Today’s Genderal Interest column at Jezebel looks at the latest research about why platonic friendships between men and women remain so difficult.
Excerpt:
The problem isn’t just, as the Bleske-Rechek study shows, that men wildly overestimate their female buddies’ sexual interest. It’s that they also undervalue their own worth as friends. In a world where we still cling to the belief that women are naturally more intuitive and verbally adept than men, many guys assume that if a woman wants a non-sexual friendship, she’ll naturally choose from the ranks of those who “do” friendship well: other women. The idea that a straight woman might want to be close to them without wanting to fuck or marry strikes them as utterly implausible. As a result, men do two things at once: they overrate their own sexual irresistibility and depreciate everything else they might have to offer. Little wonder, then, that so many dudes wrongly assume that their lady friends are crushing on them.
So what can we do to better equip guys to be “just friends” with the women in their lives? For starters, we can debunk once and for all the myth that sexual desire makes friendship impossible. The traditional reasoning is that male-female platonic relationships only work when neither friend is ever attracted to the other. Given how fluid and surprising desire can be, those friendships where lust never appears for even an instant are going to be relatively rare. But this reasoning overstates the power of sexual attraction to drown out everything else. As this new study makes clear, it’s not that women are never attracted to their male buddies. It’s that women are probably better acculturated to put lust aside for the sake of a friendship.
The study does not support Dr. Schwyzer’s claim that “men WILDLY overestimate their female buddies’ sexual interest.” Table 1 of Bleske-Recheck et al.’s article reports the relevant results. The participants rated attraction on a 9-point scale ranging from 1=”not at all attracted” to 9=”extremely attracted.” The midpoint, 5, was labeled “moderately attracted.” Females’ mean ratings of their attraction to their male friend was 3.97 (less than moderately attracted). The males’ estimated their female friend’s attraction to them at a mean rating of 4.54 (higher, but still less than moderately attracted). The overestimated their female friend’s attraction by about a half-point on a 9-point scale – hardly a WILD overestimate, and they still said (on average) that their friend was less than moderately attracted to them. Dr, Schwyzer’s suggestion that the males thought their female friends were hot to trot is simply not supported by the actual findings. But why let the numbers get in the way of a good story?
It does have better statistics than his earlier privileged serial killer hypothesis.
The main focus on every article is making men look bad. Hugo isn’t really interested in what the facts are. They are just a bothersome irritant that sometimes get in the way of his true message – that men are bad, except Hugo who was resurrected from his bad behavior to become a Christ-like savior, and women are good.
In one place Hugo writes “In a world where we still cling to the belief that women are naturally more intuitive and verbally adept than men”, and then later concludes: “women are probably better acculturated to put lust aside for the sake of a friendship”. Women are just “better” I guess, whether by nature or nurture.
There’s also an undertone in the article, hard to put my finger on it but it’s there, that smacks of good old patriarchal values, that unreciprocated male sexual desire for a woman is somehow “wrong” and men should undergo Hugo’s re-education program to be corrected.
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Oh, there are plenty of reasons for a man to have female friends, e.g.
1. he can learn what women want/expect of men in general. Not so much for a “dry run” at a relationship, but more for becoming a well-rounded member of society at large (which contains ~ 50% women, many of whom have a lot of power over men).
2. female friends can set him up with their single friends
3. if he has children, it doesn’t hurt to waft them around some well-chosen adult female role models
I’m sure there are other reasons. If they all sound self-serving, so what? They’re good reasons for the women too.
Women dont put aside lust for the sake of friendship. Women dont feel lust for the vast majority of men, to begin with. Women are as sexual and visual as men…they are just more selective.