I think we should be friends

Hello!  So, Erika the Over Queen of the blog is still hungover and not able to prepare a Tuesday post (because obviously the party was only on Saturday and that is not nearly enough recovery time) so instead, for those of you who are still all "Who is this guy with all the Ws in his name and what makes him think he should be on this blog", we now have a chance to get to know each other better!  But this is also a busy month for me and I have not lately blogged a bunch (the second Ender's Game post will go up next Sunday, though!) and so for your amusement and judgment I offer the following, which was previously posted on my original blog under the title "The Comrade Sector".

(Content: screwed-up gender dynamics, heterocentric discussion of sexist concepts.  Fun content: Klingons and daguerrotypes!)

(Alternate titles for this post included The Ally Territory, The Companion Realm, and Eight Rules For Dating My Non-Age-Specific Fellow Sapient.  [Edit: also, Salacious Tortoises would have been a good one.])

This is one of those subjects that makes it hard for me not to just profane for a while.  I have been spending time (any amount is too much) on parts of the internet where 'The Friend Zone' is treated as an established and accurate concept, and now I just want to reboot the world.  On the plus side, it's also providing me with a fascinating new perspective on the way I view people.

I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I love the heroic villain archetype is that they are doing the right thing even while not feeling like it.  They protect people they don't particularly care about and they stand up for ideals that they think are just daydreamy nonsense.  This is what I feel like most of the time, because while I'm a long-run optimist (I believe that people will eventually transcend their current widespread and colossal failures) I'm a short-run pessimist (I believe that on the road to that transcendence we will oppress, harm, and in various ways kill uncountable multitudes of people and things) and I have unreasonably high standards for folks.  I tend to think of myself as being misanthropic by nature, and continually try to remind myself not to act like it.  And yet the internet, in its signature style, teaches me things that were not the things I expected to learn.

And one of those things is that I'm way less misanthropic than some of the chuweros out there subscribing to supposedly mild and mainstream concepts that are actually totally awful.  And the Friend Zone will here act as our exhibit A.

The definition is simple: a woman (occasionally a man) is said to have 'friendzoned' a man (occasionally a woman) when she spends time with him but rejects the possibility of a romantic relationship, which the man was interested in.  Once it happens, there is no escape from its sorcerous boundaries, no matter how the man may entreat for a fresh trial to prove his suitability.

Or, in normal-person talk, ladies only date dudes they want to date, and callously disregard the dudes they don't want to date who nevertheless want to date them.

I grew up in the age when home video game consoles exploded, and so was bombarded with the insistence that this new form of media would corrupt and ruin the young and completely remove their appreciation of daguerrotypes and that sort of thing.  Is this the reckoning that was foretold?  Do people now believe that relationships have terrain hazards?  If you mistakenly equip the Hylian Shield as you're heading up the river valley, the octorok will shove you off the ledge and you'll land in the friend zone and have to start over?

All of the things wrong with this framework require some effort to disassemble and fully appreciate.  It presents the idea that forming a relationship is, from the dude's perspective, the task of continually avoiding 'getting friendzoned' until some kind of romantic connection can be made.  It's an inherently adversarial concept like something out of Klingon rituals ("Women roar.  Then they hurl heavy objects.  [The male] reads love poetry.  He ducks a lot.") and it repeats the same eternal stupid thing about men wanting (especially sex, but often generalised into 'affection') and women withholding (see previous).  But beyond that, it also implies that a woman can want to friendzone a guy but not be able to until he does something to justify it.  It has to presume this, because otherwise it would have to accept reality, which is: if a woman doesn't want to date a man, then she won't (voluntarily).  There is no complicated process, there are no rules, and there is no rigid categorisation; no one is getting a forehead stamp and sorted into the Non-Dating Cabinet.

Or, in abnormal-person talk: if the friend zone existed, it would be immediate and unstoppable.  You can't dodge it, you can't ward it off - you don't get put in it; it simply eminent-domains the ground under your feet. 

But some people apparently see a personal benefit to operating on this nonsensical framework (elsewise they wouldn't be parroting it to each other), and as near as I can tell, it's about the externalisation.  It lets a person reclassify what they did (or have done, or are doing) that made them an unsuitable date and turn it into something that was done to them.  And this is a particularly important reclassification to pull off if you are a Nice Guy.

The Internet Nice Guy, of course, is the guy who is sweet and caring and giving but women just won't date him because they're only interested in jerks.  At least according to his webpage.  In reality, it turns out that he's a self-important self-entitled guy who thinks that not actively burning down orphanages puts him in the top 1% of humanity and just can't understand why women don't reward his awesomeness with Naked Fun Times.  He's already spending all of his time hanging out with them and only doing what they want and trying to make them completely dependent on him for their emotional needs - what more is he supposed to do, explicitly say that he is attracted to her?  MADNESS.  If he did that, he would just get friendzoned!  Do you expect him to fall for such an obvious ruse?

At this point, I may sound like I'm constructing strawmen and chastising them for their dealings with strawwomen, but it's honestly not that difficult to find examples.  Erika linked me to another blog's post on friendzone concepts, and lo, but the second comment from the top was a guy explaining that Some Women really do manipulate guys and use the dudes' "honest mating attentions" for personal profit which they have no intent to compensate the dude for.  Check it out.  That's a direct quote: "honest mating attentions".  I couldn't make this up if I tried. So: do I have a low opinion of my species as a whole?  Often.  Am I insufficiently sympathetic to others' pains?  Probably.  But am I as much a misanthrope as that guy?  No.  Because that guy believes that women are heartless selfish manipulators and men are conniving fools who are trying to trade for sex but are being hornswoggled by the evil women's superior treachery.  That is what some quality misanthropy looks like. Now, as a socially-awkward person myself (and note that when I talk about Nice Guys, I refer to a group I was previously part of) I do like rules, and I think the desire for rules is part of what makes Nice Guy philosophies and frameworks like 'the friend zone' so attractive to dudes: it purports to take a complex system and reduce it to a simple series of laws, interactions, and consequences.  Never let it be said that I am unwilling to provide good rules to replace bad ones.  Here are some actual rules that serve well:

1. If a person does not want to date another person, then they won't.  Attempting any strategy that might subvert rule 1 makes you a bad person.  (Trying to actually be a person they would want to date is a somewhat more complicated grey area; even if New You can be sustained, it's still generally a better plan to try with someone else.)
2. Person A, if treating Person B like a friend when Person B has only ever acted like a friend, is not doing anything wrong.
3. Acting like a friend purely for the purpose of getting something from your supposed friend makes you a bad person.  (This was true when it was the jerks in school ingeniously absorbing the kid whose family had a pool, and it remains true now.)
4. If a friendship is all one-way, then it's not a friendship, it's indentured service.  Ditch 'em.

But there's a second aspect to this friendzone concept - its inescapability - that needs to be dealt with separately.  The premise is, again, that once a person has been identified as a friend rather than as a Potential Naked Fun Times Compatriot, the process can never be reversed, and it is impossible to go from being close friends to romantic partners.  Or, more importantly, dudes will claim that women will use their existing friendship as an excuse not to start dating.  So, keep in mind:

1. If a person says they don't want to date another person, the most probable answer is that they don't want to date them, never have, and never will.
2. It is possible that a person legitimately believes that, regardless of their possible attraction to you, the potential failure of a romantic relationship is too great to risk the consequences for the friendship.
3. Ask yourself if you can, if nothing else, imagine a friendship with [member of whatever gender(s) you're attracted to] that you valued so much, in its platonic form, that you would hesitate or turn them down if they propositioned you.  If the answer is 'no', then chances are good we've just identified why your friend didn't want to date you from the beginning.*
4. No one needs an excuse in order to not date someone.  Therefore, if you have had what you believe to be An Excuse deployed on you: it was for the sake of sparing your feelings and the other person simply doesn't want to explain that, while you're fun to hang out with, they might rather make out with a galapagos tortoise.

I have had a lot of female friends.  I have been attracted to some of them.  I have broached the subject of dating sometimes.  I have sometimes been turned down; I have even had things which I suspect were Excuses deployed on me.  What is the correct response here?

Move on with your life.

Which is bleedin' difficult sometimes, I know.  Great Jaddeth Below, I know.  When I refer to myself as a 'former Nice Guy', I see parallels with 'recovering alcoholic' - with destructive behaviours, we might never stop wanting to backslide, we might have to work constantly to be better than ourselves.  I may never stop wanting to be Romantic Comedy Guy.  But resisting that is the definition of winning.  (And sadly there are no cookies for basic decency.)

I used to dislike stories that made it explicitly clear that Our Heroes could never really win - that they would just right this injustice, push back evil this time, and then some day it would come back, and they would fight it again, or someone else would have to do it, forever.  But I get it now.

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*Gracious, I almost let a post go by without a footnote.  Well, it occurred to me on rereading this rule that the 'you' here might just be a polysomething person of the sort who doesn't feel any particular need to maintain hard lines between platonic and sexual relationships, and that may be just fine on its own; I'm not saying you're a horrible person.  But I hardly need to tell someone who has a robust set of sociosexual ethics that the turning-you-down person may not be comfortable getting into that, so I think the rule stands on its own, both in its judgey and non-judgey forms.

Language around consent

I'm sure after reading the little tangent in the last 50 Shades post you all knew there was a post about consent coming. So, trigger warnings: I will be talking about rape, I will be talking about consent, I will be talking about all sorts of issues that float around it, and I'm not sure how qualified I am to be talking about these things, so, be warned. The standard comment rules of "Differ without being a dick" will apply to this post, so if I mess up here don't be afraid to call me out, just, you know, do it politely please.

Right, so, you know the phrase "No means no" right? I mean, everyone does. Yet for some reason, we don't give a lot of power to "no". It has to be a certain kind of no for us to listen. It has to be a firm no. A forceful no. It has to be the type of no that will make you a shrill, uptight bitch. You know, all the things women are told we're not supposed to be. Those types of no upset people, right? So we try to say it passively, we try to say it nicely, we try to say it in every way that lets our "no" be ignored because we didn't really mean it.

Here is the triggery personal part. I used to fall into that trap all the time. We'll call him P. P was the first serious relationship I had ever had, and almost all of my sexual firsts were with him. I don't think P is a bad guy and wish him ill, I want to say this first, what I'm about to talk about is just one of the incredibly problematic behaviors he had. I think I'm allowed to still think well of someone and be aware of their faults and problems, after all. So, I would be at P's place and he would try to initiate sex. He'd touch a boob or start kissing and it was blatantly apparent what he was doing. I didn't mind, but I wouldn't be in the mood, and say so. I'd say no. Not a big no. Not a forceful no. Not a stern no. Just a "neh." followed by showing a hand away. His response? Put the hand back and keep going. I could have said "no" again. Sometimes I did, but usually I just went with it. I mean, I usually got off anyways, and he was my boyfriend, so it was fine, right? Ignore the fact that when I did push and stick to my "no" he'd get upset. Not screaming and rage upset. He'd sulk and be moody for a while. He was sulky and moody often enough that at no point in my inexperience did I stop and say "Wait, this is fucked. My wishes around my body are not being respected!"

Then again, I didn't really say no, right? I wasn't firm! I didn't repeat myself! I shouldn't have had to. I wish now I had called him out no it, because he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. He thought "no" that was mild and lifeless meant "try harder" since it wasn't a "real" no which he had been taught for a long time. My not standing up and correcting him was just one more person telling him that was okay. I regret that. I wish I had been more aware, and more bold at the time.

All this is a way of saying that "No means No" isn't as strong as we think it is. Ignoring the fact that saying no is hard. Ignoring the fact that when you're scared and intimidated and shocked and not totally sure what's going that "no" often doesn't even occur to you. Ignoring the fact that saying "no" means having to stop something to do so. There are a lot of problems with "no means no" but I'm not suggesting we do away with it.

I have two solutions to suggest. One is to give "no" more power. When someone says no, leave it at that as much as possible*. Friend doesn't want to dance? Don't make them. Friend doesn't want to drink tonight? Okay. Your body, your call, dude. If in innocuous social situations when you say no it's ignored, or makes people angry, you're going to be afraid to use it when it matters. Like when someone is being sexually aggressive but you kind of like them but you're really not sure if you actually want this or not and- You get the point. If we start treating "no" like it is important, like it matters, not only are we empowering people, we are making it harder for would-be attackers to ignore the "wrong type" of no.

My second solution is to start pushing for "yes means yes" which is, quite simply, that you should ask. I know a lot of people don't like the idea of asking to kiss someone, or to have sex with someone. It's inorganic! However there are ways to ask that are sexy. "Listen, I think you are absolutely stunning and I really just want to kiss you right now, can I?" "Can I (INSERT MANY SPECIFIC EXPLETIVES THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO PREFORM ON PERSON HERE)?" Think of it as an extension to dirty talk if that helps you wrap your head around it. (Once again I'm going to link to Pervocracy because it is just a wonderful place and you should go and read all of it right now.)

Now, why do I think switching from the current standard of "Person A grabs and kisses Person B and things evolve naturally from there" to "stop and ask the person if they want it first" would be an improvement? A few reasons. One is that it would open up dialog about sexual wants and expectations much earlier. I think this is just important period, because sex needs to stop being an awkward taboo and something that is normal to talk about. People are just going to be having better sex because of it. The more important reason in this context is it gives people an opening to say no. It takes the pressure off of the person to come out and say no if they're scared because now it's an option that is much easier for them to take because you asked first! It shows that you value the consent of the person you want to have sexy fun times with, and that is going to help them feel comfortable around you. It also takes a lot of the confusion out of consent. "Well, she didn't say no or stop so I thought..."** You ask, they say yes or no, you keep going or stop, and ask before the next big step (say, going from kissing to fingering) so there remains no confusion over if both parties want to be doing these things. It makes consent more important, and takes some of the mystery and confusion out of it.

I think these are important things. I think a lot of things are important things, but usually I come to a standstill when I try to think of something to DO about these things I find important. Do I start going to protests, or rallies or something? Maybe write letters to my MP? Does that stuff even make a difference? I don't know. I'm still figuring that out, but on this topic, on this one thing, I've at least got an idea. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm hilariously mislead and this is all just PC fluff, but... I don't think it is. I think these are the sorts of steps we need to start taking to shift our cultural narrative to a better one, and if nothing else, talking about it can only help, right? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!


*I know not to make blanket statements like "no should always be absolute" because that means closing the door on a lot of communication etc, but you get what I mean.
**Or didn't say the right kind of "no" as discussed above.