There is no "male loneliness epidemic". That term assumes that the problem is being experienced specifically or only by men. I think it's time for the men that believe in it to drop their egotistical tunnel-visioned ideas and consider the fact that the "gender wars" are an intentionally crafted distraction to hide the real issue with American society.

Who's really lonely in American Society?

In short, it's everyone. But some groups are affected more than others. Often times, those who don't fit into "traditional" ideas of sexuality or gender are hurt the most. And with the current political climate in the US, it's probably going to get worse.

A lot of people will tell you that technology can help, and it can. Especially if you're someone who would be ostracized from the local community for some characteristic that's non-consequential to anyone else. But the reality is that big tech and the capitalist class have intentionally engineered the loneliness epidemic.

The overall plan from what I've observed seems to be:

1. Provide online spaces to be social (social media)
2. Get society to adopt social media as a standard method of communication.
3. Hook them with addictive algorithms
4. Design these social media sites to atomize and divide
5. Radicalize these atomic individuals and communities
6. Drain the life from real life social spaces so that they shut down
7. Destroy children's spaces online and offline
8. Get children hooked on technology and algorithms early
9. Profit from the monopolization of human interaction

By atomizing society and turning communities into mere collections of separated individuals, the capitalists have destroyed a vital function of a healthy society and converted it into a sick profiteering machine.

Of course, social media isn't the only method that they're using to destroy social spaces. Amazon, as part of it's conquest against brick and mortar stores is destroying shopping malls as a concept. Although this is largely because these stores have a hard time competing, shopping malls were gigantic social hubs where people could meet up, shop, get a quick and easy meal, and have fun. Shopping malls were especially popular with teenagers who didn't have money to do much else.

Speaking of teenagers...

What happened to youth spaces?

Both online and offline, children's spaces have withered away. And what few remain are either disappearing or turning into "mixed-age spaces. Thus, you see children in adult stores like Sephora, or the same social media sites at the adults. When children and teens use to have places to shop for cheap things within their budgets, or they had places to play Flash games online (though not all of them were necessarily kid appropriate). Though HTML5 can handle the requirements of those flash game sites perfectly well in theory, it hasn't panned out so well in practice.

As a consequence of all this, these children are wreaking havoc in adult spaces that value and often times even require a certain degree of orderly conduct that children simply aren't capable of. As a response, these places end up banning unaccompanied minors, or in some cases anyone under twenty years of age. (Though if you're eighteen or nineteen or even sixteen or seventeen and behave yourself, it probably don't be a problem unless they check your ID before entering.)

None of this would be a problem if children had places to play, shop, and be children instead of just screens to mindlessly consume brain rot on. For example, McDonald's restaurants all over the US are tearing down their play places and replacing them with rows of tablets to keep them occupied.

McDonald's thus must march to the beat of the big tech barons. Any opportunity to play physically and socially is being taken away because it's unprofitable to maintain a structure that big tech's future drones aren't going to use anyway.

In the end, children are not only being robbed of places to be children, but they along with their parents are being cast out of society because there's a small, shrinking list of places that will even put up with kids in the first place.

Thus, the only place they'll be able to turn to is technology. And the rest of society will follow suit in short time.

What should we do about it?

I don't have a definitive answer for it, but the only way to fix our problems is to build our own communities. To host our own community gatherings, and most importantly to adopt radical acceptance and radical tolerance.

But our communities MUST not tolerate intolerance of any kind, and we must remember that the right to free speech does not mean the right to an audience.

These communities must also embrace physical presence above social media's technological absence. Technology should be a method of organizing gatherings, and not replacing them as they do now.

It's all well and good to say that people should get off their computers and go outside, but right now for many the only place to go from outside is right back into their house, or to a shop where the only thing to do is to spend money on crap. Even then, this doesn't work in a world where everyone has a smartphone. Now people go outside AND use the computer. There's no longer any separation between the two.

Getting off social media and being social in real life must be a collective effort, as socialization cannot occur when people don't come together.

Gender/Race/Sexuality/Culture Wars

So how does social media get away with all of this? By atomizing groups of people and turning them into "factions" engaging in online flame wars. Dividing people by race, sex, religion, nationality, culture, and such things is a tactic used by rulers since the beginning of society and what's happening now is no different. A divided society is one that not only doesn't understand that they're being oppressed, but even if they do they won't point their fingers at the actual oppressors.

Thus, men are taught that women are harlots who won't date anyone but "Gigachads", and will always cheat on their partners with more attractive men while simultaneously being told that the solution to all their problems it to make women the property of men.

Women are taught that they're weak and to act within a rigid set of expectations so that they can attract a man, which they're told is their sole purpose. All the while being told that anyone born male (including trans women) is a predator out to get them, so they need to dress and act in certain ways in order to not get sexually assaulted, but they should also submit to the whims of men even if they do intend to rape her.

Heterosexual people are taught that the LGBT are a bunch of demonic pedophiles warping and destroying society because they don't pursue the "prime directive" of creating future workers for the capitalist class.

And most obviously, both sides of the political spectrum are radicalized, even those that pretend to be "centrists" while espousing exclusively every right wing talking point that's inside the Republican Overton window. The polarization we see today is by design and will only continue to get worse so long as we rely on social media for human connection and social interaction.

Conclusion

Society is falling apart and becoming anti-social because capitalists have figured out how to use technology and engineer society in order to repackage social interaction and give it back to use in a "free" digital package that makes profit for these sites via advertisements. Furthermore they've figured out how to engineer the types of social interactions that people have. All this under the guise of an online "public square". Children have been all but driven out of every space meant specifically for them, and now have to be part of "grown-up" spaces where they're being convinced to try to skip their childhoods entirely or face "social consequences".

A real public square is a place that encourages togetherness and diversity of thought, not a place that boxes off people into segregated groups meant to oppose each other. Social Media is a hotbed of hostility, hatred, and degradation, and that's exactly what it was meant to be all along.