilities and fragile male egos all at once. What some men now experience as loneliness is the delayed consequence of long-tolerated incompetence.
If patriarchy were a building, it would be an aging structure: majestic in myth, but deeply unstable in reality. For generations, women were expected to reinforce its walls with unpaid labor, emotional endurance and moral patience. Today, that building is collapsing, not because women attacked it, but because it was never designed to carry the full weight of women’s humanity.
Women are leaving. This is not heartbreak; this is evacuation.
For decades, society invested enormous energy into modernizing women. Girls were told to pursue education, build careers, cultivate confidence and survive competition. They learned to multitask, negotiate, endure and perform. Masculinity, however, remained largely untouched, preserved in a sentimental museum of entitlement and emotional rigidity.
Women were upgraded. Men were not.
