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.
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* Hetero cis penis only.
Good point Ozymandias, I can be a bit too pedantic >.<
I mean, the point stands that any amount of rape is intolerable, plain and simple. But the gross misrepresentation of statistics is the problem that I have with MRAs chiming in with really frightening numbers such as 79.2%, while forgetting to mention that that 79.2% is of the percentage of men being forced to penetrate someone else, which is then a percentage of men who are being raped to begin with. Upon whittling down the numbers, you can see why the 79.2% is such an absurd statistic to lead with. It’s a scare tactic and a way to shut people up by telling them that tons of women everywhere are running around raping men.
Again, ANY amount of rape is intolerable. It’s not my stance at all that it is ok that men are getting raped by women just because it’s much less often than the rape of women by men, men by men, or women by women. It’s never, ever ok. MRAs don’t have to fudge the numbers for me to feel this way. It just makes their cause look worse and dishonest.
You know, they could do a world of good by trying to include better education in sex ed and campaigns that let men know that they can be raped, and can be raped by women, and that there is absolutely no shame in that. Also, to educate women that they can rape men. But you know if they did this it would be in a tone and with the types of phrasing that treats it like an epidemic, and a reflection on all women, just like the do with the gold diggers and whatnot. If they were truly concerned about the plight of the raped man I think that they would be trying to raise awareness in a way that, instead of demonizing women and grossly misrepresenting statistics, comforted and empowered men to speak out when they are the victims of sexual violence, to recognize it when it happens, and to not let the stereotypes of men being unrapable (that they should always want sex with anyone, anywhere, anytime, and be thankful when it happens even if they didn’t consent) silence their experiences. But instead they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing, weakening their cause, and influencing people to take the real problems much less seriously.
Jessay, certainly there are fewer female-on-male rapes than male-on-female rapes, but I don’t think the stats can justify there being more male-on-male rapes than female-on-male rapes. Like… the math just doesn’t work out. At all.
Your last paragraph though… high-five. I completely agree.
Assuming all these numbers are corrects,
79/100 * 4.8/100 = 3,792%
3.792/100 / (6/100+18/100) = 3.792 / 24 = 0.158 = 15.8%
1 / 0.158 = 6.3
Which mean that it would seems more like it’s one in 6 victims, though it assumes that men who have been raped by penetration have been only be men. (is rape with objects counted?) But the numbers probably wouldn’t change much anyway.
And I’ve been ninja’s by a dozen of people. I’m slow at math. ^^
Oh, and, just because it really does matter, this push for evo-psych, lock and key analogies, and all of that other sexist babble about men being naturally promiscuous, just further HURT their cause against the rape of men. They refuse to look in the mirror and accept that when they throw around these stereotypes justifying the rapes they perpetuate against women, the use of words like, “slut,” and, “whore,” and their overall mistreatment and disrespect of women, they’re also justifying the rape of men.
When you push that men are just sexual creatures, trying to spread their seed to as many women as possible, and that this is a biological need they have just got to fill, you’re confirming the myth that men cannot be raped because they always want it. How can they not see how damaging that is to their cause?
I mean, the blatant hypocrisy and contradiction is rampant among MRAs. Every single major talking point they have contradicts another major talking point they have. If they really want change, equality, and to be taken seriously, they really have to get together and figure out what the hell it is that they believe, and drop all this sexist, stereotypical, evo-psych bullshit, that just counters every single other claim they ever make.
Kyrie — “is rape with objects counted?” probably? that’s legal rape in many places, so I’d imagine it’d have to be part of the statistic?
I must confess that I would have expected the numbers to be the other way around, since with the numbers here we have
0.79 * 4.8 / 6 = 63.2%
That’s the number of women on men rape among the rapes of men. And it makes sense, but that’s just not what I would have expected, probably because I’m more used to hear about man on man rape than woman on man.
um, legal rape there is meant to imply as opposed to rape which the law doesn’t recognize as rape, hope that makes sense (I’m really not trying to pull a “not rape-rape” here >.<)
Argenti: then we’re missing the ratio of woman on man rape among the rape with penetration.
LC:
I don’t think it’s only MRAs, and I don’t think it’s all that new. Only douchey people cry “friendzone” every time a man has a female friend. I think the entitlement and betrayal aren’t recent, just the Internet has made it more visible. It’s people who either don’t recognize that they can walk away if friendship won’t work for them or hope that if they stick out friendship she’ll eventually change her mind.
Lady Zombie:
If it’s not the xkcd thing I don’t know why people don’t do that.
@ozymandias42 I may be confusing some statistics, which, if I am, forgive me, but I read, “The majority of male rape victims (93.3%) reported only male perpetrators,” which was a percentage of overall rapes of men.
The 79.2% was a percentage of a percentage (79.2% of the amount of men being forced to penetrate, which is another percentage of the men, in general, who are raped). Oh, I’m getting a headache just thinking about it (I hate doing math in my free time). And as various people have calculated, it’s something like 1 in 6, which is much, much less than 79.2%. So 79.2% is being used incorrectly as the amount of male rape victims being raped by women in general by some MRAs, when it is actually a much smaller number than that, as a tactic to make people believe that women raping men is much more common than it actually is.
But again, any amount of rape is too much rape, and the fact that it does happen is enough to need to draw attention to it in a way that gives men a platform to speak up when it happens to them. I just don’t believe in using statistics out of context in a misleading way like these MRAs seem to be doing, that’s what I have a problem with, and I think it’s hurting the cause more than it’s helping.
Does that make sense? I feel I’m struggling to get my point across that is making complete sense in my head haha.
According to the study that these numbers were drawn from (http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf), the number of male victims of rape (including object penetration) is 1/71 men, or 1.4%. That figure includes instances of attempted, but not completed penetration. (pg. 19)
Men who have been forced to penetrate another partner = 4.8% of the 22% of men who have experienced a form of sexual violence other than rape. (Pg. 24) Of that 4.8%, 79.2% of forced to penetrate assaults were perpetrated by women. (pg. 24)
In other words, a tiny percentage of men have been raped, most of them by other men, and of the other 22% of men who have experienced sexual violence, 4.8% were forced to penetrate a partner, and of them, 79% were forced to penetrate a woman.
Any way you slice it, male victims of sexual violence are far, far outnumbered by female victims of sexual violence. MRAs need to deal with that and stop trying to manipulate statistics to make their arguments sound better.
Hahaha will someone who is good at determining percentages come in, read that study, and give us a final number? I am usually really good at math but I’m on a vacation at the moment and my brain is sitting here like, “Nope, I will not calculate a damn thing today.”
The thing about the friendzones you’ve failed to mention, is what happens when you give up on the advances, and treat them like any other friend. I’ve seen several instances where the sought-after party, gets insanely jealous and furious over your dalliances with other people, and loathes it when you treat another party the way you used to treat them- even though they didn’t reciprocate your feelings. That’s where the hate comes from.
@Ozymandias42: “Jessay, certainly there are fewer female-on-male rapes than male-on-female rapes, but I don’t think the stats can justify there being more male-on-male rapes than female-on-male rapes. Like… the math just doesn’t work out. At all.”
According to the study that has been linked to by myself and others, the percentage of male perpetrators of male-on-male rape is 93%. (Page 24 of the study).
The vast, vast majority of male-rape perpetrators are men.
Kyrie,
If I’m not mistaken, men were asked if they were raped and if they were “made to penetrate” whereas women were only asked if they were raped, correct? The reason I ask this is because in addition to how problematic it is to seperate “raped” and “made to penetrate” since women can and do rape men using their vaginas the significance of the word “rape” goes the other way too. If we characterize *all* cases of “made to penetrate” as rape then what about the possibility that more women would have responded with “yes” had the word rape been excluded?
Or perhaps this is moot because I’m not understanding the methodology …
“percentage of male perpetrators of male-on-male rape is 93%.” Should read instead, “Percentage of Male perpetrators of male-rape is 93%”
Colette: that may be true, I really don’t know anything about the methodology that produced these numbers.
The number “79.8%” is not women who are victimizing men, it’s of ALL THE MEN WHO REPORTED BEING FORCED TO PENETRATE, 79.8% of those reported women attackers.
If 4.8% of men reported being forced to penetrate, and 79.8% of that 4.8% had female attackers, then only 3.8% of men were victimized by women. That’s still not 79.8%.
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“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.”
I read this and immediately thought ‘Oh, no wonder the MRM doesn’t have real activists – all of the evil women are on the internet.’
As opposed to, you know, they do their yelling on the internet, and the yelling is about evil women.
As a guy who used to make friends with women in part as an effort to get sex, I have to say that, for me, it was all about risk avoidance. Simply put, I just didn’t want to suffer the humiliation of rejection. To the younger me, it was preferable to waste everyone’s time hanging out with women who did not reciprocate my feelings, until I eventually got the message and left. Not only was I being dishonest, I also missed opportunities to get with women who were, for some unfathomable reason, attracted to me. That what I was doing might be considered creepy really didn’t occur to me.
Eventually, I learned to just ask women out, and things have been much better ever since–for all concerned.
Since I was at work all day (was called in unexpectedly), and I started all this:
I was crunching the actual numbers of men who were forced to penetrate; the numbers are from the CDC study which MRAs (such as I forget whom we recently had here) like to cite as, “79 percent of men who are raped are forced to penetrate, but feminists don’t care”.
Which is misleading, as well as the latter portion being flat out false.
Jessay’s summation was close. I wasn’t looking to see the number of men raped by women, but the number of men forced to penetrate women. The number of men raped by women is, slightly higher.
As Jessay said, they like to pretend that men and women are being raped in equal numbers, and that 79 percent of the men being raped are forced to penetrate women.
They are either worse at math than I am, or intentionally misrepresenting the facts.
I just let a bunch of comments out of ,moderation, including several on the rape stats question from Skeptical Cubefarmer. Welcome, Skeptical Cubefarmer!
That can happen. The sought after party might consider it to be an ego boost for the other person to pine after her. She might want to string the guy along in case no better offers come along. I won’t deny that can happen, and it sucks for the guy who is getting mixed signals. However, the guy has to realize that he has no control over what she chooses to do. He can only control how he reacts to the situation. He can choose to break up the friendship, he can choose to date other people regardless of how she feels about it, or he can do nothing but then stew in resentment. The latter option makes him miserable, though, so he should probably do something different. You can’t control what other people do, but you can choose how to respond to what they do.
Yeah, I think that’s when it’s time for “you can just not be friends with people, you know.”
It’s a very important corollary to “you can just not marry someone, you know.”