| Feb062008 | Men and Women Being Friends |
NSFW links: I’ve linked Todger Talk a few times before in the sidebar, I found these guys via The Girl. I like Todger Talk because it’s an attempt at opening the dialogue up to men. The site is not without its faults and a few incorrect male assumptions but overall, its heart is in the right place and I will continue to read it and I hope the comments really spark up some good discussion. Also, they’re incredibly British so that’s good too.
In a recent post, Women can be so tactless, Dave describes a female friend with such kind words as “magnificent”, “aristocratic”, “positive”, “beautiful” and “uplifting”. In one paragraph. I don’t mean to sound harsh but he’s just jerking off with a thesaurus. He talks about how she’s been on a string of bad dates; had the absence of common sense to sleep with the lot of them; and meanwhile he’s getting nothing from her. He’s “doomed to receive a ‘sweet’ kiss on the cheek at the evening’s end.”
This gets me angry. It reminds me of my own failings and nothing gets me angrier than having to confront my own shortcomings embodied in another person. All the self-loathing subconsciously transforms into regular loathing. It’s like when some smokers quit and they don’t become non-smokers, they become anti-smokers.
Let me preface this by saying I’m not trying to beat up on the author. These are my own issues that his writing has captured so well and it’s succeeded in drawing out a response from me. I, too, used to look up long adjectives to describe my crushes. In fact, I still do when I’m feeling particularly verbose. I’ve had terrible situations of falling head-over-heels for friends and they were none the wiser or willfully ignorant. These situations ended in disasters comparable to the hot girl sleeping with all the guys that she doesn’t fancy.
I wrote in the comments:
If it were me, I’d give her a stark and hopefully refreshing honesty. A woman that smart and perceptive understands, on some level, every bloke would love to see her naked.
It’s ok to admit that. If she says or wears something that turns you on then go ahead and tell her. It definitely won’t get you the girl but by doing this I learnt that it’s ok to be a man and to have desires and to be honest to them rather than be the creepy sexually frustrated chump that gets off on listening to his friend’s escapades.
I was honest, and I somehow dispelled this pedestal that I put my female friend on. Instead, I found a much stronger and more open friendship and I’m less afraid to let any girl know I’m interested. I still find her attractive, sure, but now this freeing honesty and mutual respect between us is worth far more than any old roll in the hay.
I absolutely mean that and I’ve been trying to apply it more and more. In the last few years of my life, I’ve told girls if I see an attractive quality in them. It’s called a “compliment”. I don’t wrap it up in weaselly “politeness” as would be expected of an Elizabethan-era gentleman caller, there is no need for fancy words. Tell them they are hot or they have a great laugh, a nice smile, legs that go all the way up to Canada, etc. By not telling them you find them attractive, you’re bottling your attraction just like you’d bottle rage or fear or Johnny Walker. Any psychologist will tell you that these are not things you should keep bottled up.
Platonic friendships between men and women have only gained traction in recent history. We still haven’t worked out a widely accepted model for them. Watch any Hollywood movie and if you see a man and a woman you still automatically assume they will hook up unless they fall into certain stereotypes that would define them as un-dateable (gay, married, fat, ugly, old, etc.). The thing is that the majority of your female friends will be totally dateable and Hollywood offers no advice for that. Maybe books have the answer but nobody knows where the lie-berry is. The internet certainly doesn’t have the answer, it only has a huge network of “seduction” salesmen that will try to transform you into something you’re not.
Add to this that we’ve become a society infested with over-mothered boys. We all grew up respecting women but it’s a twisted kind of respect that one would give a nanny, an authority figure or perhaps a cobra. It’s not the respect of equals. We’ve grown up hating our own sex and restricting ourselves only to the psuedo-lesbian pornography aimed at mama’s boys because God forbid we see a man enjoying sex. This man-centric “lesbian porn” they sell probably hints a lot of problems with the attitudes of men.
Ok… I get manifesto-y in that last paragraph but I think the point still stands. Be honest and upfront, enjoy their company by actually being a friend instead of a Cold War spy trying to get into their pants because, like I said, platonic relationship between men and women are still new to this world. There’s a lot we could learn.
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