[Epistemic status: amateur sociology engaged in because it’s a fun intellectual game. If I find one of you fuckers acting like this is established fact, I’m going to glare at you.]
So I’ve recently read this article from a Christian magazine mourning how acceptance of homosexuality has lead to a demise of deep male friendship, because men are too afraid of being gay to have intimate relationships with each other.
I have not personally noticed this as a problem. I can think off the top of my head of half a dozen passionate friendships which have enriched my life tremendously, and while people I know may have trouble finding friends for the ordinary reasons that people do, I have not noticed men restraining themselves from emotional intimacy with other men. I don’t doubt that this is a problem– most notably, I observed it quite a lot in high school– but it is not a problem among people I know. Perhaps I can identify what we’re doing right.
My social circles since high school have been queer: that is, more than half the people I interacted with at any given time were LGBTA. However, there are straight, cisgender people– even straight, cisgender men!– in my community. As far as I can tell, there is little difference between the straight, cisgender man and the trans lesbian in how likely they are to form friendships.
James Baldwin wrote of whiteness as a choice: whiteness, he argues, is the decision to identify oneself with white people as a group (as opposed to with Norwegians or Poles– or, indeed, with birdwatchers or model-train collectors), which white people are perfectly capable of not doing if they so choose. In a similar sense, I think, most of those men might be heterosexual, but they’re not straight. They don’t identify with straight people as a group.
How does this manifest itself? Well, quite often they idly wish to be bisexual (more people to date!) or asexual (more free time!). They may initiate casual physical contact with other men, such as hugs or cuddling, if they’re typically a huggy or cuddly person. The difference is perhaps most sharply shown about their attitudes towards dating trans people. If they are attracted to a trans man, they’re like “oh, cool! guess I like some men.” The ones who like women with penises occasionally date them without angsting about what it means; the ones who don’t don’t freak out when they see a trans girl and happen to think she’s cute, because it’s not a big deal to be attracted to someone with genitals you don’t like. And if they did happen to get a crush on a cis man, one imagines that they would shrug and roll with it.
In this environment, men are capable of becoming friends with other men, because who cares if you’re gay? If they are not invested in continuing to be heterosexual, then “people might think you’re gay” is not a threat. So? You can correct them, and if they aren’t corrected you can roll your eyes, and either way it’s no big deal.
It is important, I think, to distinguish this from being secure in one’s heterosexuality, a conflation that is often made. Being secure in your heterosexuality is thinking “I am so certain of my heterosexual identity, which I want to keep maintaining, that I can do some things people think of as being gay.” This is saying “I really don’t give a fuck if I’m straight or not; if I am, cool, and if I’m not, also cool.”
Obviously, this attitude requires community support to maintain. If everyone else cares whether you’re gay– and they’re going to harass you if they think you are– it takes a remarkably thick-skinned individual to maintain their lack of fucks given. And I think a lot of it is people absorbing the values of their own community: if everyone you’re around thinks that gayness is just as good as straightness (and bisexuality is maybe a little better), then it’s easier for you to believe that too.
The author of A Requiem for Friendship discusses solely male friendship, and seems to be vaguely under the impression that women are not capable of true philia and, perhaps relatedly, that men are not capable of true parental love. If true, this speaks to a sad reduction of human capacities by the community of the author, and perhaps he should address why the past community he wishes to return to took away from women the capacity for philia and men the capacity for parental love. For this reason, I think, he does not seem to be aware that women and men are capable of having philia for each other.
Some have argued that you can’t have true friendship if it’s possible to have romantic love for the person– the romantic love will continually get in the way. I don’t think this is an unreasonable critique: true friendship is the recognition of one soul in another soul, and that tends to lead to romantic love quite a lot. I think having bisexuals in a community improves this situation: after all, bisexuals are capable of having romantic love for everyone. By extension, one must conclude that either bisexuals are incapable of philia or that you can, in fact, have romantic love and philia at the same time.
Why would we assume any love is necessarily pure? It is perfectly possible for a parent to feel both the warm, protective love of parent to child, and the deep friendship of recognizing a person fundamentally similar to you. It is perfectly possible for a couple to feel both the companionable, affectionate familiarity of people who have spent a long time in each other’s company, and the passionate erotic love we call ‘romance’. Surely, then, it is possible to both feel erotic love and friendship for the same person at the same time.
One innovation, particularly in polyamorous communities, is the melding of friendship and sexual/romantic love. I know many people who date their friends, many people who are in love with their friends (either for a short period of time at the beginning of the relationship, or continually), many people who have sex with their friends regularly or as a one-off thing. In my opinion, the careful use of romance has great potential to strengthen and deepen a friendship, and I feel quite sad that the author of this article does not seem to be familiar with it.
Thing of Things 
I think a larger issue for male friendships is that male-only spaces are strongly frowned upon in our society as being sexist, with the only exceptions made for gay men, so there is little to no opportunity for non-sexual male bonding.
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Whether that’s the case or not is a bit situational. If you like hunting, fishing, or football whether at sports bars or football house parties, you can have a space that is, if not literally male only, effectively so.
You’ll still be belittled for it a bit, but it’s available.
There are a few other contexts where it’s possible. There are usually effectively all male amateur sports outlets around if you know where to look. These aren’t advertised but they exist. I don’t know how you’re supposed to find them if no one tells you about them though.
There are plenty of geek hobbies that are effectively all male. They’re generally condemned for this and if you engage in them you can expect to be belittled, but if your thing is RC airplanes or whatever the social spaces around those hobbies are as effectively all male as you can reasonably expect.
I don’t know if I’m really the best person to list these off since I have zero close male friends (I have zero close friends… I am not internally constituted in such a way as to have these things) but I can observe these groups around me and recognize that they are social spaces occupied almost entirely by adult men who are friends with one another.
It’s true that they’re also sometimes under attack because of that, but no one promised us freedom from that sort of spite, and it seems easily weathered.
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There’s probably not a significant overlap between “Men who are entirely comfortable being under suspicion of latent sexism and being friends with men they suspect of latent sexism” and “Men who read Ozy’s blog / are friends with Ozy / talk with Ozy regularly.”
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You’re male. You’re going to be under suspicion of latent sexism no matter what you do. If anything the more you hang around these circles the more suspicion you’ll be under because part of the toxicity of the social justice movement is it’s tendency towards “whichever nail my hammer can reach is the right nail” and “if the problem isn’t fixed hammer harder” reasoning.
At a certain point you have to learn how to maintain your separate peace.
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This is definitely true. It’s also one of those things where you find people with wildly different views expressing it: I first encountered it in “Stiffed” by Susan Faludi (she talks about how a men-only military academy allows a level of male-male intimacy that disappears when women are around) but I’ve seen it expressed by various internet far right people.
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But at that point, the solution seems to be more “allow a level of male-male intimacy even when women are around” rather than “make more male-only spaces.”
Why can’t one particular all-male social circle attend an activity where other people’s not-all-male social circles are also attending? Then the one all-male circle still gets in their male bonding time without requiring the space be all-male. That’s like saying a group of women couldn’t possibly get their girl chat in at a football game or nerd convention.
[X gender]-only spaces are not critical to friendship.
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dndnrsn –
I first encountered it in “Self-Made Man,” if I recall correctly. It’s one of the aspects of “men are the default gender” – people don’t think of men as have discrete and distinct needs or privacy. (Think about how much more acceptable it is for women to use men’s restrooms than the reverse.)
arbitrary_greay –
Men, just like women, need safe spaces in our society. This shouldn’t surprise anybody, and it isn’t sexist to acknowledge it or to forbid women entry into those safe spaces.
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@arbitrary-greay:
Is it still girls’ night out if somebody’s boyfriend comes along?
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@dndnrsn: Girls’ night out isn’t the same thing as “this location is girls only.” The girls -only group can go to a restaurant with guys in it.
@Orphan:
I think you can have a monogender social circle, and hang out with them without any members of a different gender. The frowned-upon “male-only spaces” you mention in your first comment don’t fall under this category, imo, as they imply a location/event that encompasses more than one particular friend-group. It’s the difference between a monogender party at one bowling lane vs. a monogender bowling alley, you know?
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@arbitrary_greay: Granted, there’s a difference between “this is open to women only” and “girls’ night out”, but a non-mixed group in a mixed public space is still going to behave differently from a mixed group (whether it’s in a public or private space).
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@dndnrsn: And I think that “a non-mixed group in a mixed public space is still going to behave differently from a mixed group” is potentially the problem in the first place.
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Orphan, that rings pretty true for me. I’m a member of 3 male red-statish groups.
– I went on a men’s retreat organized by my church, and we still meet periodically to pray and discuss what’s going on in our lives, and meet much more frequently with our families for social and religious stuff. I don’t have a ton in common with most of those guys other than the retreat, but they’re probably now some of my closest friends. There’s a lot of hugging and sharing emotionally vulnerable stuff and calling each other brother, and showing up when someone needs help moving stuff or whatever. Almost no bro-style behavior, except that most of the guys love to talk sports.
– Flowing from that retreat, I joined a mens-only charitable and social group. It’s mostly a combination of fundraising, parliamentary procedure, and drinking beer. I don’t feel super close to those guys, but we all say hi to each other when we meet on the street, so I guess closer than if I just knew them from church.
– On the recommendation of one of the guys from that group, I joined Y-guides, a YMCA organization that’s kind of like scouts, but specifically for fathers and their daughters or sons. I don’t know that the dynamic among the adults is much different than if moms were there, but the kids who participate love knowing that their dad will make time to be there. (A lot of the girls also belong to girl scouts, which is almost entirely a mom’s activity in my area, although I don’t know whether that’s by design.)
I don’t know the moral of those anecdotes. I think all of those groups *might* work the same if they were co-ed, but obviously I don’t have the counterfactual to test.
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As soon as you introduce (typical) women, the societal expectation will be that the men will begin policing one another’s behavior to make sure it is welcoming to the women in the group. At that point you no longer have an open and welcoming group for men, because sexist attitudes are regarded as ethically contagious; you’re a bad person if you let sexist statements and attitudes go without comment.
This doesn’t differ between red-state and blue-state groups; both have a social expectation that women must be protected, and that women’s discomfort in social situations must be addressed to make them comfortable; treating women the way men are treated is interpreted by most people as sexism, which means that for the average group with at least one typical woman, the group tends to be heavily women-centric.
This isn’t universal, mind. Indeed, the stereotypical men’s group has at least one masculine woman in it, and there’s a reason for that: her mere presence prevents this from happening. She can’t be shamed or gender-policed into acquiescence, and men can’t or won’t police her behavior in the way they police other men’s, meaning any group she’s a part of is a group that cannot become restructured to fit a more stereotypical woman’s social expectations.
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Thanks Orphan – that might be, although my read on my male only groups is:
(1) There’s surprisingly little behavior that I’d be uncomfortable about if women were there. I can’t think of any, except that we’d probably limit the kids’ risk somewhat more in the campouts if moms were there – less climbing trees, fording running water, etc.
I guess you’re right that if you added some women, I would start burning some more calories running an “is this offensive” sub-process on my own conduct, although I still wouldn’t think I would find anything.
(2) I get into this below, but personally, the biggest change if you added women is that I would spend energy being attracted to some of them. Maybe the value of mens’ groups to me is that I have a space where I am free from my own sexuality?
(The second biggest change is that every several years, somebody from the group would hook up, possibly to scandalous effect. )
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The effect is real, but I don’t think it has much to do with sexism.
The progressive model of normie gender relations is incomplete. On the one hand, it’s true that, under normie gender relations, men lead and women follow; but on the other hand, it’s also true that men are supposed to, for example, open doors for women. Nobody believes that women can’t open doors; so why are men supposed to do it for them? You could say that it’s because of the patriarchy — men want women to be weak and dependent on men — but then you’re saying that 51% of the population have no agency, in order to bolster a theory that can explain these two things, but can’t explain, say, the Scott Aaronson affair.
Let’s make the bold and controversial assumption that women have agency — that is, that they can, to some extent, shape normie gender relations to fit their interests. What sorts of interests do normie women have? Do they want partnerships of equals with soft, prosocial men in touch with their emotions? Do they want that sort of metaphorical homosexuality? Lol, no. That ‘nice guys’ are clueless dorks with entitlement complexes doesn’t mean chicks don’t dig ‘bad boys’.
Here’s a model with more predictive power: normie gender relations consists of a tacit agreement, where men agree to perform attractiveness to the abstract concept of the normie woman (i.e. strength, stoicism, emotionlessness, measured applications of violent anger, etc. — if you prefer, ‘toxic masculinity’) and women agree to perform attractiveness to the abstract concept of the normie man (i.e. weakness and dependence), and each sex enforces, and women especially are encouraged to enforce, normie gender relations by responding to lack of attractiveness with, and genuinely feeling lack of attraction as, disgust. The woman performs being scared by a spider, and the man performs being tough and killing it. If the woman doesn’t perform being scared, the man performs being disgusted; if the man doesn’t perform being tough, the woman performs being disgusted.
If you’re thinking of this as lifestyle D/s performed by people not self-aware enough to realize that’s what they’re doing or what they want, you’re totally wrong: it’s not limited to relationships. It’s the default mode of relation between the sexes — it’s not really even about attractiveness, just about What Is Done. It’s just etiquette. The dynamic even shapes interactions within the family.
Another way to conceptualize it (a better way, if you’re planning a date) is as an exchange of experiences: men provide experiences for women, and get in return the experience, facilitated by the woman, of Being A Man.
This model explains why men are expected to lead, why women are expected to follow, why men are expected to open doors for women, why Scott Aaronson faced so much backlash (he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain, because he performed unattractiveness and unmanliness, admitted to having once felt sad about the thing, etc., so he had to be punished for it, by the unconscious mechanism of women conflating lack of attraction with disgust), why men use disgust to pressure women into not shaving their armpits or whatever, why women respond to that pressure by making a point of performing disgustingness at them, and — why adding women to all-male groups completely changes the dynamic. The implicit threat isn’t an accusation of sexism, although that’s one idiom it can use — it’s that the men suddenly have to hold up the male end of the bargain, both in order to be attractive to the woman (because getting her interested in you confers status) and in order to not face the penalty for breaking it.
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Most of the backlash was about him saying stuff like <I was angry at women when they failed to punish “neanderthals” the way I expected them to punish me> and <the best place for me would be a shtetl — I even named my blog after that> (angle brackets for paraphrase).
“The sacred duty of a maiden is to guard her ‘honor’ and award herself to the most virtuous man” is an ancient part of gender roles, even more central than opening doors or screaming at mice or spiders. And even if he only meant to say “I wish there were known rules of courtship”, the shtetl part was taken to mean “my ideal life would be one where I and my male friends were considered high-status scholars, while our wives did all the menial work, regardless of their preferences”.
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I feel like Frodo/Sam is the most archetypal examples of how the growing support for LGBT+ has undermined the male friendships. By reinterpreting the incredibly christian Tolkien’s characters, one of who canonically raises a family, who was interested in a girl before the journey even began, as “gay” (not even “bisexual” which would at least respect canon), one reinforces gender norms on what “masculine” characters are allowed to feel (i.e. not platonic love, not deep loyalty, etc…). As a cis het dude who fucking loves LotR, I would much prefer if people would acknowledge their ridiculous head-canons as ridiculous head-canons and not as objective fact.[/SocialJusticeTrueRessurectionOfAuthor]
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This is a Tumblr thing. As it happens, a community that has a lot of less than social girls have a harder time accepting close male friendships. It wouldn’t surprise me if they also turned out to be mostly only children, which would also explain the hard time they have with fraternal love as well.
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It can’t be a Tumblr thing, can it? Shipping pairs of male friends together predates the site’s existence.
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It’d be more accurate to say it’s a nerdy girl thing, it just so happens Tumblr is currently their biggest stronghold.
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Sometimes all relationships between male characters turn sexual in girls’ minds, for the same reason why girls’ sleepover parties sometimes turn into orgies in boys’ minds 🙂
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Canonically, Frodo and Sam are not just friends, but master and loyal servant (Sam starts out as Frodo’s gardener, but transitions into a personal servant / valet role for the trip). That’s why Sam calls Frodo “Mister Frodo”, while Frodo calls Sam “Sam”.
In our society, hardly anyone has servant-friends. A person who follows a man wherever he goes, runs errands for him and reverently takes care of him is likely to be his partner, not just a friend. So it’s no wonder that some folks interpret it in a way that they can actually relate to.
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I was going to say “I think something is missing here” until I got to that last paragraph. But I think this should be made more explicit — the problem generalizes well beyond male-male, it’s just that outside same-sex contexts the fear of homosexuality part goes away. But the underlying problem is the insistence on a rigid separation between friendly-only contexts and sexual/romantic contexts, and the idea that the latter has to be avoided most of the time. Really I think the problem is more easily visible in opposite-sex contexts, where it’s assumed that this is a factor. In contrast, in same-sex contexts, the problem can be masked by the assumption of heterosexuality, allowing closer friendships. The problem here isn’t specific to the male-male context; removing the assumption of heterosexuality just removes the barrier to it existing in that context. Of course it’s amplified there due to the fear of homosexuality, so it’s gone from “less present than in male-female contexts due to assumption of heterosexuality” to “more present than in male-female contexts due to fear of homosexuality”. But, as I said, remove the fear of homosexuality and all that will gain you is a reduction of the problem to male-female levels. The insistence on the rigid separation is, IMO, the underlying problem in all contexts.
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Maaaaybe I’m misunderstanding what context we’re talking about, or have way too little experience that is not public school / college or similar environments…
But, IME, every damn thing that is not rigidly normal (and a few things that are) is, if not outright treated as probably romantic, then is mercilessly mocked as though it is (and then I get the same anxiety issues either way). The “no homo” meme surely came from somewhere (although I have not delved into the bowels of the internet to confirm where, so I’d be glad if it turns out that this was 4chan mocking the very idea I’m talking about). Bromance, ho-yay, and this flood of people interpreting every possible configuration of fictional or historical characters as romantically involved and somehow being taken seriously (see the LotR examples above, and I once had a classmate complain about a teacher who insisted that Lewis and Clark must have been gay because they went hiking across a continent without bringing wives and had to have sex with someone, or some such).
It’s not just a male-male thing, but yeah.
Then there’s the whole “you do not conspicuously seek out shallow romantic relationships with the opposite sex, therefore you are gay, therefore we can be disruptive in your direction at inappropriate times and that earns us glory” thing. Eh, I dunno, maybe it’s just because I’m from the midsouth, (and the other people I’ve heard this from who aren’t are from the midwest), but absence of conspicuous heterosexuality was taken as evidence of homosexuality.
But I guess there is a world outside of high school that might be much less antagonistic, for all I know.
But, yeah, I can’t get emotionally interested in literally anyone without panicking that it’s going to be taken as romantic. Gender / age / whatever, it doesn’t matter. And admitting that anything tangentially related to the subject ever passed through my head sets off the same alarms, so I don’t see myself ever telling a therapist. (Really, I’m not sure what it says that I’m saying it here, other than that I guess I trust people here more than I can think of a reason to…)
Maybe it’s not a real thing and I just got some combination of horribly unlucky and overly sensitive (so horribly unlucky). But I just hate it so very much.
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My hypothesis is that this is a trait of spaces that are half or more queer. Most spaces are not half or more queer, as you can tell by the fact that we’re like four percent of the population. Plenty of places for homophobia to screw over men’s emotional intimacy.
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An alternative hypothesis: it’s not the absence of homophobia or presence of queer folk, but the chillness sbout intimacy that makes the difference. In the article author’s culture, intimacy with a plausible mate is suspect, so if men are plausible mates for each other, they can’t be intimate with each other.
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(And of course, intimate friendships between men and women, as well as any sense of sexuality – much less homosexuality – in women themselves, is just assumed out of existence)
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I don’t think this could ever be convincing to someone who’s not already on your side, since it basically boils down to “I don’t think my social circle suffers from a lack of non-sexual relationships, because I see no value in non-sexual relationships.” But of course, the value of non-sexual relationships is precisely what’s at issue. To echo your final paragraph, if you seriously think that leaving parent-child or sibling relationships open to the possibility of sex would improve them, I feel quite sad for you.
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The most interesting part of the linked article for me was it’s whole hearted attack on the “consenting adults” ethic.
This was less surprising to me when I scrolled around to find the articles original publication date: 2005.
I first encountered the reasoning the author uses in this attack in exactly this context- conservative Christian cultural criticism of homosexuality and modern sexual mores.
I rejected the authors reasoning. Strongly. To be clear, I don’t just disagree with the authors conclusions, I disagree with how the author got to them. I don’t think that popular acceptance of homosexuality changes the cultural meaning of male gestures of intimate friendship to the point where men have to avoid intimate friendships altogether, and even if it did I don’t think that’s important enough to justify telling homosexuals to stay closeted, instead of telling everyone else to stop worrying so much about what other people think.
So on this issue, this dispute over whether the personal is political in this manner, my allegiances were already formed back in the nineties.
Before social justice took everything about this authors argument and have it their stamp of approval. His reasoning is identical to that employed by many popular social justice subculture friendly media and cultural critics. In particular his rejection of the “what consenting adults do together is their business and not yours” argument could be cut and pasted into a feminist critique of a Hollywood blockbuster with almost no changes.
And if I didn’t accept it the first time around, I’m not accepting it now. Nothing has changed except who’s deploying it, and I still think that respecting the choices of consenting adults is vastly more important than this airy “it’s affecting the cultural context!” stuff, and I tend to see both forms of this argument as equally offensive in their trespass against people’s personal lives.
On an unrelated note- there are some cultural markers in there that indicate that this guy is possibly from the sort of Christian subculture in which teenage boys are assigned “accountability buddies” to whom they are expected to tearfully confess- with details- whenever they falter and masturbate. This fact might be of interest to those seeking to contextualize this authors concerns about the possibility of being seen as gay negatively impacting male intimate relationships.
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Here’s my 2 cents.
I think for most of the people I know (straight identified, monogamous identified, mostly married), there’s a great value to a space that’s absolutely free of sex.
Sometimes that’s by explicit or implicit agreement – from what I understand, it’s basically understood that if you’re getting a professional massage from someone who you find attractive or who is attracted to you, everybody agrees not to act on it. And similarly, it’s understood that my coworkers and I shouldn’t be making out with each other on trips, and I can hug and chat the hot women in my church groups without being seen as flirtatious, and if an attractive woman and I are pinning each other while practicing ground fighting in martial arts, we all agree that the situation isn’t sexual.
Except, sometimes people in all those groups – masseuse/client, coworker, church volunteer, martial arts students, whatever, end up boning.
An all-straight, same gender group does have one special characteristic. Assuming everyone’s really all the way over on the Kinsey scale, no one in that group is actually attracted to anyone else. (The fantasy “gay best friend” is a little similar – two friends who agree that there is no possibility of romantic interaction, although there can still be attraction).
Once you integrate the formerly same sex group, or admit that some of the people in the group might be gay or bi, then it’s not sex-free in the exact way that it was. And admitting that some people are gay might be enough, especially in the early panic years, to cause problems with that.
A few more observations:
1) I can’t see the future, but I tend to think there will be other, less harmful alternatives reached that offer similar virtues at less cost of excluding others and/or “hiding our gays”, so the evolution will be a good thing.
2) I wonder if women’s same sex groups are different from men. In other words, is it really just male sexuality that we want to remove, and is a women’s only group the same if you add some open lesbians, or does introducing the possibility of attraction change both groups?
3) Another way around it would be to de-emphasize monogamy and/or sex. If me railing the occasional member of my prayer group just wasn’t that big a deal, then there might not be that much of an issue with whether it was made up of all straight guys.
(To clarify, I would be completely happy joining prayer groups and parent-child camping clubs that included women and gay men, but I do think the dynamic would be somewhat different.)
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I think that our cultural scripts include “men initiate sexual/romantic stuff, women don’t” and “male sexuality is treated as potentially predatory,” and I think that’s why my experience of mixed groups of straight/lesbian/bi women is that there’s not much anxiety about sexual tension; it’s like there’s an unspoken agreement that as long as the lesbian and bi women don’t try to initiate anything, the straight women won’t worry too much about the notion that one of the other women might be attracted to them. It still feels kind of… sex-free. (This is my impression as an asexual-ish woman, so you might get a different answer if you asked someone more sexual than me!)
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Now I really want a name for the mindset of “I’m probably a heterosexual man but I don’t mind if I’m actually bi and I don’t fret over emotional closeness to other men or attraction to people who are not gender conforming ciswomen” My social circle is not primarily queer (I’m not sure I even have a social circle to speak of) but this is a rather good description of my relationship to my heterosexuality in recent years.
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