Everyone’s heard of friendzoning – even if they don’t know the word, they sure as hell know the concept. It’s what happens time and again to unfortunate Nice Guys who, despite being nothing but sugar and spice to the girls they love, are nonetheless denied the sexual relationships they so obviously deserve and are instead treated like platonic equals – a terrible, unfair fate spawned by the dark side of feminism.
And if you thought even part of that statement was correct, Imma stop you right there.
To borrow the succinct, nail-head-hitting phraseology of one hexjackal*:
Friendzoning is bullshit because girls are not machines that you put Kindness Coins into until sex falls out.
Dear Hypothetical Interlocutor whose hackles just bristled with the unfairness of that statement; who thinks that girls can be in the Friend Zone, too, and that therefore this point is both invalid and reverse-sexist into the bargain. For your edification, I would like to submit the following definitions of the term Friend Zone as supplied by Urban Dictionary:
1. “The ‘friend zone’ is like the penalty box of dating, only you can never get out. Once a girl decides you’re her ‘friend’, it’s game over. You’ve become a complete non-sexual entity in her eyes, like her brother, or a lamp.” – Ryan Reynolds in Just Friends.
‘I’ve been locked in the friend zone with her since high school!’
2. A state of being where a male inadvertently becomes a ‘platonic friend’ of an attractive female who he was trying to intiate a romantic relationship. Females have been rumored to arrive in the Friend Zone, but reports are unsubstantiated.
Girl: “I love you (Insert the poor bastard’s name here,) but I dont want to ruin a great friendship by dating you.”
Guy: “Well why the fuck did I waste two months on you?”
and Wikipedia:
There are differing explanations about what causes the friend zone. One report suggests that some women don’t see their male friends as potential love interests because they fear that deepening their relationship might cause a loss of the romance and mystery or lead to rejection later…
Dating adviser Ali Binazir described the friend zone as Justfriendistan, and wrote that it’s a “territory only to be rivaled in inhospitability by the western Sahara, the Atacama desert, and Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.”
I therefore submit to you, Hypothetical Interlocutor, that the Friend Zone is not an equal opportunities habitat. It is where men go – or more accurately, where men perceive themselves to go – when women fail to reward their friendship with sex. Or, to quote the immortal wisdom of the internet:
Slut is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say yes.
Friendzone is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say no.
Here’s the thing, Hypothetical Interlocutor: if you truly are a self-professed Nice Guy (and I strongly suspect that you are), then you probably espouse the belief that women and men are equal. More than espouse – you believe! You know! Except that, somewhere along the line, you’ve got it into your head that if you’re romantically interested in a girl who sees you only as a friend, her failure to reciprocate your feelings is just that: a failing. That because you’re nice and treat her well, she therefore owes you at least one opportunity to present yourself as a viable sexual candidate, even if she’s already made it clear that this isn’t what she wants. That because she legitimately enjoys a friendship that you find painful (and which you’re under no obligation to continue), she is using you. That if a man wants more than friendship with a woman, then the friendship itself doesn’t even attain the status of a consolation prize, but is instead viewed as hell: a punishment to be endured because, so long as he thinks she owes him that golden opportunity, he is bound to persist in an association that hurts him – not because he cares about the friendship, but because he feels he’s invested too much kindness not to stick around for the (surely inevitable, albeit delayed) payoff.
And if she never sleeps with him? Then she’s a bitch.
I cannot state this clearly enough: if you really believe in equality, then you have to acknowledge the fact that women have a right to say no. That no matter how pure and true your feelings, your ladylove is under no obligation whatever to reciprocate them, because friendship is not a business transaction, and women are allowed to want male friends. Yes, it is difficult and sad and heartbreaking to love someone who doesn’t love you back, and doubly so when that person is a friend. Believe me; I speak from experience. This is not a fun thing to endure! But discounting the woman as a bitch, a user, a timewaster, a whore with no taste who only wants to sleep with arseholes instead of Nice Guys like you is not on. It is pure, unadulterated sexism: the attitude that friendship with a woman is only ever a stepping-stone to getting into her pants, such that if the pants-getting is off the table, then so too is the friendship.
Which, frankly, is bullshit. If you don’t care enough about someone to enjoy their company and respect their decisions when sex is off the table, then that person is right not to sleep with you, because enjoying someone’s company and respecting their decisions is pretty much how sex gets on the table to start with.
To quote the single best point in an otherwise deeply problematic Cracked piece:
What we learned as kids is that we males are each owed, and will eventually be awarded, a beautiful woman. We were told this by every movie, TV show, novel, comic book, video game and song we encountered…
In each case, the woman has no say in this — compatibility doesn’t matter, prior relationships don’t matter, nothing else factors in. If the hero accomplishes his goals, he is awarded his favorite female. Yes, there will be dialogue that maybe makes it sound like the woman is having doubts, and she will make noises like she is making the decision on her own. But we, as the audience, know that in the end the hero will “get the girl,” just as we know that at the end of the month we’re going to “get our paycheck.” Failure to award either is breaking a societal contract. The girl can say what she wants, but we all know that at the end, she will wind up with the hero, whether she knows it or not.
And now you see the problem. From birth we’re taught that we’re owed a beautiful girl. We all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, and we all (whether we admit it or not) think we’re heroes for just getting through our day.
So it’s very frustrating, and I mean frustrating to the point of violence, when we don’t get what we’re owed. A contract has been broken. These women, by exercising their own choices, are denying it to us. It’s why every Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won’t win him sex. It’s why we go to “slut” and “whore” as our default insults — we’re not mad that women enjoy sex. We’re mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed us.
In pop culture, girls who crush hopelessly on guys they can’t have are painted as just that – hopeless. Over and over again, we’re taught that girls who openly express sexual or romantic interest in guys who don’t want them are pitiable, stalkerish, desperate, crazy bitches. More often than not, they’re also portrayed as ugly – whether physically, emotionally or both – in order to further establish their undesirability as an objective fact. Both narratively and, as a consequence, in real life, men are given free reign to snub, abuse, mislead and talk down to such women: we’re raised to believe that female desire is unseemly, so that any consequent shaming is therefore deserved. There is no female-equivalent Friend Zone terminology because, in the language of our culture, a man’s romantic choices are considered sacrosanct and inviolable. If a girl has been told no, then she has only herself to blame for anything that happens next – but if a woman says no, then she must not really mean it. Or, if she does, she shouldn’t: the rejected man is a universally sympathetic figure, and everyone from moviegoers to platonic onlookers will scream at her to just give him a chance, as though her rejection must always be unfounded rather than based on the fact that he had a chance, and blew it. And even then, give him another one! The pathos of Single Nice Guys can only be eased by pity-sex with unwilling women that blossoms into romance!
Well, screw that. The Friend Zone is a fundamentally sexist construction based solely on the idea that women should be penalised for putting their own romantic happiness above that of an interested man. If a lady doesn’t want you, then either respect her decision and keep away to salve your heart, or respect her decision and stay because you still think she’s cool enough to be worth the effort of friendship. But if you don’t respect her decision, then you don’t respect her – and if you don’t respect her, then stay the fuck out of her life.
*Amendment, 11 April 2012: Originally, the first quote in this piece was attributed to Aeryn Walker. However, she has since informed me that the kindness/coins line originated with @hexjackal, and though I don’t have the exact reference for that first attribution, I’ve nonetheless changed it in the text.
shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows 
This seems to be becoming a trend, but somebody has to say something for the other side.
I do agree with what you are saying, and am glad somebody has said it. But i feel you are missing out some key factors in this whole arguement. This is merely an opinion that comes from a guy who has female friends….but has also been “friendszoned”
To start i want to say that without my female friends, whom you are a part of, i would not be half the man i am today, and for men to truly be whole and rounded human beings we require friendships of the opposite sex. But there can be times when females have been deliberately misleading and hide their true intentions to reap the benefits.
Yes i am aware what i just said sounds sexist and entirely rude and wrong but bare with me. I will happily do anything for my friends male or female, wether it be giving them lifts, or advice, helping them move house or build a house. Just because one of my female friends asked me to help them does not mean i would expect to get sexual gratification as a reward.
However in a time when i was younger and more naive i met a girl, who i developed feelings for, and for the most part believed that she felt the same. She would act in a way that friends would not act and hint towards things that friends wouldnt do (i cannot give examples that are suitable for an open audience so you will have to use your imagination), but only on occasions where she required something…say a lift home from a club or help fixing something at her home. When i realised that she didnt feel the same way i felt hurt and somewhat used, not because i had done things without reward, but because she never was upfront or honest about her feelings because she thought if she was then she would not get the same favours. I see this behaviour more and more amongst younger women now, who like to trade their sexuality (not sex itself, thats not where i am going) for an easier ride, and i dont like it.
I think that friend zoning used to be less sexist and more just a statement, but then quickly became a widely misused term to define any women who exercises her right to say no. I think its pitiful for men to just use this definition to explain any girl who wont give it up for them, i dont know why there should be a term for it in the first place, if she does not want to sleep with you there is a good reason for it- the sooner you accept and move on the happier you will be.
I think the biggest problem here is the subjective nature of trying to assess someone else’s feelings. Specifically, how do you know the girl wasn’t upfront to begin with, and that you misinterpreted her actions because you were looking for reciprocal feelings? We can believe all we want that someone returns our affection right up until they tell us they don’t – which is clear and unambiguous. Once that happens, I really don’t think it’s helpful to start second-guessing past behaviour; what the clear statement should tell us is that our previous, guess-based interpretations were wrong – hence the rejection – and not that the other person has been deliberately misleading us.
It’s also deeply problematic to say that lots of girls now ‘trade their sexuality for an easier ride’ – even without the implication of actual sex, it’s still an offensive and sexist generalisation. Again, this is a problem of perception: if men *think* that this is what girls are doing, then the girls will be judged negatively for doing so, even if what’s actually happening is that the men are just assuming that because they find the girl attractive, she must be using her attractiveness deliberately. Not trying to conceal one’s attractiveness in whatever respect is NOT the same as using it for a free ride. There are two possible ways to prevent this misunderstanding: either girls should just start actively hiding their attractiveness at all times, just to be on the safe side, or men should stop assuming that they’re always using it to advantage.
Guess which plan I favour?
Unless you directly asked her out, or told her that you were only doing nice things because you wanted to date her, she had absolutely no reason to think that she was taking advantage of you. I can’t tell you how many guys have flipped out at me for “Leading them on” after I directly told them I wasn’t interested, then did nothing more than treat them like friends. I’ve had to flat-out reject gifts and favors from men because I knew they wanted me and I didn’t return the sentiment- and in those cases, they proceeded to get angry at me for not allowing them to give me things. It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.
I don’t think you understand how difficult it is to tell when a friend is being nice because you’re their friend, or if they’re being nice because they want something. I give my friends rides, help them carry their groceries, water their plants when they’re out, and lend them cash if they forgot to hit the ATM all the time. They do the same for me, as do most friends. How am I supposed to know if someone is only being nice to me because they want to date me, versus just want to be my friend? Even worse, how do you think it feels to have to suspect every small favor someone does for you, because they might have ulterior motives?
Now consider for a moment having to reject EVERY small kindness your friends offer you, because if you accept, they’ll see it as you taking advantage of them unless you repay it with sex. Imagine not being able to ask any of your friends for a casual favor, because they’ll see it as a come-on, and they feel that being a because they’re a “good friend” means that you should put out for them.
This kind of behavior/thinking is stupid & pathetic, but I see a lot of stuff lumped in w/it that really doesn’t belong there (every guy who likes a female friend more than she likes him isn’t whining about being “friendzoned”). I think the most important point to make about the guys who Do whine about that is that they are clearly NOT “nice” guys, but were acting nice to get sex (& I think women often pick up on that). The louder someone insists they’re nice, the most obvious it is that they are not.
I agree with this article and I agree with Cole’s point as well. I have been accused of “friendzoning” people and sometimes feel that if I look a guy in the eye and smile (and, god forbid, add an actual conversation to that) in his eyes, I’ve planned out our entire future and want to go to bed with him right there. That is frustrating to the extreme. That being said, I have girlfriends who seem to “collect” guys. Not to sleep with, but to string along. They’ll sit in his lap and flirt outrageously, then tell me that they’re not interested in the guy……wft? Then why do it? I ask them and they say that they don’t have anyone else their interested in, so what does it hurt? I get that feedback from women a lot. I wouldn’t say it’s the majority of women, but I WOULD say it’s probably about a third. This is a huge problem because, as stated in this article, they really ARE trading sexuality for the attention they get that makes them feel good. It pisses me off. So, in short, “Friendzone” is BS. So are women who string guys along for the attention to make themselves feel good. They’re not mutually exclusive. They’re just TWO sh$#y things that happen.
Thanks for writing this.
In my time, I have been a Nice Guy. I regret it hugely. There are no excuses or redeeming element to having been one, merely a wince.
Nothing any of the women I Nice Guy’d at did anything to cause it. They were collateral damage to a process that had been fucking me up, installed by other guys.
I went to an all male highschool. This was not a good environment for… anything, really. But it had a particularly warped relationship with women.
As such, I grew up with the understanding that men my age were amoral, manipulative, sex-obsessed scum. And I didn’t want to be them. But I didn’t have a clear idea of how an alternative would work. Lack of experience, lack of models.
Solution! Make friends with people who are women! (Ding!) Don’t pressure them for anything they’re uncomfortable with! (Ding!) Be entirely passive and endlessly wait for them to make the first move, and then the second, and then the third, while hanging around like a hybrid puppy-dog/chew-toy waiting for That Glorious Day! (Whaa-whaa-WAAAAAH.)
All things considered, I got off light. More by accident than anything *I* did, I managed not to get bitter and twisted about things. Eventually I sloughed off the behaviour much as I did the rest of the person that godawful school had helped shape me into, though it took a couple of years where I learned to be human again, and to deal with women as humans rather than Ideas Of Humans constructed in my head.
I was talking about this with my husband, and it does seem to be something that often happens to inexperienced guys who just don’t know how to make a move and subsequently can’t identify when the moment for doing so has passed. Which isn’t their fault, particularly if – as in both your case and his – they’ve been schooled in all-male environments and never taught how to deal with that sort of thing. I am sympathetic to anyone who finds themself in that situation, and I’m really glad to hear that you managed to get past it 🙂
The problem with friendzoning as a terminology is that it encourages those men – many of whom are emotionally and socially vulnerable – to attribute all the blame for such situations to women. It’s a term that implies unfair rejection, manipulation and obliviousness on the female end (and note how contradictory those things all are!) while absolving the guy of any and all error. Which doesn’t help anyone, and is why I object so strongly to the term.
Absolutely! Friendzoning is part of the same kind of logic applied by people who are *still* amoral, manipulative scum, but who think they’re different because of the methods that are applied, when at-heart they still hold the core principle that women are there *for them.*
You know what friendzoning reminds me of? Guys who complain that they paid for dinner but they didn’t get sex. But if the woman offered to split it, they’d fight to pay the check, for whatever reason.
I think you have a great many misconceptions about men, stemming from your own sexist tendencies. You talk about any man who desires to have more than a friendship with a woman as if he’s about to club her on the head and drag her into his bed. Can’t you see that your whole argument, saying that friend-zoning stems from widespread misogyny, is only itself growing out of your own misandry?
This article you wrote is how we vilify men for having desires, caring about women, and being frusterated when they don’t care about them in return. A man who complains about being friend-zoned is not someone who expected sex, it’s someone who hoped for love and feels mislead by society about how he is supposed to act towards those he likes in order to make himself liked, time and time again until he becomes jaded.
I will never ceased to be amazed at people who think calling out sexism is the same thing as misandry, or that identifying problematic behaviours exhibited by some men is the same thing as hating all men, everywhere, forever.
Society doesn’t vilify men for having desires. It vilifies women for failing to share them unconditionally.
You ARE exhibiting misandry, exactly the same amount as men who believe in a friendzone are exhibiting misogyny. Your blog post vilifies men for having desires just as much as the existence of a concept of the friendzone vilifies women for their desires. They both vilify to the extent that one can point his/her finger at other people and blame them, simply for having ideas in their heads.
Firstly, I’ve never said that men who believe in the friend zone are exhibiting misogyny; only that both the term itself, and its dominant application within our culture, is sexist. And secondly, I’m not vilifying men for having desires – I’m vilifying specifically those men who blame women for not reciprocating their desires, which is an entirely different thing.
“I’m vilifying specifically those men who blame women for not reciprocating their desires, which is an entirely different thing.”
I do not think you meant to intentionally, but I would not have guessed that being the intent of your post based on what you wrote. I was about to actually write something similar to Harry’s comments, but then I saw this reply and saw what you are trying to convey, which I wholeheartedly agree with. (I can’t rag on you too much about conveying the message you intend to send, as I fail at that on a regular basis)
I’d like to think when I use the term “friendzoned”, there are two meanings
1) Just trying to be nice to the person who confessed feelings to a friend and got shot down with the “let’s just be friends” spiel. It always sucks. It’s not anyone’s fault, but it still sucks. In this case, it isn’t meant to cast judgment on either side, just a one-size-fit-all term that sums up the entirety of the “that sucks, hang in there, no one likes being so close yet so far…” etc etc.
2) To those who are being actively manipulated by the object of their desire. In this case, it is a term used to cast judgment. Also, I think men do this more than folks believe, except rather than denying the sexual aspect, they give the sexual aspect but instead deny the emotional bond, as a result of the societal differences between the two genders currently.
A guy who complains about misandry is like a white guy complaining there’s no Mens’ Studies Department at uni. The WHOLE uni is Mens’ studies.
If you’re being nice to girls for the whole purpose of extorting sex out of them in exchange for an agreemtn that existed only on your side, it’s no deal. The claim of ‘friendzoming’ is identical to a guy who complains he paid for dinner but didn’t get any sex.
I wonder how many of these guys set out their terms right off the bat: “I’ll only to be nice to you if you put out for me. That’s the only reason I’m nice to any woman.”
no. no, no, no. just no.
the friendzone mindset DOES stem from misogyny, because it comes out of the mindset that women are required to enter a sexual romantic relationship with someone solely on the basis of how nice that person was to them, completely erasing the fact that MAYBE those women are allowed to have sexual desires and interests that don’t revolve around people being nice to them. if the man is hoping for love, then it’s safe to say that he was GETTING love in the friendship. so if all he wanted was her love, he already had it- but it wasn’t enough. it had to be SEXUAL love. there had to be a romantic sexual relationship involved in the love, or it wasn’t enough for him- and that’s her fault for not giving the sexual aspect to him.
If anyone expects somethihng from anyone on the basis of “I did this for you now you have to sleep with me ” they’re not Nice, they’re not a friend and they are very far from a romantic prospect. They are in fact treating their unknowing friend like a prostitute with the difference that the friend was unaware of the implied transaction in her male friend’s mind.
Pointing this out is not misandry. Many males just feel so injured to have it pointed out to them that they are not behaving well that they take refuge in this ridiculous accusation.
In answer to your question- No i was not mis interpretting her intentions or feelings at any stage. This is the most pg rated quote i can give you to get my point across… “you do realise if you pick me up from the city ill be drunk, and i am way more likely to **** your **** on the way home”
So unless that is code for “i just want to be friends and am not interested in you in anything other than a platonic way” then im pretty sure she was playing me. I also take offense to the fact that you think that i can misconstrue a woman being free with her attractiveness and a woman having interest in me. Considering my job for two years involved me being in close quarters with often naked models and also having them confide in me and connect with me on a very personal level, i think i can tell the difference when a girl is just looking good, and when she is using her looks to manipulate.
i have also witnessed first hand a girl “friend zoning” a guy, based on and i quote “hes cute but i want to wait and see what happens with (insert football player) first before i say yes”
I believe your intentions are good, but my guess is that the company you keep dont display the same behaviour as some of my company does. This is a good thing and i wish the rest of the world thought more like you, but unfortunately there are girls that are out there who choose to use their bodies more than their minds and men who take advantage of that situation. Spend one night in kings cross in sydney and there is your proof, or just look back at the central coast.
Yeah, it’s just so funny that your experiences so conveniently dovetail with the sexist myths.
I judge that I have been manipulated and lead on by a few women in my life that have blatently used sexual teasing and innuendo to curry from me favors, adoration and gifts because they were leading me to believe they were interested in me as a lover, and not just as a friend.
Whether you judge this sexist or not doesn’t matter to me, it is just a fact that some women, in America in particular, are in the habit of behaving this way in return for benefits from men. If they were more clear with men about their sexual interests or not upfront then men could more easily choose how to engage socially with them or not, and on what terms that engagement would correspondingly take. (I distinguish America herein, because my experience in Canada and Europe has been that women are more clear upfront at the commencement of a relationship than my experience with American women. I am Canadian.)
You might find this article interesting, then: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution
I enjoyed the interesting take. Though I disagree that the phrase is “fundamentally sexist.” A couple thoughts:
1) When my male friends and I use the term, it’s a convenient shorthand for “I liked this girl, I expressed that feeling, but she just wanted to be friends,” with no connotations that you deserve anything. As normal males, we can recognize that there’s plenty of other women out there. We’re not “nice guys” (though we are pleasant polite people) and we’re not willing to “throw good money after bad” doting over some girl who’s not having any of it. You’re her friend, and it’s always nice to have more friends, but direct your romantic interest elsewhere. This, I believe, is the actual prevalent application.
2) Having been friends with many “nice guys,” the feeling of “after all this effort, why doesn’t she like me,” isn’t a feeling of deserving anything, it’s just that, a wondering. Especially if the girl had subsequently dated some variation of the “stereotypical crass jock.” This doesn’t necessarily imply that the guy is owed anything. It’s generally the inexperienced guy whom you referred to in a previous comment trying to find his way more than anything.
How can it not be sexist? There’s no friendzoning women; women are expected to be nice to men at all times, whereas with men it’s understood that guys are only nice to women they want to fuck.
I know a guy who probably uses the term friendzone—-my ex roommate. He woke me up one night after I’d been sound asleep for a few hours, then proceeded to ramble on about love and relationships and fairy tales, and finally said, “I want the fairy tale.” Then he told me he loved me. I was supposed to get in his fairy tale. My fairy tale? Apparently didn’t matter. I had no fairy tale, and his declaration of love was something he saw as placing an obligation on me. Meanwhile, I was thinking, If you loved me, you’d have let me SLEEP. I have to get up in a few hours!)
Nor is that the only time. Same format, though: a guy I know wrote a sort of resume as if he applying for a job, but curiously, I was the one placed in the position of being both the reward and the judge to give the reward. He literally mentioned me just once: when he said he was in love with me. (This announcement, by the way, came after an incredibly traumatic event that he knew about, and despite which he proceeded, because his wants came before re-traumatizing me.) That note he wrote me displayed the curious focus on his wants, his desires, how he deserved possessing me somehow, how it was totally okay to disregard my well being so he could have a shot. And both men felt that that declaration of love conferred on me a duty to put out.
There’s a third one but I can’t remember much about it.
Crap the italics were supposed to end at the end of the second paragraph.
IMO it’s patently false to claim that there’s no friendzoning with women. While we may not call it that, I can give many, many, many examples of women complaining about a crush thinking about them as “one of the guys” while harboring the belief that if only they are there to comfort and help them through enough BS and heartbreak the guy will one day recognize how perfect they are as a couple and then ride away into the sunset. I see the main difference here as one of semantics because even if men are going to talk about thin in terms of sex, they are not going to hang around doing nice things for women for long periods of time ONLY in the hopes of getting laid… that’s just too irrational for 99.9% of people to contemplate… they are also having the rest of that fantasy that includes a fairytale romance and whatever else they dream about for a serious relationship. If the main complaint is that men use sexual language more than women when they think or talk about relationships then maybe that’s a different conversation.
In this case, though, I absolutely believe it is sexist of anyone to think about a man doing this as an active “creepy” liar while saying either that women don’t do this or that they are not also active “creepy” liars if they do. The very idea that a man and women are not equally accountable for bad actions, or not equally active in committing them, is a denial of a woman’s powerfullness and her ability to be equally responsible for actions. Until we insist on being equal in ways that acknowledge our ability to do wrong as well as our ability to do right then we are just as guilty of sexism as anyone who otherwise believes that we should be held to different standards because of our anatomy.
In the 2nd paragraph it should say a woman’s powerfullness, not powerlessness.
So I get the intentions of writing this article, and for the most part I agree with you. But what you are essentially doing is dismissing the fact that the term friend zoning exists for a reason. I mean, yeah I get it, some…most self proclaimed nice guys get pretty douchey and mope and complain when they can’t get the girl(s) that they want, but there are girls that aren’t entirely forthcoming and deliberately keep guys around because they can be treated like puppets. I get everything I want from you, and you get nothing you want from me, that’s the mentality.
That’s really only partly what my problem is with this article, though. There’s a humongous gray area–a middle ground, if you will–that you ultimately decide not to address, not just with the term friend zoning being sexist, but with every point you make. And it makes me feel like this is just a huge arrogant feminist rant about one of the many ways guys suck. But of course, the middle ground isn’t the point of the article, so that’s more than likely not the case.
So you agree that ‘most’ friendzoners deserve it but the women, basically, manipulative and cynical.
Sometimes there is no middle ground. How could there be? Women have to fear things that men can’t even imagine. I wonder how many nice things those women do for those guys that the guys simply don’t even notice because they take it for granted?
“Friendzoning’ fits into a whole host of sexist stereotypes of women, that’s why there’s no middle ground.
How can there not be a middle ground? There is one, regardless of whether you choose to accept it or discuss it or not. There are lots of douchey, self-entitled men who need to read this article.
There are also women who lead men on under the guise of friendship. They don’t help the situation. Just because the term “friendzoning” can be used in a sexist manner does not mean it is ONLY used in a sexist manner.
At Ray though: Foz posted this in the comments, which makes the article make far more sense.
“And secondly, I’m not vilifying men for having desires – I’m vilifying specifically those men who blame women for not reciprocating their desires, which is an entirely different thing.”
That’s true. I’ve had lots of friends I’ve fallen for who haven’t felt the same way. Does it suck? Yes. Do I need to blame them for not saying yes? No.
Reading the article with the understanding that it’s aimed purely at the men who feel entitled to a woman’s affections for being nice to them; the article makes far, far more sense.
I find the ‘women leads the guy on’ argument unconvincing. Someone can only ‘use’ you if you are open to being ‘used’. And yeh, I get it. It’s hard to like someone. You want them to like you back. Blaming the other person though for doing what you’re allowing them to do and then getting angry that they didn’t give you want you wanted – that’s victim mentality. And in this situation it feeds into the ‘woman is always to blame’ trope which is as sexist as it gets. I’d like to see men in this situation take responsibility for themselves. Foz also is dead on point when she points out that if a man’s affection is only as good as the reward he gets back then it’s not affection at all. It’s also a good bet that it’s a big part of why the woman he craves is hanging back. Most people have good radars for conditional love or ‘love with strings attached’.
I completely agree with you, Vicki. Maybe this whole debate will make more sense if rather than comparing friendzoning by women vs friendzoning by men, we instead compare friendzoning by women vs wam-bam-thank-you-ma’am by men. Re-reading your response from the guy’s perspective after a one-night stand flows perfectly well and captures the way a lot of us feel on this topic.
I’ve tended to think of “friendzoning” as the hellish concept being the thing that happens when a girl says she would date you ecxept that she doesn’t want to “hurt your friendship.” Especially bad is when you combine this with her complaining about the people she dates lacking the qualities she’s said you have, which makes the friendzoning a much less admirable thing than simply saying “no.”
I can see how the concept might be misused in some cases, but most of the “friendzoned” guys I know personally fall into the camp of not being dating material solely for the reason that it poses some sort of risk to the existing friendship. I don’t think this version of the term is misogynistic, as it’s possible for a guy to friendzone a girl this way, although I don’t personally know any that have.
YOu know, a relationship is not like a job. You don’t put in an application and if it matches, you get the position. If she doesn’t want to fuck you, then that’s that. If she sees you as a friend, you’re a friend. It’s not a simplistic matter of fitting tab A into slot B, and women aren’t all the same.
(Replied with this on the BookShare, but saw that more people were here, and carried it over)
Yes- definitely yes- and no. There is an absolute mentality that certain behaviors, actions, and relations should end up in a person’s romantic involvement. That’s pretty shoddy, and when a “nice guy” focuses their energy on a specific female and then “gets friend zoned”, they’re enacting exactly the behavior that your article outlines.
There’s a couple of things that I think have not been addressed in this new ‘friend zone is going against feminism’ movement. First, that there are other things that a “nice guy” laments rather than a woman’s right to choose. If you painted a picture of one of these “nice guys”, they’re typically a person that is spurned, not from a single relationship, but is typically passed over for romantic relationships by someone that is a “bad boy”, or somesuch.
There’s two things that I think the “nice guy” laments here. The first is the social and sexual preferences of females in the given culture. Why is the leather jacket, motorcycle-riding, verbally abusive guy the one that is preferred over to the brah brah brah whatever the “nice guy” is? Is it a matter of physical appearance? Is being socially sure of oneself better than intellectualism? It is a complaint about personal insecurity and the culture that allows that to affect relational closeness. Yes, I know that women have this issue in the tenfold, and that society places the worth of a women sometimes solely on their physical/social capacity. That doesn’t make the measure of this complain invalid, and more importantly to the argument, it doesn’t make the complaint on the direct choice of a female.
The second complaint that I’ve heard is that it’s a confusion over the distance between what the cultural preference says it is- a guy who brings flowers, treats a lady with respectful words, considers her thoughts, wants to start a family, etc… Things that the culture supposedly preferences, based on everything from verbalization, to the characters built as positive role models in the media… is not the actual preference. Somehow, despite what a “nice guy” might be led to believe about what they are supposed to be, the cultural preference are actually something else. Again, I’m not saying that this means that these “nice guys” have a right to expect certain relational choices out of specific females, but as an aggrievement toward a society which confuses them, due to perhaps an incapacity to read social actions and gestures… it makes sense.
The second issue I have with this subject, is that due to an implicit force of sexuality being viewed and valued as the measure of the height of interpersonal intimacy. How do two people show their love for one another? Sex. How do two people show that they are the most important person in each others’ lives. Sex. It’s not a measure of the emotional concern of one person for another, or a connection to shared experiences.
Why this is an issue may not immediately present itself. Again, this becomes an issue of how the culture present relationships. When two guy friends are best friends, they present their relationship in certain ways. When two girl friends are best friends, they present their relationship in certain ways. Our culture does not provide for a consistent vision of what a proper girl/guy relationship looks like, excepting as a measure of romantic intimacy. You can’t be a guy or a girl’s ‘best friend’ if you are a member of the opposite gender, and you’re not achieving that “reward” of shared sexuality. Because sexuality is on the same linear relational path of success as being trusted, and cared for, anyone who does not get to that point will not be the “number 1 best friend”, but always “number 2” to the person who engages with the person sexually. This is a complaint that guys give guy friends that begin a new romantic relationship (not that the guy friend is not engaging in sexual relations with them, but that the sexual relation takes priority, presumably because the male is not considered as a sexual prospect). This is a complaint that girls give girl friends that begin a new romantic relationship. This issue is compounded when the relationship is a guy/girl relationship where the other member of the relationship is not chosen despite their closeness.
(Again, because I feel like this will be misinterpreted, this is not suggesting that the female SHOULD have a responsibility toward choosing the male friend, nor that the female should be required to have different sexual preferences. It also does not excuse a male’s dismissive attitude toward a relationship which does not end up romantically. It is simply a complaint over an issue of the constructs of relationships in our culture.
As a side note, I’d also like to mention that disappointment and expectation of this reward of a romantic relationship is absolutely something that happens to both genders, though certainly not to the frequency which allows things like “friend zone” to be a culturally accepted term for males approaching females and having their intentions spurned)
In short, I agree with most of the argument you’ve made, but for the matter that the thing is *SOLELY* on the idea that a woman should be penalized for putting their own romantic happiness above that of an interested man.
Isn’t it also possible that the “bad boy” is also being nice to her, at least some of the time? That maybe she actually gets something out of the relationship that you, from the outside, can’t see? There’s also the possibility that she is being manipulated or abused herself and not able to disengage safely. Friendships, social status, extracurriculars, even work and housing can be jeopardized when relationships end badly and that’s assuming the guy does nothing more than talk about her.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I still get the vibe that you feel the guys are being treated unfairly based on their poor social skills rather than women exercising rational judgement in relationship choices. The clingy, love-sick puppy routine can be creepy when you’re on the receiving end, and it doesn’t have to be intentional. It’s often very hard for the girl to end that sort of relationship because she would inevitably become the bad guy, worse if they share a social circle and risks hurting multiple friendships. I’ve known at least two of the pitiful, lovelorn pups to imply self-harm if a girl started to back away, including showing scars and sharing suicidal fantasies. They may have zero self-esteem, but they’re still capable of manipulation.
I don’t think my experience is exceptional when I say that a lot of my relationship choices are about minimizing risk as much as obtaining happiness. I don’t know any women who have not had to leave at least one group of friends to avoid an abusive or potentially abusive person (who often still enjoys the support of that community). Unsurprisingly where women can rely on friends to support them they tend to be much more relaxed and upfront.
Whether society provides useful models or not the problem is that the “nice guy” doesn’t respect women as individuals with needs and preferences that may not match social recommendations. It may be a stumbling block on the road to maturity, but it’s still something the guy has to take responsibility for.
“I don’t think my experience is exceptional when I say that a lot of my relationship choices are about minimizing risk as much as obtaining happiness.”
This is a really important point, especially in incidences such as you describe, where a particular social group is supporting the actions and/or presence of a person who’s making you feel uncomfortable. Nobody likes to be the cause of tension in a social group, but neither should they have to put up with behaviour that makes them feel unsafe or uneasy. And if friends are giving a nice guy sympathy – which is what you give friends who are feeling blue – it can exacerbate things for the person on the receiving end, because it makes it harder for them to give a clear, definitive ‘no’ without being seen as a villain by not just the nice guy, but the rest of the social circle.
Oh, good, the bad boy fallacy! I was so disappointed nobody brought this up yet. No discussion about Nice Guys and Friend Zoning is complete without it. How do YOU know he’s a bad guy? The idea that sex is how you show your feelings for another person—-with the implication that that’s it, that’s all—is kind of a dead giveaway. There’s a whole bunch of different ways. What does she want? Oh, who cares, right? My best friend’s husband knows when she’s having a bad day and picks up Chinese food on the way home—-and he knows what she likes. That’s love. It’s not showoffy, but it’s love.
Why is the leather jacket, motorcycle-riding, verbally abusive guy the one that is preferred over to the brah brah brah whatever the “nice guy” is? Is it a matter of physical appearance? Is being socially sure of oneself better than intellectualism? It is a complaint about personal insecurity and the culture that allows that to affect relational closeness. Yes, I know that women have this issue in the tenfold, and that society places the worth of a women sometimes solely on their physical/social capacity. That doesn’t make the measure of this complain invalid, and more importantly to the argument, it doesn’t make the complaint on the direct choice of a female.
The second complaint that I’ve heard is that it’s a confusion over the distance between what the cultural preference says it is- a guy who brings flowers, treats a lady with respectful words, considers her thoughts, wants to start a family, etc
Leather jacket? Motorcyle? Flowers? Suggesting that women are shallow for preferring a good-looking guy? Yeah, show me the ugly woman who’s being sought after by zillions of hawt guys. You’re reciting an awful lot of cliches here and acting like women like flowers and want a family—-gee, maybe women aren’t all alike? Jeez, I didn’t think anybody would actually use such a hoary old stereotypes.
I have a male acquaintance who got downgraded from friend to acquaintance when it became apparent that he wasn’t interested in anything but sex and that he had never listened to me at all. How did I know? I mentioned repeatedly my hatred for certain things. Those were the things that he gave me as presents for various holidays. The exact things I hated. Or worse yet he gave me things he liked. I tried to get that across, and finally he got offended when I pointed out that he had not been listening to me. Period. I pored over his presents to get him just the right thing….and he gave me flowers and candy. I’m serious.
I’ve had guys try and tell me they loved me, blah blah blah—-but they sure as hell didn’t display any consideration or interest in my thoughts or feelings. If you’re offering what amounts to bribes that you didn’t tell her were supposed to extort sex out of her, then who’s really the one who’s the asshole? Flowers ain’t gonna help, but maybe that dude in the leather jacket knows what I think about Shakespeare and photography, and maybe you just think he’s not good enough because he’s not you.
Freindzoning is real, and involves real manipulation.
The object of the infatuation knows of the pain of their admirer full well, and yet chooses not to do the kind thing, the one thing that the ‘freindzoned’ cannot do for themselves – which is to cease and reject all contact.
Instead they bask in the undivided support and attention, if not worship they receive, which clearly exceeds anything they could expect from a mere friend. They hold the whip hand, and they know it. And they like it.
Yes of course the admirer harbours hopes for some kind of sexual ‘reward’ for grimly holding on, Hoping by their persistence and generosity that their strength of feeling will somehow be recognized and eventually reciprocated. Naive, yes, but if it were only about sex, there are far easier ways…
So yes, women (or men) who chose to gratify their own egos, abusing the strength of feeling of a love sick friend ahead of putting that friend out of his/her misery richly deserves whatever label that friend finally needs to apply to their tormentor to escape that horrible and unhealthy situation, and to start the healing.
This is a bit of a jumbled response, but….Personally speaking, if I knew a woman was intentionally manipulative and took cruel pleasure out of manipulating, I’m not sure I would feel romantically towards her or even want to remain friends. Then again, that sounds like an emotionally abusive relationship, and if the victim was a woman, we would not want to cast blame on her, so I am feeling it would be wrong to cast full blame on the man who stays in that selfish one-sided “friendship.” Perhaps in this case, one interesting observation is that this “nice guy” appears to be actually attracted to a “bad girl” and is not recognizing it. And at the same time is wondering why she is attracted to “bad boys?” Maybe he is actually not giving other genuinely nice girls a chance because he is clinging to a manipulative “friend.”
If, on the other hand, she is simply not interested in romance but does care about the friendship, then I would think her way of demonstrating an equal investment in the relationship would involve similar things that the man in the relationship is doing – helping to study for tests, driving you to an appointment, watching movies, playing video games, whatever it may be. To me, sex is not the inherently obvious/equal trade-off for hang out time as friends.
Gee, that’s an awfully long reply for a simple idea: “I spent money on her, the bitch owes me.“
Friendzoning is bullshit, and is soley the responsibility of the guy whining about it. Your characterization here of the woman is pure sexism. That might be why women don’t want to get too close. it’s not subtle.
If the hypothetical girl you speak of isn’t holding the hypothetical guy prisoner with a chain and handcuffs, he is always free to leave. The person who’s responsible for ending a relationship is the person who’s unhappy with it. If the guy is unhappy, it’s up to him to leave. It’s not the girl’s responsibility to intuit that he’s unhappy and make him leave. End of story.
I remember a situation that a friend of mine was in where she was in love with a guy who clearly considered her only a friend. He still allowed her to faun over him. In that instance, I felt the same as you do above. I felt that the guy clearly owed her the dignity of pulling the plug on their acquaintance so that she would get the point, because she clearly wasn’t able to do it herself. Since then I’ve changed my mind. Because it’s not someone else’s responsibility to ‘save’ you from yourself. The object of infatuation owes you nothing.
The person with the infatuation owes themselves some self-awareness and self-responsibility. In fact, the situation is probably exactly the teaching-moment that person needs in order to deal with obvious patterns of attracting emotionally unavailable people into their lives. Most of the time I hear this from people they tell me how often they’ve been ‘friendzoned’. That’s a pattern right there. And it’s not everyone else’s fault.
The other person might hold the ‘whip’ hand as you put it, but the ‘love-sick’ person has placed that whip in their hand. They do have the power to take it away.
A lot of people seem to be defending the friend zone term by saying that some people (including women) are manipulative and mean. This is true, but surely it would be better to call them what they are, someone you thought was a friend who used you. I don’t understand why it should be implied that the real tradgedy of the situation was that said friend didn’t sleep with or love you. A horrible person doesn’t magically become nice just because you had sex (or romance) with them.
Friend zone implies that your main complaint is the lack of sex/romance but if these individuals are using you surely that is the larger problem?
I think the term might be used differently between men and women, to be honest. I personally use it when a friend has been told by someone he/she has feelings for that they do not return the same feelings, due to the fear that the friendship will dissolve if things do not work out.
Ultimately the one thing I don’t get is this: If I’m a guy, and I tell one of my friends I have feelings for her, and she disagrees, either I a) stay friends with her because I enjoy her company or b) move on because I don’t want the friendship to be built on this hope that we will end up together. She either a) stays friends with me because she wants company or b) moves on because she believes the relationship will be built on his hope that something will happen and/or her desire to have attention from someone that does not have to be mutual.
Doesn’t seem that hard.
Though you have a point, as in purely negative connotations, it is used by the side wanting the relationship to denote someone who is using that person, and it is used by the side not wanting the relationship to denote someone who is only interested in more than friendship.
If for some reason your relationship with a person causes them the pain of unrequited love, while granting you the pleasure of an unusually attentive friend,, you have ‘freindzoned’ them.
Nobody is suggesting you owe the other person sex, or any more feelings than you have for them – but as a freind you do owe them the mercy of terminating the relationship once this situation of unequal desire is clear. Because you are the one who is not in love, you have far more power to so act,
If you knowingly persist anyway in gratifying your own needs at the expense of another’s pain, you are indeed a bitch (or a bastard, as the case may be).
You can read sexism into anything if you really want to find it there, and spin it accordingly – but that is exactly what you would be doing.
Are you suggesting that friendships cannot persist if romance is unsuccessful? I think most emotionally mature people can accept that their feelings are not mutual and still care about the other person as a friend. I know I can, and have, it hurts but you move on. Not continuing to chase after someone who isn’t interested is really the least I expect from people. Unless there is a clear inequality–underaged person pursuing an adult, for example–the pursuer is the one with the responsibility to stop. It is not possible to control another person’s behavior.
The other problem you seem not to grasp is that most of he time the desire for romance is not made clear. What level of attention, exactly, would prove that a person has more than friendship on their mind if they’re unwilling to actually say anything? Is there a universal set of rules that could be applied to even the most supportive of friends? And why is it their responsibility to divine another’s intent? The “pain of unrequited love” is not exactly easy to diagnose either, what symptoms should we look for to determine the course of treatment?
Yeah, inadvertently these guys are revealing that it’s sex or else, they have no other use for women at all.
Yes, indeed I am suggesting friendships cannot/should not continue while there is unrequited love in the frame. We are not talking about a thwarted but otherwise idle desire for sex here, with someone who the friendzoned hardly knows, or feelings of thwarted entitlement just because somebody bought dinner.
We are talking about very powerful feelings that have likely been brewing for a long time, with someone who the friendzoned is genuinely good friends with – and not just in the hope of sex.
Calls for ’emotional maturity’ in this context are a convenient rationalisation that allows the person holding the whip hand to prolong the other person’s misery. It is a form of denialism,
so this person gets to enjoy ongoing intimacy, without any obligation to consider the pain of unrequited love this is causing, and to avoid the discomfort of confronting the situation head on,
To anyone truly intimate with a friend, the desire for romance in that friend is not hard to pick. At the very least, surely an overt declaration should be sufficient to ring that alarm bell?
Again, no. You choose to remain in a friendship that is unsatisfactory to you for whatever reason, that’s your fault. We are all responsible for our own actions. If someone is intentionally using you, he/she is wrong for using you. If you stick around for a friendship when you know you’re unhappy that it’s not more than friendship, you’re in the wrong for sticking around. You are responsible for your own decisions. You’re not a helpless child who needs someone else to make decisions for you just because you’re “in love.”
Yeah, seeing as how it’s based on guys trying to buy womens’ affections—–and feeling betrayed when they don’t put out——it’s not exactly hard to see why it’s sexist against women. Why is she responsible for cutting it off? Isn’t he a big boy?
They both are responsible for cutting it off; assuming they’re both DECENT FREAKING HUMAN BEINGS.
I’ve had this happen twice to me, where a female friend expressed romantic interests in me, and I told them I did not see them in the same way. In one scenario, we were able to remain friends as she was able to move on from her feelings. In the other scenario, I had to end our friendship because I knew she was trying to just be friends, but she kept being hurt any time I’d go on a date with someone else, would invite me out with her and her friends and try to pay for me, etc etc… and as awesome of an human being as she is, I know what it’s like to be on the opposite end of that scenario, and I had to stop talking to her.
It doesn’t make her any less of a human being, it just means that the situation and our emotions lend themselves to not working as friends. I never took her trying to spend money on me as “attempts to buy me” or what not; it was her doing what she thought would appeal to me and attract me to her. Whether it’s working out at a gym or paying for dinner or staying up till 3 AM listening to someone ramble on, it’s all about trying to court the other person.
Do you understand why women fear openly rejecting men? Aside from which, his feelings are his own business. If he’s hanging around her, there’s nothing for her to cut off. He needs to go pronto.
Given that this is a phenomenon—-and an article—-directed at the sexist use of this term and tactic, I’m really not interested in discussing exceptions.
The same men fear openly rejecting women; or people fear rejecting people, because no one wants to be a douche who hurt someone’s feelings?
In that case, I don’t think anyone here disagrees with the purely sexist use of the term and tactic being a bad thing. I don’t see anyone here who has disagreed with the idea that if a man is nice to a woman solely for the sake of starting a relationship, and the woman declines / does not initiate / it don’t happen, and the man continues on with being nice purely in the hopes that something does happen…that he is bringing the heartache onto himself, and has only himself to blame for it.
Does anyone actually disagree with that assertion? If you end up having feelings for someone you’re friends with, you either suck it up or bring it up, and if you bring it up, if she says no, you either stay friends under the knowledge that ain’t nothing gonna happen, or you move on. Seems pretty simple to me.
Are you stupid? There is this thing called sexism, and women get violently attacked, raped, and killed because of it.
I’m so sick of MRA douches who try and pretend that men and women are somehow equally affected by violence in a world where men hold all the power and still find something to whine about.
Women don’t get “attacked, raped, and killed” because of sexism. They get attacked because there are people who are evil in this world and feel that they are entitled to a woman, and biology gives the average male more physical strength and aggression than the average woman (though most of the women I know are athletes and could kick my butt, but that’s a different story).
In rarer cases, the opposite way occurs, but that’s neither here nor there, seeing as all rapes are notoriously under-reported.
Sexism is “‘Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.” Not “attacked, raped, and killed.”
If you think that men hold all the power in the world, then you’re either hellbent on keeping a worldview or woefully ignorant.
Some fun statistics: (source: http://www.supportingadvancement.com/vendors/canadian_fundraiser/articles/womens_affluence.htm)
•Women bring in half or more of the household income in the majority of the United States.
•Women control 51.3 percent of the private wealth in the United States.
•Women control most of the spending in the household – about 80 percent.
Source: The Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumer — Women, (Pearson/Prentice Hall 2006)
Globally, women’s economic power is soaring. Women make 80 percent of all buying decisions around the world.
Women account for more than 50 percent of all stock ownership in the United States. By 2010, women will account for half the private wealth in the country, or about $14 trillion. By 2020, you can expect that number to reach $22 trillion as wealth continues to shift from men to women.
When women and men of equal education, abilities, and similar social status are compared, the pay disparity disappears. Those women make as much as, if not more than, their male counterparts.
Forty-one percent of the 3.3 million Americans with incomes exceeding $500,000 are women.
Women control or influence 67 percent of household investment decisions. Forty-three percent of Americans with $500,000 or more in investable assets are women.
Women control 48 percent of estates worth more than $5 million.
Do men have it better? Unless you’re in specific situations; heck yeah. Do men have all the power? Not even close.
“People” are “evil”—-and that has nothing to do with systemic oppression and demonization of women?
Yeah, no.
99% of the attackers are men. Furthermore, your arguments are very much of the, “Well, Obama’s president, so there’s no such thing as racism any more.” And they’re not evil: sexism is so normalized in society that most people don’t recognize it as such unless it’s violent and leaves a woman bloody and dead or seriously injured.
Your figures are based on ONE source, with no backing at all. Methods? Credentials? Nothing.
Furthermore, your idiotic argument assumes that because some women have money and jobs, they are not at risk of being abused, attacked, raped, beaten, or murdered. Tell that to Nicole Simpson.
I’m not saying sexism doesn’t exist, as my last point states “Men have it better”. But they do not have ALL the power. Trying to stick to an extreme side and scream to the high heavens that it is the only truth…not really productive.
Obama being president doesn’t mean that there isn’t racism (well aware of this one, truuust me). But is it a hell of a lot better then, say, 30 years ago? Um, I don’t get weird looks on the street anymore if I’m walking with friends. That’s kind of a nice improvement. Kinda like what I’m trying to say here. Is there sexism? Of course. But is it better and has it been getting better since the middle of the 1900s? Yes. I don’t disagree there is a lot of sexism against women in the world; I do disagree with saying that men have ALL the power. That’s the type of argument that make reasonable and rational people just roll their eyes and not want to ever engage the issue.
Also, because your statistics have so many sources with credentials lined up…as for my sources: the first is this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Purse-paperback-Consumers-Women/dp/013705369X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336772810&sr=8-1-fkmr0 — a published book that has a list of citations at the bottom of the amazon page. The second is an article published by Judith Nichols, whose qualifications can be reviewed here: http://www.ncdc.org/conf/2011/speakers.asp
Just so you know? There is ZERO correlation between women’s purchasing power and the decline of sexism; in fact, you could argue the opposite. Women have always had more purchasing power than men simply because shopping – whether for clothes, food or appliances – has always been seen as a female activity, to the point that men are discouraged from doing so on the grounds of it being unmasculine. Women might have the bulk of purchasing power, but compared to wage inequality, discrimination in the workplace and other indicators of equality, it’s pretty much meaningless.
For some easy-to-access stats on the matter:
Take particular note of the second of those. Here’s a statistic for you: globally, women put in roughly three-quarters of all hours worked in the world, but earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. Oh, but we can buy stuff! So I guess that makes it OK.
For a start, your generalisation that it is women who must fear rejecting men is sexist. Any distinction based on sex is .. sexist. By definition.
I have had a female friend who inadvertently slipped into my freindzone. I am ashamed that it took as long as it did for me to acknowledge it – so I am not claiming moral superiority here. But is NOT just a guy thing. I feared ending the relationship, because she was amazingly supportive at a time when I really needed it.
Freindzoning is a phenomenon associated with inexperience, and lower self esteem or self confidence in the person being freindzoned .There is intrinsically an imbalance of power in the relationship. After one or two such horrible experiences, most ‘victims’ learn to recognize the dynamic, and so know when and how to move on.. But that does not excuse the beneficiary who takes advantage of that inexperience and perpetuates that pain, whether consciously or through convenient denial..
It is fine to say everyone is responsible for managing their own emotions, and dealing with their own pain – that is valid assuming we are talking about the interaction between two experienced and equally emotionally capable people but clearly freindzoning is precisely an example where this necessary equality and experience is NOT in play.
Based on the ‘everyone is responsible for managing their own pain’ benchmark, one could justify bullying, or ignoring someone lying bleeding in the gutter. Choosing not to act and relinquish a benefit that is causing another person pain is just not the decent thing to do. True friends do not just let friends suffer in that way.
“For a start, your generalisation that it is women who must fear rejecting men is sexist. Any distinction based on sex is .. sexist. By definition.”
Stating that I have a vagina while my husband has a penis is a sex-based distinction, yet calling it sexist – which is what your logic amounts to – is moronic. Neither is it sexist to say that women are more frequently the victims of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault than men, even though the reason why this is true ultimately stems from our endemically sexist culture. What you’re essentially arguing here, then, is that because men and women should be treated equally, any move to acknowledge situations where they aren’t – and particularly to suggest that this state of affairs breeds negative social consequences – is itself a way of promoting inequality. Which is, frankly, bullshit. Sexist distinctions are, by definition, discriminatory distinctions, not merely gender-based ones. If I say, ‘More girls than boys have long hair,’ then that’s simply an observation of fact, even though the circumstances which make it true are indicative of a sexist social construct. If, however, I say, ‘Girls should have longer hair than boys,’ then I’m being sexist – I’m arbitrarily discriminating against short-haired girls and long-haired boys on the basis that long hair is somehow essentially necessary to femininity.
Thus: saying that women are frequently confronted with verbal abuse, aggressive behaviour and/or sexual assault as a direct consequence of rejecting men – and more, that the opposite claim, while certainly possible, is extremely rare in comparison, such that women as a group have learned that the consequences of rejecting men are far more extreme and commonplace than the consequences which accompany men rejecting women – is a statement of fact reflective of our tragically sexist society. Acknowledging this reality is not sexist; pretending it doesn’t exist, however, most certainly is.
Your argument here is a red herring. I did not claim the friendzoning situation was sexist – you did. In fact I observe that the situation applies to both genders, and that maintaining a relationship where one friend is benefiting from another friend’s pain is wrong – whoever does it.
You seem to want to justify women who choose not to end that pain, based on tenuous cultural issues or fears of verbal or physical abuse.
It is my observation that physical or verbal abuse is extremely rare between genuine friends of either sex. If a woman (assuming it is the woman who has friend zoned the man) recognizes the pain of a male friend and yet chooses not to intervene, in order to keep the benefits of ongoing friendship, then that is abuse by any benchmark that makes sense.
If the man should respond to this rejection with verbal or physical abuse, then that is also, by definition, abuse – yet If those fears are even remotely justified in any given situation then why on earth would a woman even want to maintain any kind of friendship, let alone the very close kind that characterises ‘friendzoning” ?
To return to your red herring – sexism is indeed any distinction made based on sex – from the banal (as in your genitalia example) to the oppressive (as in actively denying opportunities, or judging a person or a claim based on stereotypes)
To let women who friendzone men off the hook, justifying them based on the stereotype that men will likely respond aggressively if women act to end the relationship or deny its progression from close friendship to something more is indeed another form of sexism. At the more egregious end of the scale.
Apart from the inherent illogic in that stance, the observation that men are more often physically violent than women does not in any way suggest that the odds of such a response are significant – double a tiny number is still a tiny number. There does seem to be growing evidence that although male violence is typically far more serious when it does occur, it is indeed rare (depending on your demographic), and has been getting even rarer in recent years, while emotional abuse within relationships remains every bit as common and serious from women as from men.
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“Sexism is indeed any distinction made based on sex.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, sexism is defined as ‘Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.’ I would therefore contend that your understanding of what constitutes sexism is fundamentally flawed.
“It is my observation that physical or verbal abuse is extremely rare between genuine friends of either sex.”
Firstly, this is anecdotal evidence and in no way useful as an objective statement on how frequently or infrequently women are subjected to abuse or violence at the hands of men whom they reject sexually, regardless of whether those men were previously counted as friends, acquaintances or strangers. Secondly, the whole idea of a ‘genuine’ friendship – that is, one in which both parties care about each other as friends beyond any romantic or sexual interest – is not what we’re talking about when it comes to friendzoning. ‘Genuine’ friends cannot friendzone one another, because in that context, friendship is not a ‘zone’ to be traversed, but the basis of an existing relationship.
“The observation that men are more often physically violent than women does not in any way suggest that the odds of such a response are significant.”
I never said the odds of an individual response were always high; I said that women in general are more likely than men to be subjected to such a response, and that accordingly, we have more cause – both culturally and socially – to be wary of it as a possibility, particularly if we have experienced such reactions in the past. Fear is not always a rational reaction, but that doesn’t mean women are always wrong to be wary in situations that make them uncomfortable.
“Although male violence is typically far more serious when it does occur, it is indeed rare (depending on your demographic), and has been getting even rarer in recent years, while emotional abuse within relationships remains every bit as common and serious from women as from men.”
There are two assertions here; the former, that male violence against women is both rare and getting rarer, I reject outright. I have no idea what possible basis you can have for such a claim except ignorance, or else, possibly, a drop in recorded violence in a particular locality. If the former, there’s nothing I can do except tell you to educate yourself; if the latter, you might as well be arguing that because littering is both a traditionally rare crime in Singapore and one that shows no signs of increasing, littering both is and has always been rare everywhere. You’ve parenthesized demographics as though they’re somehow of secondary importance to the question at hand, when in fact they’re just about the only point of relevance. Some groups – some demographics – are vastly more vulnerable to abuse and assault than others. At one extreme, we have women in the Congo, where on average, according to recent research, forty-eight women are raped per hour. At the other, we have well-off, white, straight, Western ciswomen like me, who are pretty much the least vulnerable and most protected women in the world. If, therefore, you’re basing your claims about this supposed lessening of violence towards women on your first-hand knowledge of predominantly white, well-off women in a country like New Zealand, you need to understand that you’re not dealing with a representative sample of women even by the standard of your own country. And as to your second point: of course emotional abuse goes both ways, and should be treated seriously regardless of the gender of the perpetrator. But that’s a derail on the issue at hand – which, quite clearly, you haven’t grasped at all.
The ‘issue at hand’ here is “friendzoning” – and whether the term describes a genuine phenomenon of inequality of feeling and power that sometimes develops into abuse in relationships between friends , or whether it merely boils down a sexist propaganda term ultimately intended to punish the sexual non compliance of women who don’t put out.
I obviously take the former view. It really does happen that way. Quite often.
I would go so far as to say most inexperienced young men (and probably women) naively find themselves at least once in painfully investing far more in a relationship in emotional as well as material terms than will ever be returned (yes, all relationships are a transaction of sorts), with a person who knowing this, chooses to do nothing to diminish that attention. For some this painful experience is relatively brief and benign, but for others not. To deny the validity of this often transforming and always painful experience in many people’s lives, on the basis of potential for sexist / coercive application of the word on the part of a few would seem to be pretty sloppy thinking.
Yes this is anecdotal, just as your examples are, but more than once women have explained their role in this dynamic to me on the basis of ‘yes I know he is miserable, but if he is stupid enough to keep doing those things for me, I don’t see why I should stop him’. That is opportunistic abuse. Again anecdotally, this scenario describes most of the cases of friendzoning I have encountered or been part of. To their credit, many, perhaps with less of sense of entitlement, or with a greater sense of empathy, do not allow friends to feel miserable in this way for longer than necessary – once the feelings are recognized, they act decisively to end the situation. Others obviously do not see why they should bother.
Sure, across the vast range of human experience there will be people who will apply any term describing harm done, including ‘friendzoning’, in a coercive way to achieve an end, just as there are people willing to stab you in the eye for $5.00. The existence and fear of small numbers such people does not however justify abuse on anyone else’s part..
There are very few phenomena in relationships between men and women that cannot be spun as sexist by whoever feels they are losing something – if your world view requires you to see things primarily in those terms.
I say ‘so what’ – men and women are typically different in some ways, just as individuals of the same sex are atypically different from each other. Some of the differences are biological, some cultural. Poor use of stereotyping on the basis of sex alone however (i.e. making calls that are not demonstrably valid in the case of the individual concerned) is the ultimate enemy here. Not sure how you get that I misunderstand the term .
Stereotyping men as representing a physical threat when rejected, requiring pre-emptive freindzoning behaviour on the part of women is not ok.
The threat of male violence in the educated western demographic that I imagine most women reading this blog belong to ( and who seem to be using this threat as an excuse) is in fact quite low – as you seem to ungraciously accept. Justifying sex based distinctions based on examples of threat levels that thus do apply to your own situation is stereotyping of the most cynical sort.
Yes call me ignorant if it helps, but that threat levels are indeed low, and are dropping requires no serious debate – even in your (America’s) more violent society – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time. And as always, the majority of violent crime is in fact directed at men, not women.
If the statistics behind actual threat levels are not sufficient, and you feel entitled to absolute certainty, then you probably shouldnt get out of bed in the morning. Male violence is one of the less likely ways you have of being hurt. The desire to feel secure from aggression just does not cut it as a ‘get out of jail free card’ if you are meanwhile by act or omission exploiting a friend who has made the error of developing further feelings for you– sorry.
If you genuinely fear for your safety in rejecting a person who claims to love you, then you are not that person’s friend anyway – there is no friendship there to prolong for gain. By definition, this situation would be harassment , not friendzoning
I’m not American; I’m an Australian living in the UK. The fact that you assume otherwise is… interesting.
As to the rest of your points: you’ve missed mine, you haven’t addressed the fact that you don’t actually know what sexism is, and I see no further point in engaging with you.
“Sorry I’m not American; I’m an Australian living in the UK. The fact that you assume otherwise is… interesting.
As to the rest of your points: you’ve missed mine, you haven’t addressed the fact that you don’t actually know what sexism is, and I see no further point in engaging with you.”
Sorry Fozmeadows for mis attributing your nationality.- I jumped to a conclusion.
However your dismissive reply suggests a worse conclusion. You make the rather strong claim that a certain unhealthy type of relationship between men & women is a sexist myth and that the term is actually only used to punish women for rejecting men..
You then insult my comprehension of sexism altogether because it evidently differs from yours, yet see no further point in engaging – presumably so your notions of sexism can forever remain a secret, and thus evade critical analysis.
As I sit here holding my 4 month old baby girl, I hope she develops the capacity to successfully defend against sexism in all it’s insidious and debilitating forms – including the form I am witnessing here.
You’re missing the point, again. Yes, serious violence is quite rare but, you cannot know for certain that someone will react violently until they do. It is unreasonable to tell women they should not use what ever level of caution they feel necessary because the worst case probably won’t happen. It is frankly cruel to those who have been abused and have elevated caution as a result.
You’re still trying to make this out to be evil women consciously manipulating “friends” for personal gain. You have yet to provide any evidence that this happens with any regularity, let alone that it is what most people refer to as “friendzoning.” Yes, real friends do not manipulate or abuse each other. That’s practically a tautology. A very small percentage of people, both male and female, abuse others.
The vast majority of friend zone accusations are not the result of conscious manipulation, but misunderstanding. Women are not psychic, and if a guy can’t bring himself to say something he cannot blame other people for not divining his desire, intent, or private suffering.
Not everyone has the same boundaries you do. Some friends will sit up with you all night because they feel that’s what friends do, some friends feel obligated to give presents on special occasions or will drop everything to pick you up when you’re stranded. I know lots of people who do this kind of thing for people they deny sexual attraction for, even for people they don’t like very much, sometimes for total strangers. These are not necessarily clear indicators of sexual feelings.
If a woman does consciously use people for her own ends without regard for their feelings, she is a terrible person. Women like this do exists. I do not accept that a majority of instance of “friendzoning” involve that kind of manipulation.
I think you have it exactly backwards. Your defence of the ‘sexist bullshit’ claim concerning the concept of friendzoning depends entirely on an implicit assumption that most people indeed do believe that friendzoning means ‘evil women cynically manipulating’ (or words to that effect)- otherwise as a description, it would have no power to coerce.
If that is not what you think it means, please advise?.
The fact that the label can be used coercively however in no way invalidates the label or the concept behind it
There are indeed (mildly) evil women who manipulate freindships.Just as there are (mildly) evil men who manipulate freindships And this abuse is not at all uncommon.
As already explained, I doubt many people freindzone an admirer out of fear. I am not sure it is even possible by the definition you implicitly seem to accept as widespread. A person you are positively fearful of rejecting is not a friend,
My definition for friendzone is a bit more nuanced than what I take yours to be, or that you feel justifies claims of sexism. I think the term describes any unrequited lover, male or female who finds themselves in a painful holding pattern in an unequal relationship for a long time. I don’t always ascribe malice to this dynamic – it can arise out of a failure to communicate as you have said – but what I do assert is that this pattern does become abuse once those feelings do become clear yet the object of these feelings chooses not to act .
I doubt statistics on the the frequency of this abuse are kept, but I do have my own anecdotal evidence to draw on, as well as the derogatory mainstream association that has formed about those who sustain friendzone.reatiobships – for better or worse.
Do you have better evidence to the contrary?
Jesus Christ, thank so you much. That’s apparently the trend du jour with sexist trolls who want to argue that sexism itself does not exact—–much the way the comment I just replied to indicates. Money—-even assuming his figures are accurate—-does not render one rape or attack proof. The way these guys exert themselves denying sexism would actually end sexism if they devoted their efforts toward that end. The fact that they do not says volumes.
What? ! OK so if I am one of the ‘sexist trolls’ you are referring to, perhaps you had better explain exactly how or where you think I deny the existence of sexism? Or is it just that anyone who is not obsequious enough to fall in to line who merits that description?
Setting aside personal attacks for just a moment, why is it that you feel freindzoning can only be a sexist myth and not something that really happens?
Why is it either / or for you? Why can’t you accept the possibility that freindzoning exists, AND is a term that is also used to punish perfectly innocent women who happen to reject someone’s advances on occasion?
If I call a woman a ‘liar’ or a’ murderer’ am I a sexist? Do lying or murdering suddenly become mythical because I use those words to describe the actions of a woman?
If not, why is freindzoning different?
Defending this friend zone=myth assertion, and on top of that conflating belief in this assertion with belief in feminism itself would have to be a pretty major strategic blunder if credibility was at all important to you – because freindzoning is something that has been directly experienced and/or witnessed by a very large number of people (women as well as men). Enough people for the condition to be given it’s very own name.
In order to accept the assertion and to not be a sexist, you are in effect requiring a significant part of the word’s population to deny directly experienced reality. That is the kind of doublethink that erodes credibility pretty darn quickly – for you, and for whatever movement you may feel you represent.
Oh, for the love of –
“Why can’t you accept the possibility that freindzoning exists, AND is a term that is also used to punish perfectly innocent women who happen to reject someone’s advances on occasion?”
I’ve never said that friendzoning doesn’t exist – or rather, that the type of emotional scenario most commonly meant by the term ‘friendzoning’ doesn’t exist. Clearly, it does! And just as clearly, I’ve said that the term is frequently misapplied to women who don’t deserve it – an assertion which, in point of fact, constitutes a good 80% of my argument. Which is that the term itself is sexist: not that it doesn’t describe a particular scenario, but that the origins of the term are sexist, that it is applied in a sexist manner with alarming frequency, and that this is something most people who use the term casually don’t seem to realise. I’m not trying to deny your experiences: I’m saying that using the term friendzone to describe them is deeply problematic, particularly if you do so under the misguided belief that it’s a neutral, non-pejorative term (which it isn’t).
A good comparative term for these purposes is the word ‘girly’. If I say your efforts at sport are girly, or that a book is girly, I’m being insulting. Why? Because once upon a time – and still, sadly, to this day – the worst insult in the dictionary was to call someone a girl, or associate their efforts with girl-like behaviour. Obviously, this is a gendered insult, and yet because of the passage of time and its prominence in language, lots of people who believe in equality and feminism will still use it casually refer to something they dislike or disapprove of, simply because the most common usage of the word means ‘a thing that’s bad’.
I’m female. I’m a feminist. I care about language. I’ve still used the word ‘girly’ as a pejorative. So has my feminist husband. Good intentions don’t prevent us from using problematic language, any more than being female in my case – or having a daughter in yours – prevents us from sometimes doing or saying sexist things. Friendzoning is not a neutral term: like girly, it has sexist origins; like girly, its most common usage is to disparage the actions of women; and even though both have a useful, particular application – it’s not technically inaccurate to call a pink frou-frou babydoll dress ‘girly’ any more than it’s technically inaccurate to say that a particular man has been friendzoned – that doesn’t mean the terminology isn’t problematic and, ultimately, sexist.
OK, thank you. A reasoned argument.
I disagree that the term is primarily sexist in origin (in any deliberately malicious or coercive sense), though do agree that it is most often used to describe.a male feeling thwarted at inability to progress beyond friendship. Sometimes it is just a wry- ‘damn, I’ve been friend zoned’ – just like a man approaching a woman in a bar might say ‘damn, I’ve just been shot down’.. .Bad luck, move on (though this takes a certain level of worldly wisdom or detachment) … Sometimes I am sure the term is also used pejoratively, as most terms are – though I have never encountered this myself.
As far as I know this particular term for the situation described only even came into prominence recently – due the the “friends” sitcom – not a particularly nasty context .
Even if we felt there was really a serious issue in play and stopped using ‘friendzone’ again, the (English speaking) world would simply carry on using other words to describe the same thing… In fact I think any attempt to modify language seen as problematic is ultimately doomed to failure Ridding the world of language that contains stereotypical overtones would be to rid the world of language. Children in school now taunt each other as being “special needs”, “ethnically challenged” etc. The words may change, but the cruelty does not.
The only halfway successful approach to take the sting out of words seems to be to embrace rather than censure any term that is seen to be pejorative..
“The only halfway successful approach to take the sting out of words seems to be to embrace rather than censure any term that is seen to be pejorative.”
I… really, really disagree with this. And I powerfully object to the idea that there’s no point in trying to undermine stigma through watching our language, or that doing so amounts to censorship. Cruelty remains only as long as the stigma remains: girl and gay are used as insults by little kids because adults use those words casually, so that even from the youngest age, children learn that it’s right and proper to insult people on the basis of their sexuality. And if you’re using those words as insults before you even properly understand why or what they mean, then how much harder is it going to be to stop using them later, or to accept why they’re inappropriate?
Only in very rare instances is it possible to reclaim certain pejorative terms, the way gay groups reclaimed queer; mostly, it’s not a viable solution. The recent slutwalk movements were partially an effort to reclaim slut, for instance, but they failed: not all women want to relciam the word – nor should we have to – and in any case, even queer is still used as an insult by homophobes. But calling people girly, retarded, bitches, whores, sluts, slags, niggers, coons, fags, chinks; that’s not on, and I’m sure as hell not going to accept that the only way to take the sting out of those words is for the people against whom they’re used to just stop being offended by them. Not just because, as a solution, it relies on the victims accepting that their abuse is benign, but because it doesn’t involve any change in the attitudes of their abusers. Even if you could convince every woman who’s ever been called a slut that she shouldn’t find it insulting, it’s a meaningless gain unless you can also teach every person who’s ever used the term as an insult that they shouldn’t continue doing so – because otherwise, you haven’t changed the underlying problem, which is the stigmatisation of female sexuality, but merely insured that abusers can keep on insulting people with impunity. The only way to remove the insult is to remove the stigma; and to do that, you need to get rid of stigmatising language.
As for friendzoning: you consider the term benign because it isn’t used against you. Men, by and large, have that luxury – to use it in a neutral way to describe a thing that’s happened to them or their friends, sometimes pejoratively, sometimes not. But consider that pretty much the only time women hear the term, it’s being used against us. Telling a guy he’s been friendzoned can mean anything from an expression of sympathy to telling him he’s acted like an idiot; but saying to a woman – or about a woman – that her actions have put someone else in the friendzone? That is purely a pejorative, negative usage – it cannot possibly be benign, or complementary, or anything other than the observation that, either thoughtlessly or callously, they’ve caused someone else pain. And because of that, it doesn’t matter that the term can technically be used both ways – to say that a guy friendzoned a girl – because in the vast majority of cases, including the initial one on Friends, it’s the other way around. The usage is dominated by men who talk about women who’ve friendzoned them, and if you cast around online for instances of guys complaining about the friendzone, you’ll quickly run into some deeply sickening misogyny. That’s why I wrote this post: not to say that men never fall for women who only want to be friends, but to say that the language we have to describe the situation exists in the context of culturally endorsed sexism, and that replicating it unthinkingly ultimately perpetuates that sexism.
Actually I find my self agreeing with some of what you say – yes there is value in watching what we say. Basic courtesy towards any person matters, and most people have some sense of this.
Yes, much of any given stereotype is learned, but even starting from a blank slate in an incredibly complex and dangerous world we all need to snap to fast decisions, and so necessarily form rapid and simple conceptual representations of any unfamiliar thing or person we encounter based on patterns learned elsewhere – forming new stereotypes even where none previously existed . This propensity to form and maintain stereotypes hurts people (and sometimes saves people), but either way the investment and time required to not stereotype and instead consider and investigate every nuance of every unfamiliar person on their own merits before attempting to judge or predict their behaviour would be prohibitive.
Yes we can be socially trained out of certain knee jerk responses to people who we identify as ‘other’ , but we are only human and only so many incomprehensible or threatening differences in world view / behaviour etc. can be tolerated – and without genuine empathy, any training in tolerance will remain superficial.
Linguistic tinkering, and attempted suppression of expression of certain ideas mostly serves to identify those others who attempt it as exactly this kind of intolerable threat to one’s own identity, and breeds resentment and backlash at ‘political correctness’ and being told by others what it is right and wrong to think. A blind alley that hardens attitudes..
I do think the ‘answer’ to stigma and hurtful language and stereotyping lies somewhere in invoking basic human empathy – which involves exposing young people to, rather than protecting them from, a wide range of ideas and situations and traditions that parents cannot easily provide, and may not even approve of . Free access to an uncensored internet, (with all its misogynistic and other horrors) is a start. Those with brains and curiosity and a basic level of empathy will start noticing the crap for what it is. People with little real empathy will not, or will not care – and will never pay anything other than lip-service to any wider notion of right and wrong anyway, whoever defines it .
That said, thwarted male (and female) desire will continue to be described one way or another. A woman who is friendly and even intimate with a hormone charged and inexperienced and probably very shy young man generates horrible and painful internal conflict (fear, longing, love, resentment, inadequacy, unworthiness, confusion, rejection etc) for that man. It is nobody’s fault that this is the case. (unless it is knowingly prolonged)
I am sure that some will feel a need to lash back at the ’cause’ of this pain, either for themselves, or in solidarity with a friend. – though this is not uncommon behaviour for either sex and with any relationship that turns sour.
Banning a sitcom phrase won’t change our basic human need to at least symbolically ‘hit back’ at what hurt us, even where there was no crime committed. What ever your sex/race/political/cultural orientation.
It just happens that about the age when what we call freindzoning occurs, young inexperienced women are simultaneously discovering and exploring the power of their own sexuality and attractiveness.
Being just as human as men, some women of course find they enjoy the exercise and confirmation of power more than others, or find a ready source the self esteem in the attention of the opposite sex. Nothing intrinsically wrong with this, so long as tempered with empathy.
Whatever a woman’s contribution to any hurt, inexperienced young men probably make up a large proportion of those who find and contribute to forums on the topic, and so many will have this experience recently in common, and will be going though a retaliatory misogynistic phase at the time – which might explain the comments you encountered by Google searching
I was not able to duplicate your findings though (with admittedly only a few minutes of searching – perhaps because I am male, I actually detected at least as much evidence of misandry as misogyny).
Yes I accept that the freindzone concept usually involves a man being the frustrated party and so seldom involves a positive characterisation of the woman concerned, but then how could it?
Someone who feels they have been painfully thwarted by anyone in any ambition will be less than glowing, or be neutral at best, in characterising the other party. How often is it otherwise in any context?
How is a man who feels hurt and simultaneously led on and rejected (rightly or wrongly) by a woman instead supposed to characterise the relationship?
When disgruntled young men need to commiserate, what term would be more appropriate ?
For a while, some teenagers who feel thwarted or hurt will express generalised disdain for parents or teachers, characterising them as idiots, oppressors or worse. For a while some young men who feel thwarted or hurt will express disdain for women. For a while some young women who feel thwarted or hurt will express disdain for men. For most these are passing phases, feelings tempered by increasing experience and thus empathy.
.I don’t think this situation, and whatever term we use to describe it is a result of unfounded cultural prejudice. It is an accident of biology and human (in)experience and empathy at a certain stage of maturation.
For a negative characterisation focused primarily on women to never arise, either hormonal young men would have to stop being confused and hurt by friendly young women, or thwarted hormonal young women would have to just as often commiserate about the same thing.
While people are people, the facts of subtly differing biological strategies between the sexes, unequal desire, the confusion and hurt, and the need to commiserate about it can’t change.
I think you are in fact railing against the human condition.
So despite agreeing with some of your points, I struggle to see usage of the term, or the concept behind it as sexist bullshit (except in the most trivial sense of the word)
Oh, for heaven’s sake! Bullying is abusive treatment or use of force or coercion (see Webster’s). It is abuse perpetuated by someone who has power against someone who has none (e.g., a boss against an employee, a teacher against a student, a big kid against a small kid, etc.). Two adults in an adult relationship are not “bullying” each other unless one is making verbal or physical threats against the other. A girl (or guy) who doesn’t show a friend the door simply because that friend has unrequited feelings is NOT “bullying” him/her.
And as for that person bleeding in the gutter, he presumably didn’t beat himself up! If an ADULT of sound mind and body CHOOSES to remain in a friendship when he/she wants more than that, then he/she is responsible for his/her own poor decision! You do not abdicate adult responsibility just because you’re “in love”!
This forum is not well designed to handle separate threads, but…
Where do I define bullying in a way that you disagree with? In what sense is the threat of loss of hope for a future with a loved one somehow different from threat of loss of something else? I don’t want to be rude but you seem determined to make some kind of special exemption for bad behaviour in just this context for some reason. and to see only a small part of the argument at a time.
How on earth is it relevant whose fault it was that someone bleeding in the gutter got hurt if it lies within your power to prevent further hurt?
In what sense are adults exempt from taking any responsibility for the impact they have on others, irrespective of whether others happen to be making good decisions or not?
You do not abdicate your own adult responsibility just because someone else who expresses love for you but ought to know better does not.have the life experience and clear head they need to know how to interpret the mixed messages they receive from you. “I am not looking for a boyfriend right now, but if I was, someone like you would be just the right kind of guy. So in the mean time come over and massage my back”.. etc
Many shy, inexperienced young men experience something like this from a woman we have long admired desperately – and it is often only after such a painful learning process that we learn to recognize that we were actually being taken advantage of – in the nicest possible way.
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There’s NO such thing as mixed messages, jut Guys who don’t kno how to interpret the messages women send…………and that ain’t the fault of Women
Seriously, there’s NO SUCH thing as being “wrongly rejected by a Woman”. When a Girl tells a Guy no, that’s automatically right, she’s automatically justified in doing that, no matter how much alot of we Guys hate that. It’s Her choice, and Her choice alone whom she dates and beds. It doesn’t mater what her reason is. Maybe she doesn’t want to date him because He’s White, or Black, too tall, too short, not educated enough, job isn’t secure enough, he doesn’t earn enough, not good looking enough, or overweight. It’s a Girl’s choice alone whom she dates, just like it’s our choice who we decide to ask out. Seriously mate, there’s simply NO SUCH THING as being wrongly rejected by Women
“sexist use of this term and tactic” ARE the exceptions. For most, friend zoning has nothing to do with sexism, and the term is not used as a ‘tactic’.
It is simply a contemporary description for the state of unrequited love experienced by one of two people who started out as friends.
Sometimes this inequality becomes consciously exploited, sometimes not.
As a man that realizes now my role in being Friendzoned I want to add that these two comments below really sum for me my experience with women that have been exploitive in their role in the relationship:
“It is simply a contemporary description for the state of unrequited love experienced by one of two people who started out as friends.”
“Sometimes this inequality becomes consciously exploited, sometimes not.”
“Yes this is anecdotal, just as your examples are, but more than once women have explained their role in this dynamic to me on the basis of ‘yes I know he is miserable, but if he is stupid enough to keep doing those things for me, I don’t see why I should stop him’. That is opportunistic abuse. Again anecdotally, this scenario describes most of the cases of friendzoning I have encountered or been part of. To their credit, many, perhaps with less of sense of entitlement, or with a greater sense of empathy, do not allow friends to feel miserable in this way for longer than necessary – once the feelings are recognized, they act decisively to end the situation. Others obviously do not see why they should bother.”
I have recently had two occasions to witness firsthand these differences in the style two women:
1. A good friend (British) of five years, whereby we began a sexual relationship and she quickly realized it did not work for her at which point she was clear, concise and direct – AND therefore I could quickly take a big step back for two months and remain good friends.
2. A friend (an American) of two years – whereby at the two year point I initiated sexual contact and she reciprocated. After 2-3 weeks she stopped the overt sexual relating but continued to tease, openly receive gifts, lean on me emotionally and even arrange for us to go away for a two day weekend, and we did not make love during the trip, although we mutually enjoyed the travel together.
After the trip and repeated advances by me she was not clear with me about her sexual feelings, and we continued to lovingly spend time together, including significant physical contact, but not sexual contact. After four more weeks I confronted her, and it was only at the time of confrontation that she stated that she never ‘felt me in her heart’ as a lover.
I find it untenable to be friends with #2, because of her lack of communications, clarity, and integrity in not expressing to me clearly her lack of heart feelings, especially since I expressed my love for her very early on.
This behavior I view as an “opportunistic abuse”, for example if I had know how she felt in her heart, I would never have taken her away for a long weekend, and simply remained friends, without such a generous gift and romantic/sexual expectations. She prolonged sharing her truth for gain emotionally, egotistically, and materially, when she knew she had no genuine interest in me sexually from the perspective of a heart connection.
To further reinforce the example, I have now learned she is dating 3-5 other men, and a few of them are I judge not men she is interested romantically, due to the age difference, but nonetheless she accepts gifts, concert invites, helicopter rides etc. from them.
The clarity and integrity that number 1 displayed to me, versus the lack of clarity and usurious of number 2 has been a big lesson for me in the way I have to sometimes demand clarity early on from a potential lover so that all parties are running on the same understandings and one party or the other is not left disappointed because their expectations of a sexual relationship are not met.
“If for some reason your relationship with a person—a woman, you mean—-causes them the pain of unrequited love…..
Er, no. YOUR feelings are YOUR feelings. YOU handle them. YOU take off. You’re making her the one at fault. Specifically, you’re blaming her. The mature thing to do is take responsibility for yourself and manage your own emotions.
I agree with that; the mature thing for him to do is, indeed, deal with them on his own. Heh, 9/10 times I’m usually yelling at a guy to either take a dump or get off the pot (and I have far more female friends than male friends). Little known fact: Men are just as good about denial as women. (Sorry, I know, I broke the code)
That said, if the woman is aware of it wouldn’t she want to at least force an honest conversation on the point? Honestly, she should want to do this for her OWN sake — letting any problem fester never ever ends well, especially one involving emotions and such.
That said, if the woman is aware of it wouldn’t she want to at least force an honest conversation on the point? Honestly, she should want to do this for her OWN sake — letting any problem fester never ever ends well, especially one involving emotions and such.
Sadly, no. Far too may women are used to the response to an honest conversation like that being an accusation of “bitch!” It takes a lot of inner nerve for a woman to bring that conversation to the boiling point, and say, “look, you don’t do it for me. I like hanging out with you, but nothing’s going to happen. Put it down to my bad taste in guys, if you want. But don’t hope.”
Especially if, maybe, she read the signals wrong. And then gets told, “Uh, I wasn’t that into you.” Granted, that’s the best case scenario. The worst cases are the ones cited above. But women can’t read minds (despite some of the other commenters over at GoodReads saying that YES WE CAN, YOU KNOW. YOU KNOW WE LIKE YOU!)… we really don’t. Not for sure. Sometimes it sounds like (sounds like, but isn’t, I know) we either have the choice of either assuming *every* guy must want us even if they say nothing (and how self-centered is that?) or assuming every guy that doesn’t hit on us is taken, gay, or finds us repulsive.
Anyway, wandering back to the point…. which was the term, “Friend Zone.” The first time I heard it? Was Ross and Joey talking about Rachel on Friends. “You waited too long, and now you’re in the Friend Zone.” In that instance, the blame was put on Ross for not making his intentions clear (which, there were a lot of (some pretty good) reasons, including his very recent divorce, insecurity, and Rachel getting over her break-up with here fiance; it didn’t change that Rachel didn’t see him as a romantic prospect after a few months of platonic hanging-out). Later, Chandler revealed his crush to Rachel, who was amazed, and mentioned that he’d mentioned a date *once*, then never followed up on it.
This is the least sexist, least damaging use of Friend Zone. You missed your window. You meet someone, you don’t reveal interest, you fall into a rut of non-interest. Could happen to either party, for any reason. (Of course, it assumes there is only *one* window, as per Romantic Comedy Conventions. And less explicitly, that it’s the guy’s window to aim for. Which is silly.)
The way it gets used too often– as Foz mentions — puts all the supposed choices in the woman’s hands; assumes knowledge on the woman’s part that may not be there; assumes that the guy deserves better treatment without explicitly asking for it (Because how do we know he doesn’t want to hang out and watch basketball without sex? Some guys like basketball!); assumes that his good treatment will be rewarded with sex/romance; assumes that women are only interested in good treatment in friends, not from romantic partners. You can see the problems with these assumptions up front. They’re all generalizations.
Because on the other side, women are not painted as being allowed to express preferences, needs, emotions first. They are not meant to pursue guys. (Yes, I know it’s the 21st Century– but it’s still viewed negatively). If they do, they get labeled Psycho, not Nice. Desperate, not confident. Girls do not, supposedly, get friend-zoned; guys are always willing to have sex with their friends! (even if they’re not.) Therefore, if she’s rejected, she must be Ugly. And we all understand that guys aren’t obligated to have sex with an Ugly Girl, no matter how Nice she is– right? Think of “Bridesmaids”. Which woman was the butt of the Overly Assertive Jokes?
These Friend Zone generalizations are *generally* more damaging to women than to men. It paints women as telepathic, manipulative, withholding of affection/sex that they are not allowed to withhold, with bad taste in guys. These generalizations paint men as sex-deserving, decent! really decent! we swear!, but ultimately wimpy and then bitter. Neither gender is actually like this; but it’s a myth that makes it harder for both sides to cope, and a phrase that cements lots of assumptions.
That’s the point, I guess. (Mine, anyway, I won’t speak for Foz.) Friend Zone is a term with some heavily loaded implications for guys, that is offensive to women because it sets us up yet again as the prize for good behavior. not being Barbie Dolls or Blow Up Dolls, this is problematic.
C.
I think the term itself is not old enough to have evolved strong connotations of blame in one particular direction. ANY discussion where men are being rejected by women risks a response of “bitch!”, this particular scenario included.
It is a very slippery slope indeed if we disapprove of words simply because they might been seen to cement this risk. All words , and the very existence of men and women, act to cement this risk.
Yes some men act like pricks when rejected.
It genuinely astonishes me however that women
A) do get that ‘bitch’ response frequently and live and apparently act in fear of it even when they are the ones that act to reduce pain by confronting and forestalling a case of suspected male infatuation. Except where the situation has been genuinely manipulated and prolonged beyond all endurance, a guy who has indeed allowed himself to fall into the freindzone is likely far too shy and inexperienced to EXPECT anything, (hope is not expectation) let alone to react that way or to do anything other than curse themselves for those unrealistic hopes.
and B) that women claim to not, or genuinely do not recognize that sustained male attention very very VERY frequently does correspond to development of some level of romantic interest – and vice versa.
I would suggest that this interest, and its manifestation through acts of kindness and attention is intrinsic to the nature of people rather than a special case that women should not be expected to anticipate. Such behaviour and hope is sexist in only the sense that all other wooing behaviour is sexist.
The subset of situations where infatuation this does not occur on some level between men & women I would judge to be limited to those cases where both already have other romantic interests, or genuinely find each other unattractive but otherwise interesting.
Again I think the friendzoning term is copping a lot of unjustified criticism. This newly minted word is a relativity innocent bystander, and one that.at most reflects one aspect of an age old struggle.
I was pleasently surprised to find this blog post! Everywhere I go, I am hearing about ‘friendzoning’ and other related topics, and YES I always hear about them from males.
Before I continue, lets get one thing straight: some men are assholes and some women are bitches. On the flipside, there are some really respectable women and men. And everyone is either one at some point in their life. Simply put: neither gender is better than the other.
The fact of the matter is that we live in a world where we are sold the idea that men and women ‘complete’ eachother. Women deserve a ‘good man’ who will provide for them — as long as they are pretty, complient and entertaining enough. Men deserve a ‘good woman’ who will please them — as long as they are fit and ‘nice’. Pretty sad, right? Women are pound puppies who should consider themselves lucky to be taken home by ‘a nice guy’.
Yes, that scenario DOES NOT apply to every male/female relationship. There are guys who are very respectful to their love interests — these are the ones who respect her decision even if it means being friends. There are girls who exercise their independence and right to choose her companion based on her own wants and needs — these are the ones who are labelled cruel and heartless bitches. The same goes for vice versa where the man chooses friendship and the woman respects this (or when two of the same gender are involved, you get the picture).
Let’s take a sec and let me say that this is NOT a pity party for females worldwide. Life is unfair to everyone in different ways and this is how our society is unfair to women. If women want a change, we have to stop relying on the damsel in distress routine and assert our ability to think for ourselves. And many women around the world are doing just that, now we just need the rest of the world to do the same.
I agree one hundred percent with this blogger that protesting a person’s decision to cultivate a friendship instead of a romantic or sexual relationship is totally disrespectful. And yes, if you don’t respect a person you really really should stay the f*** out of their lives — you can do no good there except possibly teach them to stay away from people with as little interest in their opinion as you. There is no bartering, take it or leave it.
What I’m getting at is that we all have the right to choose our companions based on what are wants and needs are in this period of our lives. We change as we grow and our needs differ from one stage in our lives to another. Sure, he’ll buy her pretty presents and compliment her outfit and hold her when she’s sad. But, maybe what she needs right now is someone who shares her love for journalism, and will remind her that she’s stronger than that when she begins to feel sorry for herself, and will be there to share the bliss of “do nothing” sundays after they both bust their a**es at school. And when they move on to another stage of life they will both need something different — maybe the way they grow will allow them to continue to fit each other’s needs and maybe not. And life goes on. Maybe what she needs is to practise standing on her own two feet and to explore her inner strength ON HER OWN.
So, to all the whining victims of unrequited love: cry a bit. . . and move on. There’s no denying that it hurts, but if you respect the other person and most of all if you respect YOURSELF you will learn to grow from these experiences and appreciate the love that you have in your life (be it romantic or platonic) because there are precious few in this world who are lucky enough to realize the gift of love at all.
Absolutely agree – except where the unrequited love is exploited – either to extend a sense of friendship with, or control over, somebody who is clearly hurting but too inexperienced to recognize the situation and detach on their own
A true friend would act on clear signals of unrequited love by being unambiguous in word and in deed that friendship is all that is possible. When this does not occur, and pain is *deliberately* prolonged by the person holding the ‘whip hand’, then this is abuse. I have witnessed this several times personally, and have been present when the women (yes , sadly, it happened to be woman in every case I witnessed) laughed with each other, or me over the stupidity of the poor sap who was too dumb to know when they were being ‘taken for a ride’.
An unnecessarily cruel way to impart experience that probably does color some men’s subsequent poor attitudes towards women.
I hasten to point out that most women are decent and DO try to do right thing in these cases. An young inexperienced men (and women) can be quite dim in these matters, genuinely incapable of comprehending how their actions are being perceived.
But it would be wrong to dismiss the cases where that is not true, and abuse is indeed occuring as evidence of male sexist interpretation.
Agreed Ginmar, but managing your emotions requires emotional maturity and confidence…….something whiny, pussy, clingy, desperate, low self esteemed, loser “Nice Guys” have little of
If I’m the ‘love-sick’ person in a situation, then I’m the one with the power to help myself. If you’re waiting for those who are objects of infatuation to be perfect and always do the ‘right’ thing, you’ll be waiting forever. ‘Friendzone’ implies victimhood with the blame being on the person who had no choice in becoming the object of your affection.
Nope its rather simple, the guy likes the girl, then the girl friendzones the guy, the guy goes on with his life staying in contact with her while she dates asshole after asshole, gets abused, even has a few babies out of these loser nobodies who wont surmount to anything in life, complain none stop about guys she openly chooses to date and then when all is said and done and the nice guy is rich, sucessful and happy.
She will come back when shes a used burlap sack with nothing to offer and say to the guy “Its taken me so long to realise that over so many years your the guy thats stuck by me, the one whos always cared about me through thick and thin, its taken so long but now i know that i truely do love you, more than a friend.
In her head though it will be like this: “Ive had so much fun fucking so many bad boys even through the pain but it was worth it and now i even have a baby through one of them but i think its time i settled down with a sucessful guy whos money i can spend but dont pretend to love and live happily ever money filled after, oh wait what about the guy i friendzoned, he fits the bill lets go approach him with what i said above.
Now sucessful friendzoned guy: “Get the fuck out of my face you ugly fucking hobo, i got a girl who i love and its no way in hell, YOU.
What a load of stunningly sexist drivel. The only reason I didn’t delete this comment is because it so perfectly proves my point.
Sexist Drivel, my left testicle, its quite a clear point on how shallow and stupid women can be, oh and if you didnt get my point before i said that the sucessful guy who got the good girls that are out there, in the end learned from these retarded women that patience and perserverance pays off in the end, at no point did i say that all women are hoes that just need a good romping or something completely sexist like that did i? i told a story about how some guys that make mistakes can learn from them and not make the same mistake that they did in the past.
So in others words, quote from Family Guy by Peter Griffin: “You just got torched man, you just got torched.”
p.s. delete all this if you want but damn i know when to drop it like its hot.
Seriously? If you can’t see why talking about the shallowness and stupidity of women is sexist, then I really can’t help you.
Yes, nothing says intelligent like a guy who dismisses women ad stupid and shallow and uses ‘retarded’ as a slur. You’re not gettin’ it because you refuse to get it.
What gets me about these guys is that they are in fact, the guy they’re talking about—–the bad guy asshole she winds up dating. See above as to why.
For fozmeadows
The shallow and stupidity of women is sexist, you are quite clearly a feminist moronic dumb fuck who thinks that your high and mighty and above every man dont you, the type that think equality for women shouldnt be equal but you think that you have a god given right to be more higher than men dont you, your replies say it all, you have a tunnel mind and thats it, SOME WOMEN, NOT ALL, let me repeat SOME WOMEN are like that shit for brains, and no thats not directed at women its actually directed at you personally and only to you you narrow minded jackass.
And for Ginmar Rienne:
No i am not the bad boy type, i absolutely positively hate the bad boy type, the asshole is just a use and abuse type and then after he gets what he wants he just leaves, if i recognise a bad boy on the street then i would punch him, floor him and say to the police that he fell. Me, my cousin and my bestfriend always say how we hate them.
Plus i dont do scientific tests jackass im a journalist with an opinion, “oh my god, he has an opinion, hes not following the crowd, oh my god, hes not like any other quiet person thats afraid to speak his mind because it might hurt someones feelings.
Yes i am that type, if i have an opinion i speak it, plus i dont need a women to validate me on how sucessful or how happy i am in my life, i have great friends, great family and a great career so far, and i am just waiting patiently on the right girl to come a long so i can welcome her into my life and treat her well and she will treat me well, we will flirt have a great time and i can show her off to my friends and family about how great she is, im not a believer in the one, i believe that relationships work on the contribution of both people, a 50/50 and thats how a relationship is a budding one.
I happily await both your replies to this, so go on, enlighten me.
Aw, diddums? Need a nap? Or a nappie?
Seriously, nothing is more HIlarious than watching these tools spit and froth while they detail all the trials they’ve suffered at the hands of coughI’msuretotallyreal women cough before they found The One (in the back pages of a sticky magazine they keep under their bare mattress) and pumped her full of air.
Also, Einstein, the word you’re looking for is… you’re. Not your.
Oh, God, he says he’s a journalist! Oh, I missed that! Hahahahaha!
lol really, your really reduced to commenting about my spelling mistakes, wow round of applause for the genius that uses “dismisses women ad stupid” the word your looking for is AS not ad so yeah Einstein just admit you got rick rolled as my best friend would say and sit there and shut up.
The responsibilities of the world are going to be put on people like you, wow i feel sorry for the world.
And yeah before you play the masturbation card, yes i do, so fucking what, your trying to tell me that you dont? If you dont then you got a serious case of swelled up balls and i pity you, plus your 100% bullshitting.
I rest my case on hopeless morons like you.
Hahahaha! There’s a difference between an obvious typo, moron, and pure misogynistic gleeful stupid. You’re about as much a journalist as you are a guy with a girlfriend. Women don’t date you because your hatred of women—-and, well, your inadequacies with language—–are, in order: hostile and offputting. You hate women. Women do not want to date men—-or boys, as I suspect the issue really is here—–who hate women. Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
lmao so you meant to write ad instead of as, shut your mouth you stupid idiot, you have been owned and just cant take it, its getting pretty pathetic now.
You’re heaping abuse on women you don’t know, using language like ‘dumb-fuck’. You ARE the ‘bad boy’ type in the sense that you display disrespect to strangers and to women. I’m glad you’re happy in your life. I hope that’s true, though it seems you’re also very angry. You should look at your behaviour though before deciding what you are and are not. If you don’t want to be cast as a ‘bad boy’ or ‘arsehole’, stop acting like one.
Nothing says ‘boyfriend material’ like an asshole who doesn’t read the post and then repeats every sexist myth that sexists like to warm themselves with at the bitter fire of their frustration. “Why won’t anybody fuck meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?” they cry to the heavens as they do nice things for a girl without telling her that he’s decided she owes him a fuck.
And of course we have to depend on these jealous sexists for accuracy when they start the drill about abusive losers. If they’re that eager to read, I’m sure they’re that eager to interview both guy and girl and take notes and conduct scientific tests.
She never came back and gave you that satisfaction did she?
Anger is a terrible burden to hold onto. Not sure who this woman was that rejected you, but forgiveness sets us free.
It’s always “Nice Guys” like this that are the shallow ones, not the Women who tell them they won’t date them. The response of overgrown High School Boy “Nice Guys” when confronted by attractive Women is what exactly? To throw themselves at their feet in adoration of them, for their looks and bodies, and smother them with compliments in regards to it. “Why are you so beautiful?”, “Do you know know you’re gorgeous?”, “I’d treat you like a Princess if you were mine”, “Are you a model?”, “if you have a Boyfriend, he’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lucky”. All without not knowing a damn thing about her, all after meeting her 20 seconds earlier, and ALL BASED ON NOTHING BUT HER LOOKS AND BODY. Yet somehow according to these overgrown juvenile delinquents and walking knobs…………….Women are apparently the shallow ones??? Work that one out
I agree that freindzoning exist in both genders. However it is more prevalent in women. To begin, I think you misunderstand men. Straight men DO NOT want to be friends with women, generally speaking. Men find that other males are most suitable for friendships. I personally wouldn’t even talk or associate with women if it wasn’t for sex. Let’s take a moment and reflect on that point. Do I think men are superior to women? Am I just another typical douche bag? No, not at all!! Let’s pretend we are all asexual, men and women dont need eachother for reproduction. Do you think we would have anything to do with one another?? Men and women are completely different. I have little to NOTHING in common with women. All of my non sexual needs are met by other males. Males seek Male comradery not female friendship. So now that we have that out of the way. Most girls (not trying to be stereotypical) shit on a nice guy. Guys wouldn’t come up with this shit if women didn’t cry all the time: “omg, I just want to meet a nice guy”, “I want a honest and caring man”, right after they get fucked and chucked by some douche bag. Women are legendary for thinking they want what they don’t want. The fact is women want to be IN LOVE more than they want to be LOVED. They might not think that on paper. But in reality it’s the way it is. Most women need to be dominated. It might not be what they think they want but its what they need, trust me they eat that shit up. Nice guys finish last because a woman wants a ALPHA male not a BETA pussy ass nice boy. I laugh at nice guys!! But I feel sorry for them. Because if it wasn’t for women like you!! There wouldn’t be guys like me in this world coming along to fuck you, dump you, or make you submit to MY WILL. That nice guy who wants to be friend despite your lack of seeing him as a romantic interest. Is probably the best man you will ever find if your honest about the whole “All I want is a caring and loving man” sob story bullshit. If the freindzoning is bullshit, then that is bullshit!! If you want a guy who will spend loads of time with you, talk to you for hours on the phone, or simply e genuinely interested in things you are.. A nice guy will be the only place you will get that treatment. Now for the apologetics. This does not apply to ALL WOMEN. This applies to a certain type of women that is extremely prevalent these days. Bottom line, women and men cannot be REAL friends. It doesn’t work!! Because when a man shows interest in a woman it’s because he likes you.
Sir, you have described what i have thought perfectly and i thank you, you deserve a knighthood for your services to men and women everywhere, take a bow son.
“Men generally don’t want to be friends with women.”
Yeah, so you only want to fuck women and can’t understand why Foz and I keep nailing you for it.
Friendzoning exists only in the minds of men who have just one use for women usually won’t admit it.
And neither of you get to say squat about women because you’re both so utterly ignorant—and it’s self chosen, so you can justify using women and then blaming women.
Well we just said and typed what we need to say, this guy above proved my point about bad boys and stupid women who go for them, their stupid enough to go for them then let them, as the old saying goes:
“When your with a player, get ready to get played.”
I might hate what type of guy he is which is a bad boy, but i admire his straight forward way of saying stuff, he isnt an ass kissing, approval seeking tool like some people (hint hint).
You hate women but you still want to fuck them. And you hate that women won’t fuck you because you’re a scumbag. The problem is not women not fucking you, it’s you being such a sleaze.
And….”their”….and “your”?
Comment deleted by Foz for misogyinistic abuse of another commenter. Also, Yasser, take note – keep this sort of thing up, and you’ll be permanently banned.
Then get the fuck off my blog, because guess what? I’m a woman! And you’re talking to me! And as I’d rather swallow cyanide before coming within a hundred miles of you, let alone anything else, this conversation is pointless.
Wow. You’re awful. And sad. Probably more sad, really.
“Do I think men are superior to women?”
-Obviously yes since no woman is naturally worthy of your time and friendship due to her ownership of a vagina.
“Am I just another typical douche bag?”
-DING DING DING YUP. WE HAVE A WINNER! YES’SIR’REE YOU ARE!
“Men and women are completely different. I have little to NOTHING in common with women.”
-Considering you have no interest in getting to know women outside of putting your penis in them via your own admission no wonder you have nothing in common with them. Either you could take women off of the magical cloud you’ve put them on and try to, oh I don’t know, talk to one like a person. Or possibly lift one up out of the mire of “only worthy to stick a weenie in” and dare I say Allow them the grace of your friendship for five fucking minutes to realize they’re the same damn species as you with the same thoughts, feelings and interests.
But nope, the only time you acknowledge a women in your personal space is if you want to fuck them! Other women who are not “worthy” of your penis time are completely disregarded as human beings altogether and not even worthy of basic respect of your TIME OR KINDNESS based on what you’re saying here.
The real issue “Nice guys” like you have with “Women like that” is
1) 99.9% of the time these “Women just looking for a nice guy but date assholes” don’t actually exist and the guy you think is a douchbag to her is only a douchebag because he’s putting his penis in her and you’re not.
and
2) YOU’RE NOT A NICE GUY.
Any.
ANY
AAAANNNYYYYYYY
Guy who says the word “Friendzoned” about a girl he genuinely likes doesn’t GENUINELY give a shit about her and lo’ and behold IS AN ASSHOLE.
Period.
The end.
No, sorry this discussion is over.
There’s no amount of “But I was there for her’s” and “I just love her so much” that can make up for the fact that you, honestly and completely, do not respect her (or any women) enough to both respect her decisions and choices (whatever they may be) and to just appreciate her company as a human being.
She, will always be “The thing I want to put my penis in” and NOTHING MORE by admission of being dejected by “Friendzoning”
I was really hoping that at some point the vast majority of the (male) commentators on this thread were all going to rip off their masks off to reveal Enlightened, sensitive, fair-minded people who were only taking on the personae of pathetic, self-pitying, sub-literate misogynists for the purposes of satire.
As this hasn’t been forthcoming, I’m going to have to say some things.
Guys. (And I do mean guys.) Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you all?
Is it really necessary for me to re-state the obvious, i.e. do we really have to go through this again?
Sigh. Okay. Let’s start with the easy:
In any situation involving romantic/erotic feelings, it’s possible that someone (and not only *you*) will feel hurt/confused/unhappy et cetera. Happens. Goes with the territory. Rains on the just and the unjust alike. Doubtless sucks, i.e. is sub-optimal. Unfortunate. Possibly worth writing a song about, as long you have the requisite abilities. Or a poem as long as you don’t publish it. And it isn’t sexist (or isn’t necessarily sexist) to feel…sad about the time that you loved but were not loved. But, then no-one, least of all Foz, has been saying this.
What is sexist, what is undeniably, chillingly sexist, is to feel *indignant* at what you perceive as rejection and then to express this (in itself never justifiable) indignation in the form of a complaint that you’ve been the victim of some kind of (apparently) society-wide conspiracy which regularly inflicts suffering upon men (poor dears!) as punishment for their niceness [sic!]. And it’s not only sexist, but incredibly, creepily, spine-chillingly *misogynist* to talk about sex and romance in a language of debts and obligations, to moan about ‘all those women’ who won’t return [sic] a guy’s ‘investment’ , who “lead you on”, without ever giving you what (you seem to think) is the only thing a man could ever want from a woman.
Can you really not see what’s wrong with this? The whole desert thing, i.e. this shocking sense of entitlement, disappointment, demand, demand, demand? The sense of women as vacuums who can only be redeemed if and only if they respond “appropriately” to a guy by sleeping with him in return for a minimum of attention/or for a socially appropriate number of *gifts*? The notion (always implicit and sometimes explicit in these comments) that it is a *waste-of-time* to talk to (let alone listen to) a woman/ to be friendly or courteous, unless you knew you were going to “cash-in” at some time in the future? The idea that you have basically been -betrayed- if you’ve spent time with someone who turns out to lack a romantic or sexual interest in you??!? Can you really think these things? Can you really say and think things like this and still maintain that -you- are a moreover a victim (cough) of your own excessive niceness? I mean, really, where do you get the definition of the word nice? I would have thought, to start with, that like most vaguely positive attributes, being ‘nice’ isn’t a trait whose existence you can assign to yourself on the basis of your own self-perception. It’s surely, like charisma, something that requires people other than yourself to see it, if it is to exist.
The very fact that you talk about a friendship ‘zone’ as if it’s a concentration camp, rather than something that, like all friendship, should be a privilege and a joy (something that makes life worth living) is telling. As is your tendency to consistently *ignore* any question of how a woman might feel in any of the situations describe (i.e. being confronted by a guy who feels ‘cheated’ when she doesn’t want to sleep with him despite their prior acquaintance) while treating your own feelings, especially those of hurt and “righteous” indignation as if these were the only possible criterion for justice.
Can you really not see that it’s a step-up, even from your previous epic-level of misogyny to then whip yourself into a frenzy of resentment over the myth that women reject you in favour of these fictional “Bad Boys” (by which you presumably mean men who would treat women even more badly than someone who takes every act of courtesy or friendliness from a man to a woman as something that engenders an obligation in the latter that must be paid, if it is not to be used as evidence for the thesis (beloved by the long history of misogyny) that the Evil of Woman knows no bounds?
Why can’t you see what’s wrong with all of this? Why must you keep protesting that, contrary to all available evidence, that you are sweet and lovely people who have only been made to sound like petulant, entitled, misogynists by the misconstructions of others, or the *cough* Great Feminine Conspiracy to Deny you your apparent Divine Right of having women to service your desires….
Putting this all into context: I’d never heard the term ‘Friendzone’ prior to reading this post, or at least had never known what it meant. If I had heard the term before, I would have assumed that it was either the name of a Christian youth group or a particularly seedy Internet dating website who’s name burst into the universe through nothing but the force of the Law that Dodgy-Loves–Euphemism. In any case, because of my ignorance to this term and its usage, I’m not sure whether I could have judged, on the original post alone, whether I thought that Foz was right about this phenomena (although I suspected that she was from, you know, the reasoned argument and the evidence and stuff.)
However, after reading the comments on this thread, I then started to find similar comments/blog posts all over the internet. So much of…..this stuff:
“I talked to her for hours [gasp! a mere woman? How did you stand it? What was in it for you?] and there wasn’t any sex forthcoming! It was such a waste of my time! Oh, the betrayal!”
I’ve found similar remarks to these on similar threads all over the internet, but for some reason particularly in the milieu of Geekery. I do not know why this is, but it is appalling and must stop. The first step is calling out (as Foz has done) the implications of the term and its usage. The second is to refuse to tolerate the various sophistries perpetrated in defense of this notion (i.e. “But I once suffered.” Yes. And.so.what? The point is not ‘does love hurt?’ , but ‘does the fact that you, and a few, curiously like-minded men felt that you were injured in some romantic/erotic matter, justify the creation and dissemination of a sexist myth in which women are portrayed as not only capricious and cruel, but as having no minds or feelings of their own by which they might be capable of making autonomous, rational decisions about who they want to sleep with, but are instead consigned to merely reacting according to the Ineluctable Evil of the Feminine.
Enough. Desist and do this no more.
-Mal
Commented deleted for vile misogynistic abuse. Yasser, you’re now banned. All further comments of yours will be deleted.
OK, there are some fairly clear demonstrations of mysogeny (and difficulty with articulation) in some of the comments here, that I wont bother to defend – but I would like to think this is a noisy minority rather than representative in any way of my sex.
. I would also like to re-state what I think was meant in case it goes some way to explaining (if not justifying) the reactions.
The fundamental hurt inspiring such opinions seems to arise when a young women engages in what is nearly indistinguishable from courtship behaviour with a young and inexperienced man, mildly rejects him in some way, then demonstrates behaviour indistinguishable from interest again, in a prolonged, painful, repeating cycle.
We are talking about young men (probably virgins) who are typically less than usually sensitive to social norms and cues here – aka “geeks”. Perhaps through inexperience alone, or due to their positioning on the Asperger’s spectrum
There is just no way, if you are an even moderately attractive woman, to be ‘just friends’ with young men who are simultaneously at the most naive, and at the most sexually driven and desperate point in their lives. There just isn’t.
Years and life experience and a few ‘notches on the belt’ are required before many if not most men can chill out enough to interpret a friendly smile as just that (and to know much earlier when to run a mile if they detect there is some kind of abusive manipulation involved),
That said, we all still get to chose how we deal with that horrible push-pull tension. Blowing off steam amongst fellow sufferers would seem to be one of the better ways, surely?
dude. straight up props to you man 😀 your comment makes so much sense. i never thought of myself in the friendzone and got seriously tired of my friends bitching about it and tried to reason with them. all that got me was a black eye and a very sore pair of fists. there is no such thing as the friendzone, its all a matter of perception. too bad we cant print this out and hand every butthurt male on the street one eh? lol
Seriously? I consider myself a moderately attractive woman, and a few years ago, I lived with a same-age male friend for a year–based on the fact that we had HAD a conversation about the very fact that neither of us had any romantic interest in the other. We were friends. Your assertion that guys “who are simultaneously at the most naive, and at the most sexually driven and desperate point in their lives” can’t be friends with a woman, is completely ignorant and sexist.
Add to which, the fact that rape and other forms of violence against women (one of the things you were asserting your opinion about earlier), are under-reported everywhere, apart from the consistent frequency that exists.
“blowing off steam amongst fellow sufferers” is also the excuse that starts riots, lynch mobs, etc.
You don’t seem to understand the very basic fact that the term “friendzone” puts all the blame on the person not returning feelings. And that the term “friendzone” is rarely if ever used among women, at least as far as I’ve experienced (and since you’re so keen on anecdotal evidence to support your own conclusions, surely you’ll allow me the same courtesy?). It implies that people who can’t read minds, or who are scared to cause tensions in their social group, or who don’t want to be endangered by the person in question, are evil manipulative creatures.
You seem to also think that sexism, particularly of the anti-female variety, is only bad for women. It’s honestly bad for everyone. Because, even taking your hypothetical into consideration, it’s the sexist structures in the way society teaches people that leads your “inexperienced” and “socially awkward” young man to walk down this stupid road of “nice guy” and “friend zone.”
I don’t know your situation, or what your male friend/flat mate was thinking as opposed to saying, but the fact that it came up for you both in conversation suggests that a romantic possibility was at least out there before being rejected. Your friend may also have been unusually worldly wise for his age, attracted to someone else, or simply attracted by different characteristics – but however mutual disinterest was achieved in this case, I can say with confidence that pure platonic friendship (with no secret hopes or desires) is not typical of single male female interaction.
To describe me (or anyone) as ‘completely ignorant’ for asserting so would be to reject the direct experience of a great many people. To describe me is sexist is fine – as I have said before we are by definition ALL sexists in a trivial sense whenever we attempt to make distinctions based on gender . That doesn’t make doing so wrong – so long as the limitations of any generalisation are understood.
Describing me as sexist is sexist – you are implicitly assuming my comments spring from male prejudice rather than observation of reality.
I doubt suppressing the blowing off of steam amongst fellow sufferers in any situation is unlikely to result in better outcomes – but what do you suggest would work?
“Friendzone ‘ obviously means something else to you than it does to me. I don’t think it is a disparaging term because ‘blame’ is not even an applicable concept except in that subset of freindzone cases when attraction is deliberately exploited or knowingly prolonged.
I think your grasp of the social conditioning of males is incomplete if you think we are typically nice guys for any cynical transactional reason, or that we typically feel a sense of entitlement. Men are nice to women they fancy generally because they in fact like the girl and want to woo her (i.e. win, not buy, her affection). I hope you won’t claim woman don’t behave differently in order to win men they fancy?
Male friends don’t tend to need or expect wooing behaviour from each other – our relationships with each other are typically based on camaraderie and shared interests rather than emotional intimacy and thoughtfulness (there are always exceptions to any generalisation),
It genuinely astonishes the inexperienced amongst us that women (if we have decided that it is not after all sexist to generalise here – or maybe it is only sexist if men do it?) might fail to recognize wooing behaviour for what it is.
Any bitterness that emerges once the hopelessness of any suit finally sinks in to hormone addled and love sick young brains is likely about a sense of having been used, or even laughed at – whether rightly or wrongly (and I have certainly witnessed overt, unambiguous abuse, more than once, as well as more benign incomprehension).
As I said.how one chooses to deal with this is what matters – sharing war stories with sympathetic friends of the same sex being one of the better ways to process and move on from an unhealthy, prolonged and painful relationship, and hopefully, with the benefit of hard experience, towards a healthier more equal one next time: there are a lot of fantastic women out there,
Are you seriously proposing that asking men to instead bottle this up, denying or minimising the very existence of a situation where certain women ARE in fact behaving badly, and even suppressing the language used to share these experiences would make the world a safer place for women?
By al means challenge unjustified assertions, whoever makes them, but don’t spin the act of describing this situation as some kind of intrinsically sexist villainy.
I think it’s only possible to say that ‘friendzone’ means different things for different people.
Personally, I have used the phrase when I have got close to someone and then that person doesn’t want to jeopardize the relationship. Not their fault. I didn’t have an expectation that I deserve to be in a relationship – only a hope. In my experience the chances of becoming romantically involved decrease when you become close friends with someone (others may disagree) and when you are seeking an intimate relationship with someone there is a balancing act. Although you want to be as close as you can to that person, because you have feelings for them it is best not to become very close until both parties know each others intention. I would use friendzone when I have become closer to a person without knowing if they could have similar feelings and then finding out that they do not share any intimate feelings.
I have to say I have also friendzoned others. I have spent large amounts of time with woman not realizing that they had feelings for me while I have talked about other romantic endevours. Only later do I realize that they have romantic feelings for me. So I don’t see it as a one way street (although this scenario is in the minority).
However, I do recognize what the article is talking about in others. So called ‘nice guys’ who simply do not understand that there is not a box ticking in trying to ‘win’ a womans affection and resent woman, as well as other men.
In regard to what some people have been posting about ‘bad boys’ etc. I am a fairly confident, loud character and I hope it doesn’t seem conceited to say that I am considered the ‘funny’ one in some social circles. I know many ‘nice guys’ who resent it when I have a good looking girl friend and they don’t (they say things like ‘how are you going out with …. you’re a bit of a prick mate, no offence). They see me as the brass, Jockish (too use the american phrase) guy who doesn’t ‘deserve’ to win the affections of someone. Despite the fact that I am different from my pub persona to how I am in an intimate relationship. Anyway I was just using that as an example of how the resentment that so called ‘nice guys’ feel is probably because they feel they ticked the boxes and society says that should of worked. Still sexist though.
archprime, I think you pretty clearly illustrate the issue that it is difficult for anyone in a position of privilege to understand the degree to which they are privileged. You literally cannot see the ways in which “friendzone” talk blames the person who it’s applied to.
You also fail to realize that women might not recognize “wooing” behavior because in many female relationships, the exchange of favors is customary, not as an attempt to woo, but as a simple component of friendship.
As to my story: We discussed it, because we both (being single) thought it would be nice if we COULD find each other attractive. I reminded him of his mother; he reminded me of my brother. There was no physical attraction between the two of us. I’ve had similar relationships with many guys–no physical attraction from either partner, but mutual interests and similarities of intellect.
I would suggest that these “sufferers”–particularly the ones who have gone so far as to develop the “nice guy” neurosis, get some insight from a neutral, disinterested party, as opposed to rubbing their resentments together until they form a spark of bitterness.
But, since you’ve come back every time saying more of the same thing, not really addressing any points, just saying “Yes but…” and repeating your own points, I don’t doubt that you’ll come up with a thesaurus-like repetition here, too.
I am certainly privileged in a number of ways (and not in others), just as anyone contributing here likely is. Privilege may reduce the immediacy of any personal sense of injustice, but it also confers the luxury of detachment – allowing one such injustice to be seen against a context of others that may result from attempts to remedy it
You have confirmed my understanding of friendzoning as often being a matter of simple incomprehension of differences in friend vs wooing behaviour between the sexes.
I reject that being a nice guy because he likes someone, or that being bitter when he then experiences rejection that is not quick or clean makes the guy neurotic – a phase of bitterness is simply a healthy part of healing.
You seem to advise male ignorance in such matters be addressed by seeking wisdom from some more experienced neutral party – and having such a mentor in a young man’s life would certainly be very helpful on many fronts. But surely the same should apply to young women who equally stand to loose from such misunderstanding? The reality is that mentorship, let alone detached and intelligent mentorship is rare, just as intelligence and detachment generally are rare.
The reality is that a significant minority of women and men do treat relationships and attraction as transactional, and are indeed prepared to disregard the hurt they cause in pursuit of their own objectives. When a label that is applied to people caught in an unfortunate situation that is without blame is also applied to the subset of people engaging in bad behaviour, yes there may be some crossover of disparaging connotations from the blameless to the blameworthy group – but that is life. We all experience aspects of being ‘tarred with the same brush’ whatever combination of demographic groups we belong to.
If I was a woman and well known feminist for example, it is far less likely I would be so quickly dismissed as sexist in reaching the conclusions I do.
I gotta be honest, I love the fact that ‘friendzoning’ is in the spotlight and is making feminists squirm. Probably because its one thing that hetro-males on both sides of feminism can agree on.
Can’t wait to see how you get out of this one, especially since NiceGuys are the biggest supporters of feminism.
I see you pulled out ye olde 1980’s “label everything sexist” approach. LOL. I bet guys who had your back for years will love being called sexist pigs. Maybe you love could win them back with some pity sex? Nah. Didn’t think so.
everyone should listen to this song if you’re stuck in the friend zone! lol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCh-0MboJds
The mere idea that sex is the only thing a man could ever want or need from a woman, or that all men only maintain friendships with women in the hopes of one day having sex with them, is sexist.. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about how sexist that is? *That* is misandry, bros- the assertion that every male on this planet is so selfish and sex-centered that they all disregard women as human beings apart from their sexuality. It’s false of course, and is also a sweeping, sexist generalization that paints cismen as wholly uniform and all-conforming sex apes. I know and love quite a few men who would object strongly to those assertions, and rightly so.
One of my best and oldest friends, E, is a dude. We’ve been friends for fifteen years, since we were in high school. We’ve never hooked up, slept together or dated. I even introduced him to his current girlfriend, who was a friend of mine; they’ve been together for nearly a decade. E and I have an equal, emotionally intimate and loyal friendship that mutually benefits us both. Not only do we crack each other up and have a lot of similar interests (of course), but when we get together we can have a few beers and really talk about our shit. He can open up to me in his ways he can’t with other guys (who aren’t always comfortable talking about their feelings) or his girlfriend (since we have no romantic obligations or roles to assume). He can ask me for a woman’s advice when he has rough patches with his girlfriend, and vice versa. It’s the greatest friendship on the planet. He’s like a brother to me, he’s chosen family and I love him. I’m not IN love with him, I don’t want to sleep with him- but I love him with all my heart. I would go to bat for him any damned day and have, several times. But what’s that worth compared to ~*~~# !SEX! #~~*~, right guys?
Love this! thanks for mentioning the whole “men aren’t all sex apes thing.” No one seemed to be talking about that 🙂
Okay you all sound really smart and old and experienced and all but i would like to express my opinion of this “friendzoning” junk from the pov of a 18 year old silly boy who experiences it everyday. Now i’ve always been kind of a hopeless romantic and i guess because of this i’ve gotten turned down so much cause i want things that will last and apparently girls dont at my age level. I was always shy in my approach and i never wanted anything more than to just be able to be myself and have some sort of committment that lasted. Someone that knew me better than i knew myself. Sex was never involved with it at all. From what i’ve noticed some of you think that all guys want is sex from these friendzoners. Thats not entirly true, there are guys like that, that only want sex and when they fail they take the easy way out and say things like “ahh whatever my lifes so hard all girls do is friendzone nice guys blah blah blah.” that is different from situations like mine. For instance theres this girl that i’ve been head over heels for, for the better part of 4 years now (yeah i know slightly long time) she is a flirty girl which isnt a bad thing as long she isnt a slutty type one. She is christian so no sex before marriage which i love about her. And she friendzoned me pretty quickly for obvious reasons im a goofy skinny little idiot, pretty understandable. Anyway only girl ive ever liked for more than 2 years and i still have the same if not more feelings for this girl than when i first started liking her. Now i know this girl incredible well, i can tell if somethings wrong with her from 100 miles away and i would practically do anything for her and she knows that and trys to do the same for me. I’ve made peace with the fact that i’ll probably never get a chance to be with her in a real relationship. But it hasnt changed a dam thing about how i treat her. I treat her exactly the same way that i would if i had a chance with her. The point is some guys are actually legit in there motives to love a girl rather than just get in her pants. I believe i actually am in love with girl and my tendancy to make her happy has completely diminished any self entitlement at all, i dont need a single thing from her in return aside from seeing her smile and knowing i caused it. I like to think this is what true bros mean by getting friendzoned. (oh and also a side point i would like to point out, i think that guys like me are just starting to get mad by the fact that they do all these good things for good reasons and dont get any good karma out of it. While at the same time these people who are confident and good looking and all the things girls are attracted to seem to get all the breaks in life and to us it seems unfair on a romantic level and even a philosophical level, so we get mad and try to blame it on a target that would often get emotional about things and try to make everyone happy… No offence but that would be the females. I have no clue if this makes any sense these are just my observations and im relativly stupid 🙂
Your take on the term “friendzone” is, in my opinion, half right. It depends on the ambiguous definition of the term. One occasionally reasonable interpretation is the one you presented; men who overuse it in a way that relates to gender politics.
The much more common definition, in my experience, is the result that occurs to a man when he fails to be clear in his intentions with a woman he wishes to pursue romantically. Over time, she appears to categorize the relationship as purely platonic, and the window for romantic relationships has closed. No male domination. No sexual politics. Simply, she views me as a friend and nothing more, and I wish it were the other way.
Do some men then go beyond that and elicit the large number of social effects you propose? Absolutely.
That doesn’t mean the term is exclusively the purview of male-dominant hegemony.
Sometimes it simply means that a man feels he missed his chance with a woman towards whom he feels more than platonic affection.
The most important flaw in your argument here is that you blame both society, and individual men for the existence of frienzoning, when in fact a large amount of the blame should rest on whoever or whatever you believe created us. That force, for some reason, decided that for men, sex should be as important to the body as necessities such as food, water, air, and sleep. Actually, it’s mostly on par with sleep, since you can technically live without it but not without going insane. However, I shall enlighten you with a politically charged parable.
Imagine you live in a world where you cannot simply sleep when you become tired, but instead can only fall asleep with the express permission of the magical “dream fairies”, who with a touch of their wand send you off into the night. Imagine it has been quite a while since you last slept, and you are in dire need of a rest. So you befriend a dream fairy. You buy it presents, you do it favors, you give it money, and most of all you give it your time. After an extended period, you confront the dream fairy, asking for permission to sleep. It responds by saying that it’s not ready for that kind of relationship. As it explains this, the dream fairy is floating about, sending various other individuals off to dreamland, none of whom put in the time or effort that you did to befriend the dream fairy. You demand an explanation, and the dream fairy rationalizes that because dream fairies were once oppressed by humans to whom you bear little or no relation, it is now your burden to laud dream fairies with kindness and gifts and expect nothing in return, and that if you ever expect anything from a dream fairy you are an racist pig who never deserves to sleep again.
That’s how I see it. That should give you a little perspective; I am aware that this is a bit unfair, however, it certainly gets my point accross.
1. Men don’t inherently want more sex than women, nor is it more important to them. That’s a stereotype unsupported by biology. Also, we evolved; we weren’t created.
2. Not all men want sex, or if they do, not all of them want it with women. And in any case, it’s possible to have a sexual release without the involvement of another partner; not so with sleep.
3. In your analogy, Dream Fairies exist only to help people sleep – but women don’t exist purely to sleep with men. Providing sex is not our duty, our job or our primary function.
4. In your analogy, the problem with Dream Fairies is that they’re willing to send everyone to sleep but you for apparently frivolous reasons. And frankly, that seems to suggest that the problem still isn’t with the Dream Fairies so much as with your treatment of them. Specifically: you’re treating all Dream Fairies – and, presumably, women – interchangeably; for your purposes, it doesn’t matter who sleeps with you/sends you to sleep, so long as your needs are met. Which is probably why the women in question (sorry, Dream Fairies) tend to react badly to your approach: no matter the gifts you lavish on them, it’s probably blindingly obvious that if you could dispense with the pretense of caring and just make them do what you wanted, you would. The gifts in this analogy are a meaningless means to your desired ends, not an actual display of affection.
Point being: if you actually treat women like your hypothetical doppleganger treats Dream Fairies – just latching onto one at random, showering them with unasked-for gifts and then ‘demanding an explanation’ for why they subsequently refuse to sleep with you – then yeah, you really, really do have a problem with sexist behaviour.
Buy a sextoy and stop whinging.
Comment deleted for pointless abuse of another commenter.
Oh, how I love the “men can’t help it, they can’t live without sex” excuse. Comparing it to sleep deprivation is ridiculous; yes, going without sleep will make you tired, reduce your ability to function mentally and, in prolonged and extreme cases, lead to mental illness, physical illness and/or death. Going without sex has zero health consequences aside from a bit of frustration (and perhaps RSI, in some cases).
Any man who feels that a woman owes him sex simply because he was nice to her – and who thinks she is a fussy bitch for not ‘paying up’ – does not deserve to have her as a friend (and yes, the same could apply if the genders were reversed).
[…] apparently, is totally unacceptable the them. There are memes devoted to the dreaded “friend zone.” There are angsty chain Facebook statuses that are posted passive aggressively time and […]
I think its particularly interesting that the people who repute this article always seem to bring up an example of a girl they thought was just using them for favors and then use this example to repudiate the entirety of the article. Its like if one woman follows the stereotype and uses a man, then it MUST be true for all other women.
Some women are jerks. Some men are jerks. That doesn’t make the NiceGuy behavior okay. That doesn’t make this article any less true. I’m sure there’s a woman out there who did realize that her male friend was doing favors because he wanted to have sex with her and abused those feelings to extract favors, but that doesn’t hold true for all women. One example doesn’t unprove the point. Bartering friendship for future sex is not okay and it IS sexist. There is no female equivalent to the ‘friendzone,’ women who desire men who aren’t interested are seen as hopeless or pathetic, even stalkers. However if men exhibit the same behavior they become this cultural archetype. The kind of character people identify with. How would Spiderman’s story change if you gender flipped the whole thing? Surely some of his (now her) behavior towards Mary Jane (Marty Joe?) would be seen as obsessive, slightly crazy even. Just a hypothetical suggestion for thought.
I also think that you missed an area where this behavior shows up. NiceGuy syndrome shows up in romantic relationships as well. Where men will do favors for their partner and expect to be rewarded with sex. Regardless of whether the woman is ready for sex or not, regardless of her previous experience or personal feelings, she is expected to give them sex when they want it because they are in a relationship. To refer to the original quote; that presents and favors are coins in the jukebox of sexual favors. Like I said before, some men and women can be jerks and might date a guy or girl for the benefits but again, this doesn’t make the original behavior okay. Its like these men don’t realize that its *their* choice to buy presents, give gifts, and do favors, and they are responsible for their own actions. The receiving party is under no obligation to reward said gifts with sex, even if the two parties are in a relationship.
I think your analysis fails to take into account two very specific issues that change the playing field significantly. In the past I have been both highly successful in maintaining friendships with women I was attracted to and also seen them go horribly awry. There are responsibilities on both sides to making it work and reasons both parties can be to blame for the failure.
The reason the friendzone label even exists is because of the euphemistic cop out of “I only see you as a friend” or “I see you more as a friend.” Men understand attractive and not attractive. If women are honest and simply state, “I am not physically attracted to you” then it is not putting someone in the friendzone. Instead the man has the choice of whether to continue the friendship on its own merits. It is harsh, but it is fair. Furthermore it avoids the next issue.
When women use the “friends excuse” (and it is an excuse because it does not address the unchanging chemistry issue which is the real reason) and the man chooses to remain in the friendship, then the situation gets worse. Now the man is often treated with weekly to hourly (depending on the level of friendship) updates on the latest cro-magnon d-bag she does view as more than a friend and his lack of texting back, post coital cuddling, ability to maintain a job, etc. Now since physical attraction wasn’t the issue in the beginning, it can only be that treating her decently was the mistake that the male friend made. It is logical because is the only comparison that can be explicitly made. One was decent and made a friend while the other is a jerk and she obsesses endlessly. This is generally when nice guys realize that being a jerk, against their better judgment, is the proper approach to every situation. As women grow older and want to meet a nice stable guy to settle down with they complain that “all the good guys are taken” while failing to see the causal link between their previous behavior.
Now I have been able to maintain several significant friendships that started off with attraction. It is not generally easy for either party in the beginning. If both parties value the friendship, and it was not the polite way of explaining lack of attraction, then there are boundaries that must be respected. The male must keep his feelings in check. This means disavowing himself of any notions that it is only a matter of time until Ducky gets the girl. It means discrediting every romantic comedy he is forced to watch where the woman realizes that her best friend was the perfect guy for her all along. It means not letting his feelings alter any advice he gives her on dating. Most importantly it means that never under any circumstances can he send drunken late night text professing his undying love.
For women the boundaries are much simpler. She needs to bear with him for a short period of time while he accepts that her answer is final. She needs to refrain at all times from complaining that “there just aren’t any good guys out there” or how she will “die old and alone as a cat lady because she can’t meet a decent guy.” She should, at least in the beginning, moderate the number of complaints about the new guy she is dating. She is never allowed at the end of a late night to drunkenly decide to hook up with her friend. Most importantly, she must avoid flirting to encourage him to sway him to do something for her that he would not otherwise do.
Is it tough? Hell yes. Friendships aren’t always easy and starting off with so much baggage makes them more difficult. If the friendship is worth it, then these are rules worth living by. If it isn’t, then abolish the friend zone and just say “I am not attracted to you.”
Bogus Bro, nobody puts a Gun to a Guy’s head and makes him listen to Women complain about the alleged “jerk”, they choose to do that…because they hope to replace the jerk in her life. Nobody forces a Guy to listen to a Girl complain, or stay friends with her if he wants more, and he knows it will ever happen. It beats me how most Guys can’t see the bleedingly obvious. If you behave like a “friend”, especially when you never get the gumption up to ask her out, on account of self esteem so lo you shit bicks over rejection, then funny enough…………SHE SEES HIM ONLY AS A FRIEND!!! DUH
I agree with this article except for the fact that it is saying that guys just want sex; that is simply not true (and also a little hypocritical on sexism). The true “nice guy” does not want to simply have sex with the person he loves a few time and move on, he wants to feel the closeness and emotions that he just cannot receive through friendship. He want to be able to hold, hug, cuddle, and share his deepest secrets with her. Psychologically speaking women tend to share their secrets and deepest desires with their friends while men do not; men do release as easily as women do because “it’s not manly” (based off on many studies that i have read through my schooling). That is why the “friendzone” is such a hell; knowing that the desire to be free and close with the person you love will almost never be attained. I still acknowledge that women go through this too, but as I said; it usually is more “painful” for men.
I have never said that men “just want sex” – I’m saying that the desire to turn the relationship into a romantic rather than merely platonic one – which invariably contains a sexual component – is what causes men to accuse women who don’t reciprocate their greater feelings of friendzoning. And at that point, it doesn’t matter if the guy truly does love her, if he wants something more substantive than a simple physical relationship; it’s the desire for greater intimacy on his part that’s tipped the scales, and by saying the girl has friendzoned him when she doesn’t share that desire, he’s implicitly denying the possibility that her rejection is reasonable. Guys don’t say “she friendzoned me” because they think the girl was within her rights to decline a romantic relationship; they say it because they feel cheated, pigeonholed, ignored, undervalued and/or resentful that the girl might have feelings for someone else. And as I said in the article: yes, that’s a really emotionally shitty situation to be in. Unrequited love always sucks. But saying you’ve been friendzoned is not the same as saying you’ve been shot down or rejected: the latter terms imply only that the girl said no, whereas the former implies that it was unfair or unreasonable of her to have done so.
Also: I am extremely skeptical of any claim that members of one gender empirically and intrinsically suffer unrequited love to a greater extent than another. Everyone varies in their capacity for individual suffering depending on the context and who they are; gender doesn’t come into it at all, except when people feel moved to make sexist generalisations.
[…] it’s wrong if a girl rejects a guy who fancies her. Maybe it’s even bullying? Who knows. Here’s an interesting article by Foz Meadows about guys and friendzoning, which resonates quite strongly with Kade’s attitude. You know, the attitude of a future rapist […]
Men don’t like being in the friendzone, simply because men don’t like being stereotyped as “desperate perverts who are just trying to get into your pants.”
Your the one who is being sexist. Your the one who is believing in sexist stereotypes. I’m tired of women assuming that I must be a sex-crazed idiot because of my gender. Stop pretending you know what every guy on the planet is thinking, because YOU DON’T!
[…] we (ladies, often) are categorising potential partners too quickly. On another case, this piece marks the Friend Zone as a male’s attempt to belittle feminism and a woman’s right to […]
>>I am extremely skeptical of any claim that members of one gender empirically and intrinsically suffer unrequited love to a greater extent than another.
Wrong. Men suffer much more unrequited love than women, because women generally speaking always want men who are better than themselves. Men would of course would LIKE that, too, but the difference is that they do not INSIST on it for large parts of their life. Men are more reasonable.
What is the big problem with using the term friendzone?
A man gets friendzoned (because the woman thinks she is to good for the man, although often she isn’t). Yeah, yeah, she does have the right to be stupid, but don’t come complaining 10 years later.
A woman gets fuckzoned (did I just make up a new word?) because the man does not think she is worth marrying or having a serious relationship with. And most of the time he is right, because she was aiming to high.
That’s what is really going on.
I some woman wants to say to her friends that I fuckzoned her, and it is true, go right ahead. If I want to say that a woman friendzoned me, I will as well.
[…] THL stuff comes from a more realistic place. Friendzoning is totally bullshit, and I can’t be a person who gets offended when it happens to me, but […]
1) self proclaimed “nice guys” are usually not
Being passive and socially awkward doesn’t make you nice. And when you are passive and don’t get what you want this often leads to later aggression. I’ve known a lot of guys who think they are “nice guys” because they are not the most attractive and kind of nerdy and do nice things for girls but are actually very degrading and predatorial when it comes to sex. If a women senses these sorts of behaviours she might be trying to let you down nicely so as not to put herself in danger
2) being a nice guy doesn’t mean she wants to date you
Now I think girls need to take a bit more responsibility for this one. First of all, usually when girls tell a guy he is in the friend zone, they make it seem as if they WOULD have dated the guy, but now on getting to know them better they can only think of them in a brotherly sense. OR that they don’t want to hurt the friendship implying that if they had not developed this special relationship she probably would have been interested.
This is a problematic way of putting it because it is usually not true. If a girl wanted to sleepmwithnyou, and then you became friends, she would probably want to date you. You generally don’t lose sexual attraction to someone if you get to know them better and like them! The most likely situation is the girl never wanted to sleep with you and is now trying to let you down nicely.
So girls should be saying : i don’t want to date/sleep with you AND I want to be your friend, not because I am your friend instead, which makes it feel like a consolation prize instead of something good in itself.
What’s also interesting, is that girls are more likely to have intimate friendships with their girlfriends than guys are with their guy friends. So if a girl is acting towards a boy the way she would tower any friend, and he does not have any other intimate friendships in his life, it is easy to see how the situation could be confused on both ends.
Let me explain it from a guy’s perspective.
I wouldn’t be friends with most people if there wasn’t some benefit I was getting out of it. This applies to guys and girls equally. With guys, there’s some of them that I have shared interests with, and so we’re friends. Most women on the other hand, I don’t have much in common… girls tend to like girl things (shopping, stitching, etc) and guys like guy things (football, Halo, etc). However, if I find a girl attractive, and she finds me attractive, then that is a shared interest (sex). So she can be my girlfriend, and I’ll be her boyfriend.
I would not spend hours talking with anyone, male or female, unless we were talking about something I find really interesting. If it were a girl talking about her life, job, problems, etc… I would not care, unless she were my girlfriend. The same applies to men: guys do not chat with guys about all their life problems, usually, unless it can help one another (like: hey man, how’d you get that job?)
If a woman and I did have shared interests, I could be her friend (for example, we could play some Halo). However, there’s a reason this is different than a typical male-male friendship. Case 1: I am single, and she is single. In this case, if she’s attractive, I’d rather it be a sexual relationship. Case 2: I have a girlfriend, she is single. In this case, my girlfriend would probably not want me getting to close to the other girl, and I wouldn’t want to make my girlfriend jealous. Case 3: She has a boyfriend, I am single. In this case, I wouldn’t want to piss off the boyfriend or make him jealous. Case 4: We are both in relationships. Again, our boyfriends/girlfriends would be concerned if we hanged out too often together. Although in this case we could all do something as a group, like go to a football game.
So you can see how a male-female “friendship” can theoretically exist, but practically it either is 1) avoided, because of existing relationships, or 2) would be better off turned into a sexual relationship.
And to answer the question “well, why wouldn’t your girlfriend understand that your friend just happens to be female?” the answer is: yeah right! You try explaining that.
The friend zone is really not that big a deal, if you understand why it happens… one side wants a sexual relationship but the other doesn’t, and the side that does isn’t making sexual advances, but instead keeping it brewed up inside. The solution is to start making sexual advances, and then you’ll either get accepted, or if rejected you can move on to new people.
So basically, your entire argument – which you seem to believe applies to all men – is predicated jointly on your using female jealousy as an excuse not to pursue female friendships when in a relationship and your inability to view women in a non-sexual context when single. Which, I’m sorry, is a whole load of sexist bullshit right there.
And look: if you still wanna maintain that’s how things have to work for you, fine. But don’t go assuming all men are in the same boat with you. My entire life, the majority of my friends have been guys regardless of whether I was single or not, or whether they were single or not, and while inevitably there have been times when I was attracted to one of them or one of them was attracted to me, the vast majority of the time? We’ve all just gotten on and been friends; and are still friends now, because we respect each other.
Plus and also: the sort of jealousy you’re talking about, whereby someone would actively seek to discourage or hinder friendship between their partner and someone of the opposite sex? That is toxic, unhealthy and wrong, regardless of the gender involved; and yet you seem to think that’s just how women are. Bullshit.
Here’s some homework for you: go through what you’ve just posted and run a gender-flip on it, as though a straight woman had just written the exact same thing, but about her relationships with and expectations of men. See if it still seems so reasonable then.
Thank you for this post. It’s now my go-to link for any idiots complaining about the friend zone.
While you keep calling guys losers for their troubles, keep in mind that one of George Sodini’s last stops was the “pick-up-girls-quick” school. So keep laughing and be ready for another funeral
and you can feel REALLY superior.Keep it up!
Yeah, George, because reminding people of a friendzone-whining multiple murderer is a REALLY good way to argue that men aren’t assholes.
This article is nice, except for the use of words that really gives the feeling that men are all at fault…
First thing, it is NOT always the men fault… there’s also situation where none are at fault, the situation itself is at fault. Also, girls.
I’ve seen a lot (being a teenager, going to a university, and quite a lot of experience in younger days), nice guys who is a bit shy (doesn’t really show his character, etc) and nice guys who has a backbone.
One thing that really happen a lot, to boys, is that the girls are thinking with their ‘social brain’. Something like, “I actually really clicked with this guy… He’s also smart, etc… ” But since the guy lack of character in social life, or a standing, they also think “What will my friends say if I got together with him?”
You know, when we think too much, we ended up causing trouble that weren’t there at the first place.
This case of friendzone happens a lot.
I must admit that I’m once friendzoned, aaanddd still holding some feelings for her.
We were close friend because we study together a lot. I like to study with her for her diligence. Until one day it struck me that I’m really comfortable being with her and can’t get her out of my mind, while I also realize that at this point, of course she will not consider me a potential boyfriend at all (remember that we’re that close, people think we are dating, while we are not, and in fact we just enjoy each other company). Nevertheless I still go for it, drop the big question and got shattered.
You see…. it’s the situation at fault.
He befriend her. become good buddy, He falls for her. While in this point, she could not really see him as a man
P.S. : I am not sexist… except when I’m driving.
also if you haven’t watch this video, gives a good laugh and a bit of example..
Male are visual being, get attracted physically more often than a female generally.
Also, What really build a relationship in my opinion is trust and commitment… love can actually bloom later
I’m a man. That seems important to mention here lol.
The initial post is something I wholeheartedly agree with . . . which shocks me all to shit because I’ve never been the biggest fan of feminism. Or maybe “the current practice” of feminism is a better way to put it.
It’s true. Pretending to be nice in order to obtain sex is dishonest and shitty. Vilifying females for saying no is blatantly misogynistic as well. Yes, there are instances where the guy is genuinely nice and is being manipulated. The consensus from the women on these seems to be: “fuck em, it’s their own fault.”
Harsh, but I actually agree with that too. The reason why is that there’s an INVERSE to this situation that I don’t think anyone else has touched on. I’m going to bring it up because well . . . it’s caused me a metric fuckton of misery.
I’m talking about this notion that a lot of women have. No, not “all”. I said a lot, which means enough to be a problem. It’s this idea that sex = emotional intimacy. Or to be blunt, the idea that just because I’m willing to have sex with you I should also be willing to be your goddamn boyfriend.
Men are not machines you can put Sex Coins into until a romantic relationship falls out.
That seems like I’m trying to be “cute” or sarcastic by twisting that line from the original post, but I’m dead serious here. Look, as an individual it costs me NOTHING to have sex with a woman. I don’t have to even like her as a person to enjoy it. However, it costs me quite a bit to open up emotionally. It’s not the easiest thing in the world for me, and I won’t do it for someone just because they think I owe it to them.
Here’s a story, and it’s the unvarnished truth.
Four years ago I was in a FWB relationship with a woman that I found absolutely boring in every other capacity. I didn’t manipulate her or twist her arm. I made the offer, she accepted, and we set up the terms together. You have to understand this to get my point. This woman had NO reason to believe I’d ever be interested in a real relationship with her, and at the time I thought she felt the same way. Men aren’t mind readers either.
The first couple of months went by smoothly. Each of us brought something valuable to this one particular table and we enjoyed ourselves. I like to think she enjoyed herself anyway. If she was miserable the whole time, then she was quite a liar and fooled the everloving shit out of me.
Then her attitude started shifting. She became temperamental and shrill in outbursts that felt completely random and unprovoked to me. After some time passed in this mode, I was already thinking about how to tell her it was over. See, I didn’t get into this to deal with any emotional hassle, we were supposed to be physical outlets for each other. That was the agreement and she was breaking it. I didn’t feel like I owed it to her to “be there” or empathize with whatever was bothering her. I don’t care if that makes me sound like an asshole.
She beat me to the punch though, and told me she couldn’t do it anymore. I told her that was fine – that it was actually a load off – and I laughed. Then she started crying. Perhaps idiotically, I asked just what the fuck was up with her.
She seemed confused at first, then started getting angry. Before I knew it, she was livid. She then proceeded to insult me in ways that still boggle my mind to this day. It was like she’d been storing all these nasty remarks up the way a pirate stores treasure. She ripped everything about me apart, from the way I dress, to my physical mannerisms, to my personality, to everything. I felt like an empty husk by the time she was done. I left without saying anything back. What the fuck was there left to say?
Now, here’s the twist. This girl has a best friend and it’s a guy. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect he fits the stereotypical Nice Guy model. Add to that he’s insane. I’ll get to that in a second.
Apparently she’d been telling him about us (even though I asked her to be discreet), and building me up like I was this complex, towering, psychological monster that was ruining her life. And why? Because I refused to talk about personal things? Because she couldn’t force me to like her back the way she liked me? I found out she was “in love” with me later on see, which I find ridiculous. How can you be in love with someone you barely even know? I’m not a “bad boy” and I wasn’t trying to “use and abuse” her. I’m actually a pretty decent person, and nobody who listens to this story every really believes that. It pisses me off.
Anyway, after she spit venom in my face she went straight to him and told him God knows what. Now, I dunno if she was aware of what he decided to do about it at the time, and I don’t want to know. He’s a nutjob, but I don’t think she’s crazy or that vindictive. I just think she decided to hate me for an unfair reason and what happened as a result was unfortunate.
This man followed me home from work the next night. I had no clue who this person in the shitty Dodge behind me was. Like I said, I never made a real effort to get to know her or her friends. We both parked in my driveway and got out of our respective vehicles about the same time.
This fucker is large btw. He’s at least two times my weight, but it’s mostly fat. “Nimble” isn’t the first word that comes to mind is all I’m saying. In a fair fight, I’d be no match for his formidable bulk. I’m a tall guy, but I’m lanky.
None of that shit mattered then though, because he was holding a baseball bat. I had a second to react before he lunged at me and all I could think to do was hurl my keys towards his face and flee.
He chased me across the smallish front lawn, screaming that I’m a motherfucker and that he’s going to split my skull open. In my stupid panic, all I could do was figure-eight and zig-zag like a jackass, not really attempting to outrun him, just trying to make myself a difficult target. I sincerely had no idea why he was trying to beat the shit out of me and it was terrifying.
Some basic motor survival switch in my head told me that he’d eventually tire out, he’s HUGE for fucksake, but I underestimated the amount of wind this dude apparently has. Or maybe it was just his rage itself acting as a demented and unlimited supply of chasing fuel.
Whatever, he managed to get an awkward angle on me and close in. My last best hope was to do a weak little pivot/stutter-step/spin and fall to the ground. He brought the bat down on my left wrist. I heard, more than felt, the bones crack and my entire arm went numb, like the pins and needles feeling. He caught me again on the lower back, again on the shoulder, and finally on the back of my calf. That one hurt the most people. I’ve been there and the baseball bat whack to the back of the calf hurts like a real sonovabitch.
I don’t live around many other people, so it’s not like the whole debacle was waking the neighbors. He could’ve killed me if he really wanted to, but he stopped, spit on me, and left.
I’ll spare you the following details. I drove myself to the emergency room. The worst of it was my wrist. The cops eventually tracked him down from my description and there’s a whole other melodrama involving his arrest and subsequent trial.
Did I deserve that though? That’s the question. A lot of people seem to think so. I live in a backwards-ass hick community. Most people around here see that as some white knight giving a bully his just desserts. Did I fucking DESERVE that shit?
So yeah, I don’t feel sorry for you “nice guys”. Not generally speaking anyway. I think a pretty small cross-section of you might be a couple of inches away from braining someone with a baseball bat. Call me paranoid.
I also don’t feel sorry for girls who think they deserve a white wedding just because some dude was willing to fuck them. It’s not the same situation as the friendzone, but I felt it was close enough to warrant discussing.
Bottom line, stop deluding yourselves and making other people hurt because of it. You’ll feel much better. Being resentful and pissed off all the time sucks.
I’m struggling to wrap this up lol. Nice post and ensuing discussion! It really got me thinking.
^like.
i think the main similarity between that situation and friendzoning is one party’s expectation that the other party should be on the same page as them (emphasis on “expectation” and “should”), without actually communicating the fact that the first party turned the page and is now reading a different chapter.
relationships, be they friendship or romantic or anywhere in between, take communication.
You are right too, saying as a woman who doesn’t do casual sex and agrees with most of the rants about friendzone.
I don’t get what the big deal is. “Friendzone” is just a word for somebody who has romantic/sexual feelings for somebody who views them as a friend and only as a friend and will never view them as something more. That’s it, that’s all the friendzone really is. It’s not even really “friends” either, it should more appropriately be called “the disinterested zone”.
Is every friendzoning situation the same? Of course not.
As for men being manipulated by women who use them by giving them promises of something more only to never “pay up”. Well, that happens, as I’m sure similar stuff happens to women with men. Just like with cheating or abusive spouses, yeah it sucks, but the world isn’t going to bend over backwards because you’ve seen the ugly side of life. Dust yourself off and get over yourself.
Boy do I ever agree with your entire post. Now I have a rather eloquent link to go back to when I start hearing people bitching about friendzoning.
I was so deep into this whole ‘friendzone’ bullshit last spring (2011, not this year) that it was just ridiculous. Someone I had been close friends with for a couple years or so decided, out of the blue, when I had a somewhat new relationship, that he was going to be a complete asshole and try to ask me how I felt about him, constantly, without taking ‘I’m in a relationship’ for an answer. And then of course when I finally had enough and I yelled at him that I don’t feel that way and whatever else and tried to tell him he was being a jerk, he called me a bitch and whined to everyone else that he’s just such a NICE GUY and he had no clue why I was with my boyfriend (that I’m still with almost two years later, and doing just fine with ). And oh MAN, this guy wouldn’t stop! Even after blocking him from everything I could think of, he still managed to send me vile messages through other sites I had forgotten he was on about how he was such a better person, months after blocking him, and how me being a terrible, horrible person really made him even better.
And you know what? I’m so much more careful picking out guy friends now, which is pretty crappy considering I tend to get along with guys better than other girls. While I’d had other ‘friendzone’ episodes in the past with other guys, they couldn’t hold a candle to this one. And now it’s made me uncomfortable when I go to conventions, and it’s made me uncomfortable when I first meet a guy, because I don’t know what to think or how to say things anymore. I’m at such a loss. But I hear friendzone from so many directions that it makes me twitch, and I’ve never actually seen anyone posting so well about the entire thing, so thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. ❤
Can't wait to share this with everyone I know.
As I have noticed, they are always after taken girls. It’s almost funny that he also started hitting on you after you started a relationship.
[…] Lamenting The Friend Zone, Or: The “Nice Guy” Approach To Perpetrating Sexist Bullshit, 9 April 2012: An angry deconstruction of the sexism and gendered cultural pressures that underlie […]
[…] Why the “Friend Zone” is Bullshit (Foz Meadows) — how “nice guys” are the worst […]
[…] Lamenting The Friend Zone, Or: The “Nice Guy” Approach To Perpetrating Sexist Bullshit (fozmeadows.wordpress.com) […]
I’ve been researching this topic for quite a while now, and I am pleased to find this post with these replies, even if they’re from 2012. It’s a joy to see this topic being discussed formally by individuals who have diverse experiences and opinions. Some of you may not see eye to eye on much of anything, but that’s what beautiful about this whole thing. If we all shared the same opinions then we would all be stale, and we’d be stuck in our own mental closets. The opportunity to learn and grow are very significant to culture, and for this, diverse experiences are necessary to share. So carry on and encourage each other to share even if it’s an opposing viewpoint.
“The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”
― Brooks Atkinson
With that said, I’ll share my experiences and thoughts on two parts
Part I
I’m a young guy [mid 20s] athletic build (ran track and played football), grew up in an city environment with a decent childhood. In my youth I was known as a chill, humorous guy, very active and carefree. I didn’t care much for popularity, although it didn’t bother me. I was friends with everyone, but somewhat still reserved and shy. I was socially versatile and could fit in any popular/unpopular circle at any given moment.
I was raised in a home where it wasn’t okay to call girls “bitches, whores, sluts, etc”. If I wanted to express friendship/interests in a girl, things like holding the door for her or complimenting her seemed to be a good idea. For a while I was seen as different, unique, in a cute sense according to the girls in my circle of friends, just for going out of my way. Totally not creepy or desperate, I promise. At the time, it boggled me why that’s usually as far as it went. “You’re cute”, “you’re sweet”. I’m thinking ‘GREAT’, she digs me… turned out not so much. I understand now that even a HINT of desperation will leave a big stain on any potential a person might have. I did not understand that what was a big deal to a girl was not a big deal to me, like giving them a ride home or walking them to class. My natural eagerness and availability was translated into desperation, which I didn’t realize until later. Nevertheless, I was always seen as “the nice guy”, and I agree, I was a nice a guy to the core. However, I was also a “guy’s guy”, a bro to many, and dominant in many of the sports teams I’ve been a part of. But still, I was a nice guy which I enjoyed.
I admit that this did build up resentment in me, not because I didn’t “score” with my first choice crushes, but because that’s just how life went and the way we’ve been taught as kids was a failing example. It is indeed BS that movies portray the guy as a hero who always gets the girl, HIS girl, no matter who he really is inside, or what she’s been through. It’s just magic how it all comes together. This concept works in movies, because in movies you’re waiting, hoping, for a happy ending, which is love we can admire and marvel at with our eyes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against happy endings, but when you make the girl almost like a prize, or anyone for that matter, it turns into just that, a prize you hang up on a shelf. It’s a cultural structure that is plaguing young minds of boys and girls alike. Girls want a superman, and boys will do anything thinking there will be a smoking hot mama at the finish line, ready and waiting. A pretty entertaining concept.
I felt like the city I lived in was ass backwards the way the ladies chased after the knuckleheads, who in turn were actually my best friends. The main difference between our character(s) was that I didn’t refer to women as “bitches and sluts”, or treat them as such. Otherwise, we all had the same interests in sports, hanging out, etc. I gave up caring so much, because it started to control how I interacted with girls. It was starting to become a game, where as I didn’t want to be TOO nice, or I didn’t want to seem like I was trying too hard. Most men refer to this balance daily, and I believe balance is healthy, but in a perfect reality it shouldn’t be a game.
After reading this post, I’ve come to fully realize that it is totally fine and acceptable for a girl to chase knuckleheads if they want, or to go whomever else. They’re free to anyone they want, or no one at all if they choose. You can be the most person you believe a girl could want, but given her previous experience or childhood, she may not be ready for all of that. I’m close with several young women who had rough childhoods where abuse took place. They’re all much stronger women because of it, but no kind of superman would be an automatic victory in their life. Any amount of niceness won’t outweigh a childhood filled with trauma, but most men don’t consider this a possibility to their failed attempts at courtship.
The moral of Part I is, I will be continue to be genuine and kind, and humorous when appropriate, and I’ve learned to take a hint when a girl is just not that into me. Simple as that, and I respect it. I’ve definitely cut back on being too available for any one person, because inflation availability depreciates the value of the energy you put into it, like money, which is a sucky comparison. Also, sexual attraction is a legit thing. Someone may just not be sexually attracted to you, which is okay. Some groups of people don’t want to admit it because they fear it would reflect a shallow character, but I believe it is a genuine need to be sexually attracted to someone you want to be with. Prioritize though, as it doesn’t mean the end of the world.
Part II
With all I’ve experienced above, there have definitely been instances where I’ve been taken advantage of because of my pursuing nature. I mostly blame myself for this, but I do believe it takes two; a dumb sap to fall for it, and a facilitator who may or may not be aware of said dumb sap. Either way they reap the benefits. I’m willing to admit this but I doubt she would:
I’ve had a crush on this girl for 7 years, off and on. She was always cool with me and my crew, but she moved around a bunch due to family trouble. We would always hang out back as teens, sometimes my house, other times her house. However, I never tried to make a move on her, probably because I’m an idiot who feared rejection. Anyway, we recently reconnected and started hanging out again. We would text early and often, I’d ask about her day and her feelings/mood. But she didn’t really return much interests in my day and happenings. The convo moved moreso like a questionnaire. I realized nothing much was going on here, so I backed off my feelings and kept it chill, not hoping for much. But what I did realize, is that this girl would only call me when she needed something. To break down a locked door, to give her a ride to work because she’s hungover, etc. Me being an idiot, I’m just feeding this behavior, hoping it’ll click in her head like “damn this guy is genuine and reliable”. It didn’t happen, and I’m okay with it not being “meant to be”.
I made a plan to cut the cord, this would be the last straw. I set up a regular friend date with her and I at a local bar/grill. Just as friends. She was excited to go just like always during the times she stood me up. I figured, if she values this friendship even a penny’s worth, she’ll show up, and maybe I can just get over it and still be friends. Just like I predicted, she didn’t show, she didn’t even have the guts to call me and say she couldn’t make it. This is supposed to a close friend from way back. I got over it by realizing, what is the point of pursuing someone even halfway romantically if that person doesn’t even value a basic friendship? Not worth it, and it’s insanity to keep trying. She hasn’t called or texted me since then, but she still “likes” my pictures/posts on social network sites for some reason. I bet if I texted her saying “HI HOW ARE YOU!” she would text back like nothing happened.
In conclusion, she is the type of person to only call you when she needs something. I believe true friends don’t need to have a task for you to do just to kick it with you. She knew I’d be there for her in a blink of an eye, but she doesn’t mind standing me up multiple times just to hang out. In perspective, this behavior is not exclusive to females. I have several guy friends who are like this as well, but I don’t care as much. This is also just one of many situations like this, but I’ll spare myself further embarrassment. I’m not ashamed, I’m a much better person now who has realized I’m in control or my own feelings, and my feelings are the only ones I can control. It would suck to have to play a game to “make” someone like you. That’s not how I believe it should be, so I refuse to go about it that way anymore.
I do believe the friendzone exist, but I agree it’s best for the ‘victim’ to do their best to control their own feelings, and to keep their intentions in check, or make them known. That way, your destiny is in your hands. If any of you have any friends who only call you when they need something, knowing you’re head over heels for them, let them know how you feel about it. I have no problem doing anything for my friends, but I believe I’m more than a task master.
Cheers all, and remember, people will date and hook up with whoever they want to. That’s life. Also, people will say and label people the way they want. I say we all just chill out, and refrain from taking ourselves too seriously. No one wants to date a textbook filled with bitter words.
“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter
Anyways, thanks for reading
I liked it 🙂
Me and my friend agree with this, the amount of times men have made us feel bad for not wanting to be with them but wanting a friendship which what they claimed they wanted in the first place and then call us sluts and whores when we are both virgins. Just because we dont want them that way and have feelings for other guys does not mean we want to hurt them. The fact that men make us feel so terrible for ‘hurting’ them like we does not make us want to date them anymore than we previously did. It in fact makes us want to stay away from them because we dont want to hurt them, and therefore they ruin any chances they had.
Another thing is sometimes men and women, because both can be in this situation, its not just men, say you never gave them a chance and get angry for being ‘friendzoned’ when in actual fact you gave them a chance and it didnt work out and they requested to be friends. Furthermore sometimes they think you didnt give them a chance when in fact you have no idea they are interested in a romantic relationship because they never made their feeling known and then they get angry and the person they claim to care about does not know why. This causes the breakdown of the relationship and then the person who they had affection for gets the blame and quite often slandered.
Life sucks get over it, and enjoy the little things 🙂
Re:Micki+io
Anyone who is nice to your face and then calls you names when they don’t get what they want from you is not [and never was] a friend. That is a two-face person. I have friends like this, male and female, and usually it’s not sexually related. Be happy that these people willingly expose themselves when they are shot down.
Both men and women should always keep in mind that IT IS OKAY to be genuinely interested in someone romantically. It’s key that we understand this, and not be ashamed of it, even if others may feel that these feelings do not belong. It is okay to make these feelings know… it is actually the right thing to do [without being a tool about it].
What gets people in trouble is when they try to manipulate people into liking them, or thinking they have to trick someone into noticing them, or if they wear a certain combination of colors then maybe, just maybe, that special someone will see them in a new light. In their mind, they may be ‘doing everything right’, but most of the time their love interest really couldn’t care less and may not have a clue. This is a healthy desire, and a completely normal strategy, but it can be dangerous to gain a conclusion from these results. I truly believe we as people are on this earth to serve each another in our every day lives, but when you base your service off of the expectation to get a positive review, you become a business contact, instead of a genuine friend. You’ll be the reliable friend, which is fine for some people, but frustrating for many others. Who you are and how you are should be enough to get anyone to notice you, and how special and unique you are. Not what you do, how when you do it.
I’ve learned to stop being so available to some friends because I may have romance in mind, but they were treating me like a contractor. Two completely different goals here. I don’t mind helping anyone, friend or stranger, as I’m physically gifted with strength and ability, but when it becomes the only reason a friend calls me, I feel honored and dissed at the same time. I’ve learned that as human creatures, some people carry more physically desirable traits than they do social traits. Maybe my personality is lacking, but I can definitely tell when someone is trying to get over on another [playing a game].
Like I’ve said before, I believe the power is in the hands of those pursuing, and if it’s not, then the individual is doing themselves a disservice and selling themselves short for a cause not worth while. It’s not easy to keep yourself in check, which is why I recommend surround yourself with a savvy group of friends who know a thing or two.
[…] https://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/lamenting-the-friend-zone-or-the-nice-guy-approach-to-per… […]
[…] word “Friend Zone” has been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. Many of my favorite feminists are not pleased. Because the term is generally thought to be something only straight men complain […]
I love you for posting this!!! I’m sick of getting accused of “friend-zoning” people, like I don’t have a right to say no to dating someone that I don’t like. It’s almost a way of guilting girls into dating guys, especially ones that are manipulative and controlling and it makes me nauseous to think about all of the girls in high school right now that are being told that they don’t have a choice or should feel guilty about not wanting to date someone! UGH. Thanks MTV, I can only image how this is new “friend-zoning” thing is going to impact emotional/physical abuse rates in the future. ashl
[…] Lamenting The Friend Zone, Or: The “Nice Guy” Approach To Perpetrating Sexist Bullshit « shatte… […]
There is another side to this friendzone. A girl who friend zones a guy should be aware that it is only fair that she is responsible for her fair share of the resources that are spent, that she is responsible for her own safety and security and that the guy is not expected to risk his life for her security, and that she does not get any special attention above any other of the guy’s friends. Otherwise, she is just using the guy.
WOW! If that isn’t the ranting of a 12 year old popular girl who is tired of the unwanted advances from the varsity football team, then I don’t know what is. I (yes a self professed nice guy) have found myself in the “friend zone” as it were, many times. Do you know what I call these women? MY FRIENDS! This is NOT because I am “truely a nice guy” or whatever kind of self serving ego stroking label I choose or think of myself as being for sticking around though I wasn’t rewarded the “golden prize” of my friend. This is only because I am a 37 year old MAN. Not boy but, man who respects the decision of any person in my life. As USUAL it sounds like the same old shit that’s been going on (and will continue to go on for as long as human kind) Men & women alike have one thing in common as a fatal dating flaw… We both want what we can’t have. It’s the intangible or forbidden fruit that drives us, drives us crazy! Seriously how ludicrous is this topic! (Or at least for a person who is near 40 & a divorced father of one beautiful little girl any way) to have to read when forwarded from a female friend who I can only assume is sending it to me as a type of “I just want to be friends” message. Which if that is the case I must first say “yuck!” And then second “get over yourself!” and I would do it quickly! As you are NO prize! Unless the prize is a punishment. But then again we all know how to spell ass-u-me so I digress.
This said, has it ever occurred to shit, pretty much ALL women, that not every man you encounter in life (yes all be it a great deal of them do) are not trying to sleep with you! Maybe you remind them of someone (platonic) who makes them feel comfortable such as an aunt or cousin or sister or mother etc. Or maybe just maybe they just enjoy your company and view YOU “as a brother or a lamp” Maybe you should just enjoy the company of a man whom it sounds you don’t deserve the time with for what it is. I guess what I am trying to say here is this; people suck! Men, women, transvestites whoever… Human being = sucky ass shit bag.
Oh and a little advice for the “nice guys” out there; if you are trying to court a girl (not a woman but a girl) like this, you should try being a dick to her, blow her off don’t give her any attention as you can tell she gets PLENTY enough! So much so she had to write this “LOG” (you know like in the toilet… Comes out of most people’s ass, but seams her mouth) If you are at least physically attractive to her, she will find this behavior intriguing and will need your attention. This is only because every Tom with a Harry dick has been showering her with attention ever since she was 11 trying to get the “golden prize” as it was called. But in my opinion you deserve better then her if you TRUELY are a nice guy.
Shit like this is why I have chose not to date since my divorce 3 years ago. People are fucked up! I am FAR from perfect but Jesus at least I don’t complain on the Internet about having nice people wanting more from me then I am willing to give.
And a piece of advice for the author of this “waste” maybe you should try talking to this or these men prior to things getting out of control? As I am certain you knew long before it became an issue, weather or not he was “boyfriend” material for you. But the reality of it is that you want these men pinning over you because as I said before, you not only enjoy the attention you actually need it to feel whole. And maybe think about some counciling for your deep seeded narcissism considering you obviously have time on your hands.
T-T-F-N
[…] that it justifies shitty behaviour, like harassment and entitlement and whining about the friendzone, and (when pushed to its logical conclusion) sexual assault and rape. Women could not possibly […]
hmm…hell hath no fury like a man scorned….?
You know, I always assumed you were nice to people just to be nice, not to get things in return. Although rejection does hurt, being someones friend is much better than not. And that if you truly cared for someone that you would want their happiness, even if that meant you couldn’t be with them. Guys act like the “friendzone” and being a “nice guy” is pure hell. Then everyone assumes that girl who turned him down is selfish, ignorant, and should have given him a chance. It seems hard to be friends with or even have a simple conversation with men because they assume you are romantically interested in them and when you turn them down, they either no longer want to be your friend or throw the friendzone, nice guy act. With my experience, when I gave my close guy friend “a chance” we ended up breaking up and never talking again. Sometimes, a girl is closer to you as a friend than as a girlfriend. They enjoy your company and friendship and dont want to ruin it. But it seems men cant understand this. The same men who usually throw out the “nice guy, friendzone”, usually dont even realize they themselves have “friendzoned” a “nice girl” or will say its okay..because, its okay for men to say no because maybe the girl isnt interesting or is ugly to him. They dont consider the fact that maybe girls assume the same about him. You can enjoy someones company, friendship, and be nice to them without respecting anything in return. Girls arent obligated to date every guy interested in them or nice to them, just like guys arent obligated to date every girl who likes them.
Abby is such a WONDERFUL friend to have! So don’t ask us to carry that heavy box or change that tire, since you think that acts of friendship or helpfulness are ALL ploys to get you into the nearest bed.
Shorter dave: no sex? Fuck you bitches then, why on earth do you keep thinking you have any other purpose?
Guys who whine about the friendzone make it very clear that they don’t give a shit about women, period. All we are to them is pussy. Friendship? They’re absolutely astonished at the notion that anybody would have a woman around unless there was sex. What else are women for? Friendship? They can’t even imagine it. The only reason they tolerate women is because they hope there’s sex soon.
Niceness does not come with the expectation of payment. Notice how the Daves of the world never acknowledge in the slightest the many nice things women do for men. That’s because that’s what women are supposed to do, and if women do not do this stuff as a matter of course, they’re horrible feminazi bitches. Women are supposed to wait on guys but if a guy does the slightest thing for a girl she better be incredibly flattered——-and she better put out.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
[…] Confused, I watched as the few other girls in each of the aforementioned groups dealt with their particular lovesick swains while no one seemed to notice that I was also a girl. To this day, I’m more than a little confused by why things went the way that they did. All that I know is that I was not mobbed by male “friends” secretly hoping to put in just the right amount of kindness coins that would lead to sex. […]
Really short Ginmar – Just take a look a your “friendships” with unmarried men and let THEM
comment about what a great friend you say you are to them.This is nothing about sex ( misread my statements all you like to fit YOUR agenda),it is about taking advantage of people. Where did I EVER say that acts of kindness should lead to sex? You said that! I would mail you some glasses, but then, you would accuse me of trying to trick you into the sack.
Diddums, are you that idiotic naturally or do you just work at it really, really, REALLY hard?
…”it is about taking advantage of people.. ”
You know, dude, if a guy avoids the “n” word there’s still ways he’ll reveal he’s racist. Just like sexism.
So you’re saying “friendzoning” is taking advantage of men. By women. And that because you never said “sex”——one can almost feel the sweaty waves of triumph radiating off this goober ——–(even though that’s the whole premise, but you’re Special)——you get to redefine the whole thing. “Plausible deniability”, always the last resort of sexist twits.
“Just take a look at your “friendships” with unmarried men…”
Because you’re a silly delusional twit if you think “friendships” exist between men and—- yuck!—-women.
“…..it’s about taking advantage of people….”
No, it’s about MEN whining that they expect sex, are you crazy? Who gives a shit about anything else?
And it’s about you inadvertently revealing that without sex, you think it’s taking advantage of men, even though like so many sexists you try the old gender switcheroo to look less sexist.
So according to ArchPrim it’s sexist to suggest Women violence from Guys if they turn then down, really? Tell that to the Family of the 16yo Girl in Connecticut that was killed in April this year because she turned a Guy down who asked her to the School Prom. Or the girls who spent time around Elliot Rodgers who went postal with a gun outside a sorority in California for revenge against those stuck up bitches who wouldn’t date a “Good guy” like him. Even as a Fella, I can see how utterly retarded the drivel you spew is
NOBODY puts a gun to a Guy’s head and makes him stay friends with a Girl if he wants more. So often guys who whine about being “Friend Zoned”, don’t have the nads to ask the Girl out. They hang around humping her leg, not saying anything about how he feels, and funnily enough, she doesn’t date him. When the inevitable happens and she doesn’t, and she takes off with a jerk, (You know, the jerk……………the guy that fronted her, and demonstrated he owned a set by asking her out), he sits around howling like it’s the end of the world, sulking about being “Friend Zoned”, and “Bitches don’t give “Good Guys” a chance”. (Apparently Good Guys” that are perfect Gentlemen, who “Totally respect her feelings”routinely refer to Women as ‘Bitches’…..who knew?)
Seriously, if so called Good Guys demonstrated a little self confidence, took a risk and asked a Girl out, who knows where that might lead. Alot of Guys can’t do that, because they fear rejection by women. If you want a Girl to date you, step up to the plate and ask her out, and be man enough to accept the outcome, whether that’s yes or no. If she says yes, then fabulous, if not, be a Man and deal with that. You have to take the risk a Girl will tell you no, to get the chance to hear her say yes. You have no business expecting/hoping for a yes from a Woman, if you’re not prepared to risk the no by asking her out. If she says no, you then have two choices. Stay and be friends with her, knowing that’s all it will ever be and accept that, or be Man and honest enough to tell her “I really like you, and it’s hard staying friends with you when I can’t have you. I can accept you don’t want to be with me, I hope you can accept me discontinuing the friendship for my own emotional well being”…..and then just walk away. If you want Women to treat and respect you as a Man Fellas………..try behaving like one
That also entails not whining or sulking when a Girl tells you no, and not laying on verbal abuse and calling her stuck up bitch, shallow bitch, gold digging bitch, and any other juvenile High School insult because she refused to date/bed you. When a Girl turns you down and says no, it doesn’t matter why she doesn’t want to date or fuck you, she just doesn’t. It’s her body and her choice who she dates and beds, and she doesn’t have to justify it to you. A Girl’s right to choose who she dates and beds, always supersedes a Guy’s right to date her, if that’s her choice. Ok it’s disappointing to be told no by a Girl you’d really like to date, nobody’s suggesting don’t be disappointed. But take being told no like a mature, self confident guy, and simply walk away. Once you get into an insult/slanging match with a girl, or start whining “but I’m a “good guy”, give me a chance”, simply because she exercised her right to independence, you’ve already killed what little chance you had. Which was probably next to zero, because your poor insecurity, low confidence and neediness, showed up in your body language and turned her off. “Nice Guys” are never as nice as they proclaim………a Girl only has to turn one down and see evidence of it
I wonder how many Women have turned Dave down to make him so bitter………all of em probably:P
Johann Sebastian-Wilson – I would hate to disappoint you and frustrate your warped attitude, but you will not able to put me into your “bitter,turned down by women, psycho” box. My community honors me for what I do ( and I do those things as a volunteer because they give me joy) so leave your lectures for guys who HAVE been turned down and been made bitter by it.
Aw, Davey, you protest a WEE bit too much for a guy whose response to Abby was: “Don’t ask me for shit, bitch,” when she went to some trouble to point out that nice people help each other out without whining for blowjobs.
Your response, to be precise? Totally negated what Abbie said about doing friends helping friends.
“Abby is such a WONDERFUL friend to have! So don’t ask us to carry that heavy box or change that tire, since you think that acts of friendship or helpfulness are ALL ploys to get you into the nearest bed.”
Which isn’t close to what she said at all, which was more directed at manipulative, misogynist users like you. You can’t even IMAGINE doing anything nice for a woman.
“Abby is such a WONDERFUL friend to have! So don’t ask us to carry that heavy box or change that tire, since you think that acts of friendship or helpfulness are ALL ploys to get you into the nearest bed.” Translation:”Don’t ask me to carry that heavy box or change your tyre……..since it won’t get me into your panties”.
The root of pretty much EVERY “Nice Guy’s” problem is crippling lack of confidence/poor self esteem, especially when it comes to dealing with Women. Their Nice Guy act, and them doing things for Women, is the means by which they hope to earn the approval of Women, and the chance to date them, it’s that simple. When Nice Guys do something for Women, it always comes with strings attatched, and those stringsd are hopefully getting sex/relationships. If that weren’t so, they’d not complain so bitterly about Women not dating/fucking them. So called Nice Guys do those things for Women, then hold it over their heads when a relationship, and/or sex isn’t forthcoming. They can deny it all the like, but there’s not a Girl out there in general, or those on here reading this, who doesn’t know that’s the truth. It’s why Nice/Good Guys are so hostile toward Women who won’t date/fuck them.
They come with all the retarded pick up lines, all the 13yo High School Compliments for Women, which are then replaced by whining about being Friend Zoned and bitches not giving Good Guys a chance………..then Juvenile, High School Insults and abuse when Women don’t play ball and give them what they want. If so called Good Guys were genuinely good, and respected Women the way they claim to, they’d respect the way Women feel when they won’t date them, and not sulk like 6 year old’s whose Mummy told them they couldn’t have a chocolate bar at the supermarket, and not be such anally retentive assholes about everything. Which is really all Nice Guys really are, assholes with self esteem issues. Quite frankly, atleast Asshole Jerks are honest about being asshole jerks, and don’t try to hide that fact under a stinking shitpile of passive/aggressive, “Good Guy” horseshit. Quite frankly it’s any wonder that when confronted with a choice between an self confessed asshole, and a whiny arsed “Nice Guy”, it’s no wonder most Women choose the obnoxious asshole, since he’s honest about what he’s really like
Dave, your community may well honor you for any volunteer work you do, and that’s great, putting into the local community as a volunteer is noble, an applaudable. But guess what, that DOESN’T make you dating/fucking material in the eyes of Women……………….nor should it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilOx2Jmm1r4 For “friend zone” whiners like Dave to cry over…………and for Gals on here to have a giggle over:P
Reblogged this on fleurmach and commented:
“If you don’t care enough about someone to enjoy their company and respect their decisions when sex is off the table, then that person is right not to sleep with you, because enjoying someone’s company and respecting their decisions is pretty much how sex gets on the table to start with.”
But Nice/Good Guys DON’T respect Women Cherry Bomb, as much as they claim they do. All that respect and Gentlemanly behavior they’re so proud of and make a big deal of, goes out the window, when it becomes obvious their chosen Girl other won’t fuck/date them
If “Nice Guys” feel Women are taking advantage of them, then they need to stand up for themselves and not allow that to happen anymore. You can only be taken advantage of, IF YOU ALLOW IT TO OCCUR. But “Nice Guys”, being the weaklings they are, won’t entertain that idea, oh noooooooooooo. It’s always the fault of somebody else……………normally “Bitches”
Come back peoples;P
[…] Source: Lamenting The Friend Zone, Or: The “Nice Guy” Approach To Perpetrating Sexist Bullshit | shatter… […]
The vending machine analogy began to be misattributed to Sylvia Plath in 2014. I found Hexjackal’s original Tweet from 08-Feb-2012 where he acknowledged the quote wasn’t his but didn’t attribute or cite it.
As my soul is not christian i cant feel courage being nice or good etc. Life forced me to look to the abyss, i dont have choice.