I’m too lazy to write a real post today, so I thought I’d point you all to a pretty decent analysis of the dreaded “friend zone” by Foz Meadows on goodreads.
Here she is addressing the “Nice Guys” of the world:
[S]omewhere 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.
Seriously, Nice Guys, if you think of your friendship with a woman as a means to an end, or some kind of purgatory, then it’s not really a friendship, and you’re doing both yourself and your crush a disservice by persisting in it. (I learned this lesson myself the hard way, a long time before there were helpful internet posts explaining to me why Nice Guying was a recipe for crappiness all around.)
Speaking of learning: I also learned from Foz Meadows’ post that there is a Wikipedia entry for “friend zone,” complete with advice on how dudes can avoid getting “friendzoned” in the first place.
Several advisers urged men, during the initial dates, to touch women physically in appropriate places such as elbows or shoulders as a means of increasing the sexual tension. … Adviser Ali Binazir agrees, and suggested for the man to be a “little bit dangerous”, not in a violent sense, but “with a bit of an edge to them”, and be unpredictable and feel “comfortable in their skin as sexual beings.”
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia … for Your Penis*.
Also: Here is the official Friend Zone anthem, “Consolation Prize” by Orange Juice. Lyrics here.
—
* Hetero cis penis only.
There seems to be this “urban myth” circulating through MRA/PUA circles about the origins of spinster cat ladies. It begins with a young woman friendzoning all suitable mates, riding the cock carousel, and finally making a mad dash to snag a beta provider around age 38, before finally ending up alone with cats. They recommend buying stock in Purina as cat ladies are growing in numbers.
If you are a woman this will happen to you! So stop friendzoning nice guys and get married before you turn 30 or your life is over! This story is repeated so often MRAs amd PUAs accept is simply another fact of life. This falsely makes the case that it is better for a woman to be in an unhappy relationship than alone.
If I have to chose between him and him, the choice will be easy.
Sorry, angry guy.
The spinster cat lady archetype was around when I was growing up in the 70’s but it seemed to only apply to elderly, eccentric women who never married. Not women who friendzoned or were a bitch to men when they were “in their prime.”
I also distinctly remember the butch lesbian type stereotype who raised and trained dogs.
So, is being a cat lady only for cis-gendered, heterosexual women? At what age do you become a cat lady and what is the minimum number of cats you must have? I have two. A happily married friend has 4 cats, an awesome husband, and 3 children. She has two more cats than me. Is the fact she’s married and has children somehow negate ownership of said cats?
And speaking about it, living by yourself with half a dozen cats, that’s actually going your own way. Not playing a lot of video games and yelling about how evil women are on the internet.
My husband has always had cats, and strongly dislikes dogs, so…. MRAs are fond of saying “that’s the exception that proves the rule” WTF?
I am something of a part time cat lady, since my husband has to spend extended periods away due to his job. I would go crazy without our two cats.
Now I’m wondering how Mister Hard-wood-chairs-are-oppression would argue that cat ladies are whores.
@Kyrie
Well obviously the only reason a woman would be single is if men don’t want to be with her because she’s a used up whore. But, since she has a vagina, she can still get a man whenever she wants, so cat ladies actually don’t exist. All women are whores! PS my ass hurts.
Cat ladies are whores because they expect, nay demand services and products to maintain their cats’ health and well being. For instance, premium odor absorbent cat liter. My god! What an entitled, misandric expectation! Not to mention whorish because if the manufacturer does not provide the cat liter to purchase, the woman will patronize another manufacturer who will. Does that not scream whore to you? It does to me.
A non-whorish cat lady would make her own cat liter by the sweat of her own brow and not expect some hardworking man to provide it for her!
And what’s up with pink colored cat toys? Proof positive that cat ownership is misandrist and discriminatory. Pink is the color of whores btw!
What’s that you say? You say that a woman who uses her own money that she earned herself and who purchases cat liter from a company which in turn benefits from her patronage is not, in fact, a whore, but a consumer? Misandrist! I’ll see you in court!
I imagine these guys thinking that building a relationship with a girl is like an RPG game. If you keep selecting all the “nice” interaction options, she will respond positively and eventually, when the relationship bar is fully positive, she will marry you. It’s how I get people to hook up in The Sims =D
@Joanna- but even in the Sims, if two of the little characters have VERY different personality types, it is quite difficult to get them to hook up. Maxis has a more nuanced view of human interaction and relationships than MRAs do.
@Kyrie and Argenti Aertheri
The math Pecunium is doing is a commonly misused statistic by MRAs where the original source was finally cited and disproved. I made a comment about it earlier: http://skepticalcubefarm.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/the-problem-with-the-mens-rights-movement/ If you check out the comments from May 6 (they are somwhere in the middle as replies to earlier comments) an MRA said
But when you actually do the math provided by the actual study, it winds up to be a very small percentage of men being raped by women, and yet they treat it like it’s a common thing, comparible to the amount of men raping women and men raping men. The OP of the blog corrected his interpretation of statistics and Pecunium attempted to find the actual % of men being raped by women. While it is still completely wrong when women do rape men, it’s not a very good talking point, especially where so many MRA’s taje the 79.2% thing and cite it out of context.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this weird shift. It used to be “weird shy girls grow up to live with their cats” not “sluts grow to regret it, metamorphose into weird shy girls at 30 when all the alphas abandon them, then grow up to live with their cats.”
…Among other things, this theory betrays a severe overestimation of how old thirty is.
Everyone has that friendship that they wish could be more but it can’t. Mine, personally, is because the dude has a baby and is dedicated to making his family work. And man, it stung like hell when I thought he wasn’t trying to make it work with the baby momma and drunkenly confessed that I like liked him. But he was really kind and compassionate, which is out of character for him because he has a very sarcastic sense of humor, and told me, under any other circumstances, he absolutely would. But he has to be there for his baby, and he still cares about me and wants to be my friend. You know, I could’ve walked away from the relationship right there because I wasn’t getting laid (which is funny for me to even say because it wasn’t even about sex at all), but he’s fun as hell and we get along great. I can be happy as his friend. And now that he knows that certain behaviors of his led me on in a way, he’s been better about that. So I mean, it’s there on the table. If one day he is single again and I’m single and we can get together, that’s great. But I’m not banking on it. I need friends to go out to the bar with just as bad as I need a significant other.
So yes, I get that it hurts. And there will always be a part of me that hurts from time to time. But I’m not going to resent him for having knocked a girl up prior to my meeting him. It is what it is, and if I can’t handle it, I know where the door is.
This. I’ve been in the position where somone was a nice, good man, but he couldn’t give me what I wanted romantically. My feelings eventually faded because there was just no desire to be intimate with him anymore and what was once a good, romantic relationship became a really stressful, close friendship. Stressful because since he couldn’t give me what I wanted (which is making out and foreplay) I couldn’t give him what he wanted (sex, if I couldn’t get turned on by a really great makeout session, I couldn’t have sex with him), and just, it wasn’t a good situation. But because I loved him as a friend, that relationship dragged on with nothing getting any better. You know, the whole, “How can I give up such a nice guy?” thing went through my head over and over. So I felt it was my duty to stay with him. All the while we both might be missing out on partners that could’ve given us what we wanted and been more compatible. That fear of giving up the only good man you’ll ever find can really mess with you when all you want to do is leave.
Yeah, I’m tired of this stereotype that it’s so easy for women to land men. Sure, it’s easy for drop dead grogeous women, and it’s easy for women with no standards what-so-ever, but for the women who hover around the average to just above or below average scale, who have standards around the average to just above average scale, it’s not that simple. I mean, I could leave the bar with a new guy every night, but it wouldn’t be a man I was attracted to. This is supposed to be an advantage? That I would rather go to sleep alone than have sex with someone who doesn’t turn me on?
It’s really insulting to both men and women. Men, because it drills into their brains that they must all want sex, with anyone, any time, whenever it’s offered. And it perpetuates the women as gatekeepers b.s. I don’t want to always have to be the gatekeeper! Sometimes I’d like to have a fling without fear that the other person is going to disrespect me because I gave it up too easily. Ok, now I’m rambling. This whole topic is annoying.
And lol at the sims! The only time I’ve ever felt entitled to sex was when another sim just wouldn’t hook up with my sim. I’m like, “WTF IS YOUR PROBLEM? YOUR RELATIONSHIP LEVEL IS AT 70%>!?!”
haha
Rape Statistics Powers ACTIVATE.
My source for all this is the CDC’s NISVS study, which is one of the largest, most recent, and most methodologically sound studies about the prevalence of rape and domestic violence in the United States. You can find an executive summary here: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Executive_Summary-a.pdf.
For no reason which I am able to understand, rape by envelopment is not classified as rape, but as “forced to penetrate.” 18.3% of women and 1.4% of men have been raped by penetration in their lifetimes; additionally, 4.8% of men have been forced to penetrate someone. If you assume the overlap is minimal (because blah this is a blog comment I’m not going to go THAT far into detail), about 6% of men and 18% of women have been raped, which means that about a quarter of rape survivors are men.
Using Pecunium’s 79% number for the number of rapes by envelopment of a male survivor that are female-on-male, we get about 1 in 5 rapes that are female-on-male. Which is to say: a minority, but a significant minority.
Oh, wait, I fucked up the math.
Basic multiplication powers ACTIVATE!
It’s actually about 1 in 6, I accidentally put the rape-of-a-man-by-penetration stats in with the rape-of-a-man-by-envelopment stats, when in reality that 79% statistic only applies to rape-of-a-man-by-envelopment.
Still. Not insignificant.
Maxis has a more nuanced view of human interaction and relationships than MRAs do.
You can also light the asshole dudes on fire, or build a wall around them until they die. …Remind me why real life is better than the Sims, again? 😀
The minimum number of cats necessary to qualify as a cat lady is three.
If you wish to qualify as a crazy cat lady it requires more.
Too many and you are shunned as a collector of critters. This is a very bad thing to be and also against the law in most states.
There is a reason that cats own the interwebs. There are kazillions of little girls who, back in the day, heard talk of growing up to be a cat lady if they did not serve the needs, wants, and desires of men, and decided to do just that. They are now filling the interwebs with cat pics and videos. Heh.
Not only cats, but metric cats! They’re probably European! Misandry and socialism!
Jessay, thank you for the source on that.
Ozymandias42 — your math makes sense, and no argument from me that that’s important to note, but I think the reason behind “forced to penetrate” is that the CDC includes victims being forced to penetrate a third party (eg at gunpoint, where neither um “party to the sex act” would be a rapist per se, thankfully I can’t imagine that happens much)…that falls under things I don’t think I can cite though
Shit. I misspelled litter. Fail!
@karalora
Awesome
@Lady Zombie
But it turned out so much more awesome. It’s the slinky of blog comments
Argenti: Theoretically, one could be forced at gunpoint to envelop someone, but no one seems to consider that a reason to call it “forced to envelop” as opposed to rape. :/
I blame feminism and its war against spelling. The agenda is quite obvious. Misspelling obscures truth which is all women are hoars.