ETC

Why the friendzone is bullshit and self-proclaimed “nice guys” are misogynists

angels-and-angles:

Why the friendzone is bullshit and self-proclaimed “nice guys” are misogynists

Wow, accidentally deleted my original post. Reblogging so I can keep it in my archives.

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As defined by urban dictionary, the friendzone is…

“When you are expected to support a girl you really like while she searches for a smarter, richer, and more handsome boyfriend. There is little you can do without feeling like a dick. All in all, one of the meanest things a girl can do, whether they mean it or not.”

and ”The perennial location of nice guys everywhere.”

Although this hypothetical situation could work both ways, friendzone is almost always applied to a man who is rejected by a woman. Therefore, there is something inherently unequal, something inherently sexist about the term “friendzone”. But what and why?

From my experience, this is what friend zone is. A “nice guy” pursues a woman, but isn’t forward with his intentions from the get-go like, say, a “jerk”. The woman is pleased to see a man who is interested in her not as a sexual object but as a human being and wishes for things to stay that way. The man is not satisfied with seeing the woman as a human being because being “expected to support a girl” is a bad deal if she’s not putting out.

Before I delve into the sociological aspects of this, I just want to point out that ”friendzone” is no more pleasant for a woman than it is a man. First, that is to say unrequited love works both ways, but the person who doesn’t return affections is considered mean only when she’s a woman. And second, what option does the woman have in a traditional “friendzone” situation? Just stop talking to a close friend to avoid “leading him on”? In high school, I found out my best friend of 2 years liked me. Having to tell him I didn’t feel the same way and being immediately ex-communicated via Facebook status (“Thanks for wasting my time”) was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Were our two years of friendship invalid because I didn’t want anything more? Was all our time together really wasted because there was no hypothetical pay off?

Guys who do this and claim to be “nice guys” are the worst misogynists because of their sense of entitlement toward a woman. They make investments in property and expect their dividends. They are fake friends. They are selfish. And they will jump at the chance to vilify you and victimize themselves when their attempts at manipulation don’t work. Clearly, “friendzone” is the remnant of a phenomenon that has plagued women since the beginning of time: women are not independent creatures. Our love lives exist only in the context of a man’s desire. When we make independent decisions, we are subject to a host of derogatory terms. “Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”. “Friendzone” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “no”

skelethongs:

“why do gay people have to be everywhere nowadays” said the heterosexual blogger as he sat down in the house owned by his heterosexual parents after a busy day at his primarily heterosexual school learning heterosexual-focused sex education and a syllabus approved by a government mainly made up of heterosexual politicians which enforced policies that generally benefited heterosexuals over people of any other sexuality

schubertiade:

“So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that. It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then. (Years later, when he took up the question of abortion again in Vanity Fair, he said basically the exact same things, using the same straw-women arguments. Time taught him nothing, because he didn’t want to learn.) That was the bad side of Christopher—the moral bully and black-and-white thinker posing as daring truth-teller. It was the side that reveled in 9/11, because now everyone would see how evil the jihadis were, and that rejoiced in the thought that the Korans of Muslim fighters would not protect them from American bullets. Some eulogists have praised him for moral consistency, but I don’t see that: he wrote tens of thousands of words attacking Clinton for executing Ricky Ray Rector, but seemed untroubled about George W Bush’s execution of 152 people—at the time a historical record—as governor of Texas. He was so fuelled by his own certainty he claimed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only proved they were there.”

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Regarding Christopher | The Nation

I’m putting off writing about Hitchens until such time that I can write about him more soberly, but this is one of the better remembrances of him that I’ve read.

(via irredenta)

Reblog if you’re an atheist and not a misogynist

alisonofagun:

iamabutchsolo:

friendlyatheist:

proudtobegodfree:

because I know you exist, you know you exist, we all know you exist.

Say what? Since when did being atheist equates with misogyny? First time I ever heard such a thing…

Because leaders of this “atheism movement” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have said some very misogynistic things; there are few atheist leaders that actually feature proper gender equality discourse in their discussions on atheism who say anything beyond “Muslims/Christians/Jewish treatment of women are worse”. It’s not saying that misogyny and atheism go hand-in-hand, but the strongest voices in atheism have misogynistic rhetoric.

^this. 

It’s hard to imagine anybody who experienced elevatorgate this summer could not realize that a huge number of atheists are misogynistic. Part of the problem is that atheists in particular think of themselves as enlightened and incapable of sexism or racism.