I don’t like men. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love men, but I don’t like them very much. Despite being an absolute darling, I remain somewhat synonymous with disliking men personally and professionally: I have disliked them on the internet, in my books, on the streets, in the sheets. You name the time and place; I’m there with a complaint about some nightmare named Ryan, probably, who sucks. But despite this reputation, I do actually have a lot of straight male friends. I have a soft spot for boys, you know? They’re cute! They love their disgusting little beers, their football games, their ugly Apple Watch bands. “Look at this!” one of my male friends will tell me, and the “this” is just a plant he likes. I’m still close with a few choice male friends, but those are friendships forged in teenagedom and ripping darts in the quad of a mediocre Canadian university. These days, I struggle to find sincerity in my conversations with a lot of straight men; the worst of them are stuck in feedback loops of irony or self-avoidance, or worse, they want to talk about podcasts. There is nothing worse than talking about a podcast. Since my divorce a few years ago, I’ve started distancing myself from male-centric spaces, and from many of my straight male friends. My life has reoriented mostly around my largely queer, often nonwhite female friends. And you know where those bitches are definitely not congregating? A bleedin’ Oasis concert, I’ll tell you that. After a 16-year hiatus and several interbrother feuds between Liam and Noel Gallagher, Britpop band Oasis is touring again. The 41-date international tour has quickly become a mecca for guys who wear soccer jerseys to meet their girlfriends’ moms. This month, they’ll kick off their North American leg, but back in July, I saw them at Wembley Stadium. I attended on the second night of seven sold-out shows in London, with my little group of straight male friends and around 90,000 other fans. Year after year, women and sociologists alike try to come up with solutions to the male loneliness epidemic. Do they need to play more sports? Listen to more Theo Von? Eat more protein? The Oasis show provided at least one answer: They need to be with their buddies, crying to songs that came out before the advent of the iPhone. My grasp of Oasis is tangential at best, but my male friends speak the band’s language like a private Rosetta Stone. One friend was renowned in university for picking up a guitar at any house party and holding us hostage to his rendition of “Wonderwall.” (To maintain our nearly 20-year friendship, I will say his rendition is good and definitely something I hope to keep hearing.) During one of our very few fights, I was so mad at him over a two-week period that I listened to “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” a song I had not previously heard, relentlessly. By the end of the year, it made it into my Spotify Wrapped. We plan a trip every year, but this year’s event coincided with seeing one of their favorite bands in their hometown, an unmissable opportunity. I’m not a huge Oasis fan, but I wanted to hang out with my pals in their preferred environment. What would it be like to be with the lads in the place where lads are safe to be lads? Oasis is a somewhat surprising band to chart a return at a complex moment. Their return is a piece of nostalgia, which we’re always seeking culturally, though usually for and by women: Sex & The City and Girls rewatches, a Pam Anderson revival, the return of Lindsay Lohan in a madcap family comedy. But Oasis always spoke to straight men, and namely straight white British men of a certain economic bracket, but always with a dutiful and unmistakable sincerity. If you wanted to shit on Oasis back in the day, you’d just make fun of their sentimentality and silly lyrics and name-riddled merchandise. “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall” was a punchline for good reason, a joke about the too-self-serious artsy man. Remember when it used to be corny as hell to wear a band T-shirt to the concert for that same band? At Wembley, everyone was wearing layers upon layers of Oasis merchandise: Oasis x Adidas bucket hat, Oasis T-shirt, Oasis zip-up, Oasis track pants. There was no room for even the slight embarrassment that comes with loving something loudly. This was the “Eras” tour for men whose fathers punched them on the arm on their wedding day. I don’t need to tell you that they’re still pretty good live, though they are. But what makes an Oasis show so potent, 30 years out from the release of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, is the audience of unrelentingly sincere white men. It’s a more male-dominated space than any sports arena I’ve stood in, any wrestling match I’ve attended, or any of the all-male Senate confirmation hearings I’ve witnessed. Instead of trafficking in violence or aggression or fear, male Oasis fans seemed excited to feel seen by the Gallaghers and by each other. They made friends with strangers seated next to them, offered vape hits, politely shuffled by to get a drink after the opening act. How sweet to see men in their joy! If a grotesque little IPA delights your loser boyfriend, imagine tens upon tens of thousands of loser boyfriends, crying alongside each other to “Fade Away,” sloshing half of that £9 beer down my tube top. To be in that audience was to move as one, to weep together, to feel the urgency of a shared experience: nearly 100,000 people, mostly men, crying when the brothers hugged on stage after decades of infighting and public spats. Me and my stupid loser friends stood shoulder to shoulder and wept openly to “Stand by Me.” We didn’t know why we were crying, but it felt important to do it anyway. I’ve always thought that the most terrifying sound in any language is unexplained adult male laughter emerging from an unknown source. Yet in the cacophony of thousands upon thousands of white guys singing “HER SOUL SLIDES AWAY” was a comfort and a unity in just bein’ blokes. Sincerity in joy is hard to come by these days. Who could have expected I’d get it from a bunch of white British guys? Still, witnessing this swell of male emotionality doesn’t make me want to like men more. It doesn’t make me want to take it easier on them or to be more generous in their failings. No: Instead, it’s proof of exactly how much men are capable of. They do have versions of intimacy, of sentimentality, of warmth, of community. It seemed pretty fun, too, a far cry from the disenfranchised grumblings of the manosphere online. Men are capable of more, and still faced with a bar so low they usually trip over it, break their own noses, and blame their wives. Look how easy it was to access the soft animal part of themselves! Look how simple and safe it was for a football stadium full of men to touch the underbelly of their own vulnerabilities! All they ever needed was some music from their 20s, six to nine overpriced pints, and a football stadium full of their best mates.