To hear some tell it, there is no crueller torture a woman can inflict upon a man than to be his friend. Because, as the saddest sad men of the internet will happily explain to you at length, men and women can’t really be friends. Any woman who think she has male friends is fooling herself; all her supposed male friends have ulterior motives, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
They want to take her to the Bone Zone, in the parlance of our time, but she has put them in the Friend Zone instead, a hellish sexless purgatory that only the exquisitely charming and wholly fictional Jim Halpert on The Office has been able to escape. Such, at least, is the Friend Zone myth.
I’ve read a lot of silly things about the alleged evils of the alleged Friend Zone over the years, mostly in the form of terrible memes or scary rants on some misbegotten misogynist subreddit. But the silliest thing I’ve read on the subject for some time is a post that went up earlier this week on The Federalist, a right-wing media outlet with a heavy Christian bent.
In “Why Men and Women Can Never Be ‘Just Friends,'” Lutheran pastor and “comical video” maker Hans Fiene argues that we need to “tear down the Friend Zone” so American men and women can marry younger and “raise our sagging birth rates” so the world won’t run out of babies.
No, really.
All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.
Despite the achingly off-key “humor” at the end there — did I mention that Fiene makes “comical videos” on the side? — this argument, such as it is, is meant in all seriousness. As Fiene sees it, every day America’s hapless males waste in the Friend Zone is a day they could be making babies with a loving wife.
Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration. Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.
Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed.
Fiene’s case against the Friend Zone is if anything even sillier than his demographic alarmism. He begins by sketching out the true horror of the purgatory that is the Friend Zone.
Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.
Fiene is apparently baffled and appalled by the notion that any woman might want to have dinner with a man without wanting — literally — to have his babies.
The women of America, he argues, need to accept two harsh truths: “you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends” — because any dude who likes to spend time alone with a woman actually just wants to get with her.
Fiene has a rather hackneyed notion of what men are looking for in a friend — basically a dudely dude type
who shares his interest in activities such as watching movies where things explode, playing video games where things explode, or putting fireworks in things so they’ll explode.
And in Fiene’s mind, women just aren’t qualified for that position, which strikes me as a rather strange contention because, well, my best friend IS a woman, and we have spent many hours over many years “watching movies where things explode [and] playing video games where things explode.”
We’ve also spent many hours watching Project Runway, and gleefully mocking the worst dressed at the Academy Awards. Because we’re actual human beings whose interests don’t map directly onto hackneyed stereotypes of what men and women enjoy. (She does have a hard time convincing me to watch Jane Austen movies though.) Oh, and we have no interest in sex or romance with each other; we enjoy those things with other people.
But I guess I’m delusional to think she and I are real friends, because everything she provides, friendship-wise, could apparently be provided much more efficiently by another dude. As Fiene sees it, “the average male coworker, male neighbor, or male Nepalese yak herder is better at producing masculine companionship” than women. Indeed, as Fiene (or his editor) declares in a big bold subhed, “There’s Only One Thing You Can Give His Man Friends Can’t.”
And, no, that isn’t “vagina.” It’s “vagina in the context of a loving marriage,” though Fiene doesn’t put it quite that baldly.
Addressing his female readers directly, Fiene tells them that when a man signs you up as a friend,
It’s not because he wants your friendship. It’s because he wants to convince you to open up the supply chain of a romantic relationship to him, and he foolishly believes he can do so by being a loyal friendship customer. “Pay my dues in the Friend Zone,” he thinks, “and one day she’ll promote me to boyfriend.”
Fiene assures the ladies that
Just because men don’t want to be your friend, however, doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy your company. They most certainly do. They love discovering how you see the world, what you think about life, the universe, and everything. They love your kindness, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, support, and your nurturing heart. They love being in your presence when you display the wonders of the feminine virtues.
At least when those “feminine virtues” come as part of a package deal with vagina — though, again, Fiene puts it a bit more delicately.
[B]ecause God designed these [feminine] virtues to entice men into marriage, the average man will never be content to receive those gifts in a form of companionship that doesn’t lead to marriage. Quite simply, men can’t be at peace being just friends. And there’s nothing you can do to change that. Platonic chilling won’t stop your inner (and outer) beauty from pulling a man towards romantic love.
So what is to be done? The women of America need to clear out their Friend Zones — kicking the guys they don’t find attractive to the curb and marrying up those guys who at least sort of stir their loins a little.
First, he informs the female reader, she needs to address those Friend-Zoned men who don’t
fill you with the biological desire to repopulate the earth? If not, then do your “friend” a solid and let him go. Call him up and tell him, “It’s not my fault that your facial symmetry grosses out my ovaries, but it was my fault that I got your hopes up by putting you in the Friend Zone. As restitution, please accept the phone numbers of five girls I know who find you attractive. Stop wasting your time with me and go hang out with a girl who might one day bear your children.”
Apparently Fiene thinks human beings talk to each other like that.
“Conversely,” Fiene continues,
if you find your guy friend attractive, and if you see him as a man of character and heart, then call him right now and tell him that he was placed in the Friend Zone due to a clerical error. Say to him, “You make me laugh and would be a great husband and father. Clearly, you need to be on the express track to the Marriage Zone.”
How … romantic?
Fiene concludes his strange little anti-Friend Zone manifesto with a stirring paean to the transcendent glories of … increased baby production.
So get brave. Get married. Get pregnant a bunch of times and give birth to a bunch of beautiful little future taxpayers. The time has come to fight for our future. The time has come to rebuild America’s demographic glory atop the rubble of the fertility-killing Friend Zone.
I think I’ll pass, thanks!
So who exactly is this manifesto supposed to inspire? Nothing in it bears much resemblance to the world I live in. Fiene’s resolutely heteronormative, baby-centric utopia offers nothing to the gay, bi, or trans folk I know, nor is it going to appeal to those with no interest in traditional marriage and/or children. Hell, its visions of masculinity and femininity are so constricted they don’t even fit most of the straight, cis people I know.
I certainly wouldn’t want to be trapped in the Fiene Zone, that’s for sure.
Oh, no, Hans! Don’t you remember that vaginas are actually evil maws of Satan?
Sounds to me like a whole lotta his problem.
Wait, what? What did Oprah do?
In case the last link didn’t go through, here it is again:
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=126010
Whenever the topic of friendzoning comes up, all I can think of is the Mammoth post last year (?) on PUAs claiming that hot girls were having sex with their own pet dogs, and Buttercup Q. Skullpants commented:
It never gets old.
First, my own personal theory is that partly it is because the Japanese are the most perfectionist people on Earth and so their traditional collective standards for all things in life in general have always been sky high, and this is true for both their males and females. So, more and more males and females are not willing to settle anymore for just the next-best-thing in this modern beauty-conscious era, and you thus have the situation where by and large only those who really need and want to reproduce will reproduce i.e. Relatively very few. Regrettably, that is not of course obviously not enough to support their own national pension system tsk tsk tsk.
Second, i would be a most ready, willing, and capable sperm donor , but it appears that there are no sperm donees hehehe ?
@Humbug
Speaking as an Asian American ™, how about fuck off with your assfax and 日本字 supremacist bs over other Asian countries? Or how everyone already explained why low birth rates from a shitty work culture steeped in gender roles and xenophobia?
Ew. That was so gross that even your emoji looks grossed out.
Have some class, please.
Humbug says:
“Second, it is exactly because of this eternal crisis with the “friend zone” that is why humanity requires lovebots immediately.”
Oh goody. Another MGTOW or incel or whatever he calls himself who is obsessed with the idea of sexbots.
Color me unsurprised. I might just have a heart attack and die from not surprise.
On topic, if what he says is true then I’m worrying about something. I’m going to be playing Shadowrun* tonight with some friends, some of whom are female. Does that mean that they won’t be able to participate in pretending to set off explosions? If so, what about the explosions that they’ve set off in previous sessions? Were they faking explosions?
Also, one of those women was assigned male at birth. Is she capable of enjoying explosions? Did she lose that capability?
If several of those women have partners who aren’t present, does that mean that they’re explosion-cucking their partners?
Answers pls kthx.
—–
* A pen-and-paper roleplaying game featuring nontrivial amounts of explosions.
Yep. He’s obsessed with hypothetical sexbots. Which is a tad strange. Non-sapient sexbots would defeat the entire reason misogynists have or want to have sex (To abuse women), and sapient sexbots are very likely to insist on being treated as people and having rights and shit.
You know! Just like the crux of the current conflict between misogynists and women! We know we’re people, and we insist on being treated like people, and the misogynists refuse to abide by the minimum standard of decent behavior. So the misogynists have to go.
So, are you denying that Japanese perfectionism has anything to do with those said gender roles and xenophobia?
And to digress, I hope that you’re indeed Japanese-American to have a reason to actually care about this, and not just some other random Asian-American who presumes to speak for the Japanese even against their will and contrary to their own position as with that Kimono controversy in Boston (non-Japanese sjws complained about cultural appropriation by other non-Japanese, Japanese themselves complained that sjws — who they scoffed at as being Chinese and Koreans — were sabotaging their efforts at developing an export market for Japanese kimonos) and the Ghost in the Shell American adaptation casting controversy (non-Japanese sjws complained about whitewashing of Japanese characters, Japanese themselves didn’t really care at all and were proud instead that their creation was getting exposure).
You were the one who barged in here spouting blatantly false crap. You started this topic of conversation, the rest of us are merely enjoying pointing out how obviously you are wrong.
Yawn. Time for ya to piss off.
@Humbug
“Are the reasons why Japan is currently going low birth rates possibly include xenophobia, toxic work and gender cultures? Nah it’s because their standards are too high for those outsiders. I should know, being the guy who is speaking for them.”
I feel sick. This post report things worse than usual.
Humbug sez:
Tell that to Megumi Igarashi.
“Purebred Japanese” is neither a race nor a nation. It’s a creepy fantasy that netouyo, Western anime nazis and other nationalists wank to, facilitated perhaps by Japan’s unfortunate tendency to paper over the extent to which populations such as the Ainu, kakyou, Ryukyuans, and Zainichi Koreans have, for hundreds of years, been putting lie to the supposed genetic isolation of the Japanese population.
Oh, so you’re Japanese or Japanese-American yourself and not just some rando who thinks his self-issued degree in Japanology earned through 3000 hours of fapping to underage anime titties somehow confers the authority to speak on the psyche of an entire nation?
False, eh? Such as what? So are you actually saying that a society having ever-fewer and ever-less children is not going to affect at all or have any effect at all on the social security system of such society? Where do you think the funding is going to come from? Is the government just going to print money? And my example of Japan is sound because their own Establishment — and even those of other countries — is now freaking out about it.
And you feminazis really do fail to comprehend at all the heterosexual males who desire gynoids. Aside from the small minority of sadists and sociopaths present in every group, the large majority of these males simply desire to have someone to love who will also love them back (personally even just writing these words out is embarrassing).
Regrettably though, ever-more females of their species nowadays are ever-less lovely, loving, and loveable so as to make “love” with them a dream of a dream at best and a fools folly at worst. And if human history has proven anything, its that if man can’t find what he seeks naturally, he will just build it artificially! That is the essence of Applied STEM!
@EJ : the biggest problem is more sending explosives into a spiral staircase. Doubly so if they are explosives + EMP. Generally speaking, doing so set the GM framerate to about one round per 8 hours of gameplay because of all the calculations, which is harmful to the rythm of the game.
(and sorry if Shadowrun was simplified enough that explosives in spiral staircases isn’t a geometric nightmare anymore :p)
I think we’ve had enough Humbug, and at this point he’s broken more than one rule. Banned.
Japan’s fertility rate since 1947:
http://harutaka-aozora.jp/english/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/スライド6.jpg
Based on this graph and what Humbug has said, it appears that Japanese people only started being perfectionists in 1983.
I suggest an alternate mechanism: Japan’s falling fertility rate is nothing to do with perfectionism. It’s due to Pink Floyd having broken up that year.
Edit:
@Ohlmann:
Hah! Thanks for that, it’s improved my morning tremendously.
Is there some reason you folks are actively engaging with the internet herpes that is Humbug as opposed to trying to make sure the outbreak doesn’t spread and emit too much purulent discharge?
This friendzone stuff is all very complicated. Are married people allowed to have friends of the opposite sex? Is it only ok if those friends are married too? Would it only be allowed after both parties have separately provided the mandatory 2.1 children? Should adultery be approved of because it slightly increases the chance of having additional children? So many questions!
This is like if a Dave Barry column had the worst kind of born-again Christian experience .
Humbug sez:
The Japanese Establishment™ is famously overpopulated by pea-brained, corrupt nationalists and known for its tendency to stoke inane moral panics. Meanwhile, there’s also constant pushback against that Establishment™ by normal people. And by constant, I mean that, even in smaller cities like mine, rarely a week goes by that some citizens group doesn’t haul their loudspeakers and pamphlets downtown to convince passersby that Abe and his cronies are the human embodiment of crusty penis wrinkles.
Also, living in Japan has given me ample opportunity to observe that perfectionism among Japanese people is tangential to gender roles or xenophobia. For instance, I’ve met plenty of people, young and old, who are perfectionistic about being cosmopolitan or about challenging social norms.
@E.J.: Trust me, if your Shadowrun game doesn’t somehow devolve into lots of explosions, you’re not doing it right. It’s a game where someone once noted that a trip to a vending machine can somehow involve several kilos of C4 after half an hour.
My personal favorite moment of it was another player’s rigger intentionally luring the unstoppable cyberzombie into his van, vacating it, and activating the self-destruct sequence while the mage and shaman formed a Force Wall around it to rebound all the boom-booms back into itself. We got the idea from the Chunky Salsa rule!
Ironically, the style and tone of Fiene’s writing is making me have flashbacks to the work of Christopher Hitchens. Specifically, that one article where he was holding forth on why women could never be as funny as men, unless you were (insert slur for lesbians here). It wasn’t very funny.
@Ooglyboggles
I believe that you meant to write 日本人 (Nihonjin = people of Japanese extraction), and not 日本字 (Nihon ji = Japanese words).
(Disclaimer: I am not Japanese, and do not speak, read nor write the Japanese language, and I’m merely applying my knowledge of Standard Written Chinese and a smattering of romaji.)