Of Course Men and Women Can Be 'Just Friends'

“Can men and women really be 'just friends?' Asking for a friend...”

The Facebook page for the website SoulPancake.com decided to throw some chum in the water of the ongoing gender conversation by sarcastically asking if men and women can really be ‘Just Friends.’ I get what they are trying to do, kick up some social media dust for some action on their Facebook page. That said, the social media team for SoulPancake.com might want to read the room a little before they get cute with the traffic friendly cheapies. The question of whether men and women can be "just friends" is much more of a hot button than they seem to think.

While it was cute for Rob Reiner to ask the same question in his 1980s romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, nearly 30 years later this question has taken on a darker undertone. The question is essentially: Can a man carry on a relationship with a woman that isn’t dependent upon her willingness to sleep with him? It’s an inherently misogynistic question that sets out to define male-female relationships by the act of sex.

If a man doesn’t believe that he can be "just friends" with a woman what is he saying? For me, the basis of the question comes directly from a place of profoundly sad male insecurity. There is an ugly egotism that drives this question as the man who wonders whether he can be "just friends" with a woman is stating in uncertain terms that he defines his relationships with people by their willingness to have sexual intimacy with them.

It's that insecurity, the inability to treat a woman as anything other than a sexual conquest or some sort of failure of their masculinity that leads directly to acts of sexual harassment and sexual assault. When men define women by sexual willingness they’ve opened a pandora’s box of ugly questions regarding how they treat women in other aspects of their life such as the workforce. If a man is willing to qualify his relationships with women by their sexual willingness, then why should we believe he wouldn’t set a similar standard in the workplace? What’s to say that this person who asked this question isn’t making the same sexual qualifications of female co-workers as they are of the women they meet in daily life, the one’s they aren’t sure they could be "just friends" with. What about being "just co-workers?"

What if the women in this question are customers? What if a man selling a product to female customers held women to a similar standard of whether or not the women they are selling to can be "just customers?" If a woman proves to be just a customer or just a co-worker how has this man’s resentment of this situation affected the decisions they’ve made regarding these women? Again, this dynamic could theoretically work both ways but again, it tends to be men who think in this sexist manner.

I came across this SoulPancake.com social media post because one of my best friends, a woman, posted a response to the post and talked about what our friendship means to her and how it was very easy for men to be "just friends" with women. My friend Melissa and I have been friends for nearly a decade. I am the Godfather to her daughter and I stood with the Groomsmen at her wedding. I have never in that decade of friendship resented her or thought less of myself because our relationship never had a sexual aspect.

It is a poisonous and dangerous mindset to define women by their sexual availability. As we are learning each and every day since the #MeToo became a social media phenomenon, the sexual frustrations of men have defined our culture for far too long. Men take this mindset of being unable to have a non-sexual relationship with women out into the world with them and the result is their frustration being harmful to the women who simply wish to exist in their sphere with the same rights and privileges of the people these men aren’t trying to sleep with.

The inability of a man to simply befriend a woman has been at the heart of cultural conflicts with men and women for centuries. If men could simply see a woman as his equal instead of defining them by their sexual availability the #MeToo would not be necessary. Because men persist with joking about whether they can be "just friends" with women, we have a culture where sexual availability is at the heart of male-female relationships in all aspects of life and that is toxic.

I am proposing that we immediately exile the question of whether men and women can be friends. This isn’t a question. We need to get into the mindset that "of course" men and women can be "just friends" by retiring the question entirely. Along with this question, we must also kill the idea of "the friend zone." This is yet another insecure male construct that categorizes women by their sexual availability. Like the "just friends" question, the "Friend Zone" is a toxic male concept that men use to place themselves above other men in some sort of alpha-male posturing. “Dude you got friend zoned” is just another way to demonstrate sexual superiority and define a male-female relationship on the terms of sexual availability. It’s toxic and it must stop.