Fallacy of ‘Friends’

Remember the show ‘Friends’? Chandler, Monica, Rachel, Ross, Joey and Phoebe? Three guys, three girls, adjacent apartments, all of them platonic best friends. Not until season five or six does any romantic interplay exist between any of the characters.

Though a fan of the show, I look back and wonder how realistic the premise was. Can three attractive women maintain a healthy romantic relationship with anyone outside their incestuous circle of male friends once their boyfriend discovers he is in competition with three other men for her time and attention? Conversely, would any women tolerate dating a man who is thick as thieves with three beautiful women he claims are his ‘best friends’?

The question tugs even deeper. Though male-female platonic friendships do exist in Pussified and Scrobotomized America today, what do they say about the men and women that inhabit them? Is it different for men than for women to have platonic friends of the opposite sex? Is it ok for either once in a committed, monogamous relationship? What about exes that the person you date may still be close to, “as a friend”?

Has the line between men and women been so blurred that not only is the workplace and the household gender-neutral, but now once-sacred male bonds and once-unbreakable female friendships have been usurped by mixed-gender friendships that purport to be of the same dynamic.

How many women these days do you hear describing their slew of ‘best friends’, half the names of which are male? Men, too, have succumbed to the false notion that the more female friends they have the more desirable they look in a woman’s eyes.

We’ll start with this issue first, then move on to the deeper issue of platonic mixed-gender friendships and why they wreak of mischief.

Undeniably, men that relate better to women on a friendship level generally come in two varieties: Homosexual and Pansy. The first is obvious--Gay men crave the friendship of women because they themselves are wired with a feminine bent: attraction to men, obsession with all things fashion, design and appearance, a disdain for the disheveled and disorderly. The commonalities are endless. The pansy, on the other hand, is the straight guy who can’t close the deal, so he figures he’ll hang around long enough, be the shoulder to cry on and the ear to yap into until one day, tired of the “jerks and deadbeats” (read, real men), and imbibed with the right concoction of booze, pills and self-pity, she might hand down a sympathy lay to the hapless schmuck.

Short of those two, no straight man who has any aspirations beyond a Level 3 existence, has more than at most 2 female acquaintances, both of whom he has bagged. Here’s why: Most straight men with multiple female friends crave female validation. Like their female counterparts, they are attention-whores. If a man can get intellectually, recreationally and/or conversationally from a woman what he lacks with his male friends, he is, to be sure, one of two breeds of man; Homosexual or Pansy. Women, be wary of the man that divides his time between returning missed calls to female friends and staying in touch with exes because “their friendship is so close.” Real men don’t stay around long after sex has ended. This should sound neither chauvinistic nor offensive to women, but rather should serve as a benchmark for the degree to which your man is insecure and/or needy. Remember, as a general rule, men do NOT stick around long after sex has ended, nor do they stray while it is going on.

For women the story as old as Methuselah. The fag hags are by and large the women so emotionally vacuous yet desperate for male attention that they surround themselves with the flattery and praise of gay men innocuous enough not to demand anything at the end of the night. Avoid these women like a Priest would a daycare center.

Next is the women who just have a lot of male friends. Don’t kid yourself here, boys. Unless the men fall into one of the two aforementioned categories—Gay or Pansy—and you can tell quick if they do, this woman has either blown them or spread for them. Any man who would tolerate being in a relationship with a woman who insists on maintaining “friendships” with the strangers she’s blown who probably hope to one day experience seconds, is, well, not much of a man.

The point here is that there are very few cases in which mixed-gender friendships are just that—a genuine human connection between two people of the opposite sex that is longstanding and built on substance, shared common interests and platonic fondness for the other rather than random sexual chemistry and/or neediness. The word ‘friend’ is sacred and overused in our society. A Level 5 Player has friends that number in the single digits and can usually be counted on one hand. People that tell you they have more are doubtless using a liberal definition of the word and therefore probably aren’t very good friends themselves.

Level 5 Players do not tolerate women keeping in touch with male friends as much as they refuse to keep in touch with their own. Again, in rare cases, genuine bonds are created between men and women that transcend romance and passion and exist somewhere in the platonic realm of kinship. But they are rare.

For their part, should women tolerate a man who keeps in touch with his exes? No. This man craves validation and feels the need to walk the relationship tightrope with a safety net lest you break his heart and he be left alone. His constant need for love and validation keep him from breaking contact with those women that accepted and loved him. This man, at best, is operating at Level 3.

Keep in mind, however, male-female “friendships” have only recently begun to take vogue. By recently, we’re talking the last 25 years. While no official study has been done to tabulate the average number of opposite sex friendships the average man or woman counts as having, it is surely higher than the days when contact was cut the day someone was spoken for.

From a Meninist perspective, the issue begs whether or not women, not unlike vaginized men, have become so Scrotumized that they indeed relate better to men these days than they do their own kind. This issue is a non-issue. For the sort of women we are talking about—power-walking, chain-smoking maneaters that fill Marketing Director chairs and executive boardrooms, if the Beware sign is not clear enough to avoid, God be with you.

Similarly for women. If you are the type of women that gravitates to Old Reliable, the vaginized doormat of a man, because he is safe and won’t challenge or cheat on you (not synonymous) you are saying something about yourself, not him. Step outside that comfort box, honey, and see if you can keep the interest of a real man (Level 4 and up) for longer than it takes to swing your legs back shut.

If not, revert back to the Pussified Man that will reply with ‘yes, dear’ to everything you say. And when he wonders aloud who’s the guy on the other end of the line you’re talking to at midnight, you can always count on that old standby…

“Honey, he’s just a friend.”

Pffft.

- al