Adventures in the Sexy Vacuum: Can We Please Stop Asking Whether Men and Women can be Friends?

Lately, I've been talking with friends, acquaintances and coworkers about the annoyingly persistent question of whether a man and a woman can be "just friends." This all started when YouTube suggested the following video to me. Ten points for spotting the implicit sexism!

If you watch the video, you'll notice several of the factors that contribute to the head-banging, teeth-grinding inanity of this so-called debate. For one thing, the whole question is pretty damn hetero-normative-- pretty sure that the gay trans-men I know don't resent me for not banging them. It's also set up to make women look like idiots. The filmmaker asks leading questions whose answers are unavoidably speculative ("Of those guy friends, do you think any of them secretly like you?") and creates hypothetical situations that change the nature of the relationships in question ("Would Dave hook up with you if you gave him the chance?") Probably the most succinct example of this video's stupidity lies in the conversation that starts at about the 1:50 mark.

Douchebag: Would he hook up with you if you wanted to hook up?

Woman: Yes.

Douchebag: So he likes you?

Woman: Mm-hm.

Douchebag: So, what you're saying is, men and women can't be friends.

Woman: No, we can be friends.

Douchebag: You're just friends, but he likes you.

Woman: Yes.

(Cut)

Douchebag: So it's a one-sided friendship.

From the thesis "This man would have sex with this woman if the woman desired sex with him," our filmmaker concludes "This man is not satisfied with their relationship, and no man can ever be friends with any woman, ever." Funny, all I concluded was "Sounds like her friend isn't a big fan of rapin' chicks."

And besides Baroque painters, who is, really?

And then the filmmaker diagnoses the relationship as a "one-sided friendship." What is that? No, really, what the hell is that? The woman is answering questions in the present tense, so we can assume that she's currently friends with this guy. She affirms that he "likes" her, but since we're not in the goddamn fourth grade, that doesn't necessarily mean that he wants to make out with her. It just means that he likes her. A friendship whose participants don't like each other is a pretty shitty friendship, after all.


"yeah but do u LIKE me like me????" Shut up.

Presumably, the filmmaker is suggesting that the man in this relationship feels unsatisfied with non-sexual friendship-- not that he actually interviews the guy in question, or anything fact-checky like that. Since this film student hasn't yet passed "Aspect Ratios 101," I doubt he's made it as far in his studies as "Intro to Journalistic Integrity."

"But Swales!" you cry. "She said that he would hook up with her if given the opportunity, so clearly she knows that he's sexually attracted to her!" Well no shit, Sherlock, if she offered to steam the love-clams with me I'd say yes, too. Just because you don't fuck somebody on a regular basis doesn't mean you think they're unfuckable. She hasn't offered him sex, but she thinks that he'd probably accept if she did-- who wants to assume that your friends put you in the "Eew! Not if you were the last warm-blooded mammal on earth!" category?

According to our filmmaker, you can only call someone a "friend" if you wouldn't fuck them under any circumstances. Any acknowledgement of attractiveness or willingness to theoretically see that person naked, and BAM! No longer friendship! So, what do we call the relationship being described in the video? The man would sleep with the woman if circumstances were right, but he hasn't. If he's suggested the possibility and been turned down, it didn't sadden him enough to end their communication. So, we have two non-related people who voluntarily spend time together, without having sex. Damn! If only there was a word for that.

It's on the tip of my tongue!

What frustrates me most about this argument that men and women can't be friends is that it paints interactions between men and women as inherently adversarial. Any friendly contact between a man and a woman is just an effort to get her into bed, an outcome against which women must constantly defend themselves. Friendship represents a female victory/male failure, sex a male victory/female failure, always.

I mean, in this scenario, if I go out to see a movie with my college quiz bowl team, three-fourths of the other members aren't going to be able to enjoy the show because of their frustration that I'm not sharing my vagina with their penises. The mere presence of a not-having-sex-with-you lady on any outing is apparently enough to ruin a guy's day. Every guy. Always.

Unrequited love sucks, no doubt about it. But it's a part of life-- you can't just blame it on women for being oblivious to the attractions of their male friends. And it's idiotic to assume that every woman a man meets is going to turn him on so much that he feels uncomfortable being around her. People have types, preferences, specific crushes, not just indiscriminate lust for every warm body they see.

Also, the makers of this video seem to think that it's impossible for a straight woman to harbor unrequited feelings for a straight male friend. I offer as counterargument my entire middle school experience.

Nope nope nope this NEVER happens.

There are good reasons why a man and a woman might have the same level of attraction to one another, but provide different answers to the question "Would you hook up with this person if given the chance?" To explain, I need you to journey with me to a magical place. It's a world where social networks are blessedly free from complication, where that hot guy is never the ex-boyfriend of your best friend, where dating and then breaking up with that sexy barista won't put you at risk of spit in your next cappucino, and where nobody will put you in an internet database for making out with that 17-year-old. In this mystical world, there are no STDs or unintended pregnancies, and nobody is ever unavailable due to marital status or sexual orientation. This world only contains what you bring to it: yourself, and another attractive person. The only question you have to answer before getting down with said attractive person is "Do I think I would enjoy having sex with this individual?" It's called the Sexy Vacuum, and it's where fantasies happen.

Like this, except with dildos instead of guns.

If you ask a guy whether he would hook up with someone, he'll usually answer the way he would in the Sexy Vacuum: "Sure, she's pretty good-looking, and we get along. I'd have sex with her." However, the real world is full of valid reasons not to have sex-- she could be married, or gay, or a single mother who really can't make a romance work at this point in her life, or her genitals might have been destroyed in a farm accident. That's just how the real world works. If you probed the guy further (not in a Sexy Vacuum way or anything), he'd probably elaborate as to why he hasn't slept with her. And I doubt that he would be super hung-up on the fact that outside the Sexy Vacuum, it's not possible to sleep with everybody you think is kinda pretty. It probably doesn't stop him from hanging out with her now and then.

If you ask a woman whether she would sleep with someone, she's more likely to answer based on what's going on in real life: "Well, he's really attractive, but he's seeing someone else/old enough to be my father/a recovering alcoholic who's not allowed to date in his first year of sobriety/kind of a horrible racist. So no." She might think he's the hottest person on earth and he might figure prominently (in a very Sexy Vacuum way, if you know what I mean) in her fantasies, but in the real world, she knows that sex isn't a good idea. Doesn't stop her from being friendly with him. (Except for the "kind of a terrible racist" thing, that's a dealbreaker for sex or friendship.) Hmm, I wonder if there's a deeply-ingrained biological reason that women are more likely than men to consider real-life repurcussions when answering a hypothetical query about sex...

I just can't concieve of an explanation.

So, the fact that the girls in this video attest that sure, their guy-friend would hook up with them, doesn't mean that their guy friend is constantly trying to hook up with them in the real world. He'd say yes in the Sexy Vacuum, but obviously, has said no in real life so far. It's possible that the women interviewed would say yes to their friends in the Sexy Vacuum, but haven't in real life just because, well, you can't bang every hot guy without dying from exhaustion. But guess what: their Sexy-Vacuum answers don't prevent them from enjoying activities together in the real world, because the Sexy Vacuum is kind of a silly place to live your life!

But that's all anecdotal evidence, and this is a STATS blog, dammit! Bring on the hard numbers! A couple of my friends said they'd heard about a study that compared cross-sex friends' self-reported levels of attraction to one another. It would be great to see some unbiased data on the reality of men and women hanging out together, free of asinine gender discrimination. I too remembered hearing something about a study like this, so I did I little searching, and... sigh. Here's how Stephen Colbert summed up the study.

Really? We can't acknowledge any kind of complexity or subtlety in human relationships, we have to break out the ultimatums? I know Colbert's bit is just humor, but that's a real Scientific American headline he's showing up there. I was not satisfied, so I tracked down the real goddamn study and paid $25 to read their actual, numeric results. And whaddaya know, they say something just a little bit different!

The study asked for pairs of opposite-sex volunteers who considered themselves non-sexual friends. They screened out homosexuals and were left with 88 pairs of straight, college-aged friends who agreed not to discuss their interview answers with one another, even after the study was concluded. They asked each friend individually to rate their level of attraction to their friend, and their desire to go on a romantic date with that friend. They also asked friends to speculate on the other friend's attraction to themselves. Here's what they found.

In explaining the results of this study, I'm going to use a sentence that could apply to pretty much every discussion of gender stereotypes under the sun:

While statistically significant differences between the male and female populations exist, they are not nearly as vast as we have been led to believe, and do not constitute an unbridgeable gap between genders.



Shockingly, these two are members of the same species!

Indeed, men report a higher mean score than women on all fronts, and though they're not listed on the table, the p-values are damn tiny for each paired-means test. There is a real, calculable difference between how attracted the average guy feels toward his ladyfriend and how attracted the average girl feels toward her dudebuddy.

It's just not actually all that big.

See the note under the table? Respondents rated their attraction on a scale of one to nine, where a one represents "Not at all attracted," a five represents "Moderately attracted," and a nine "Extremely attracted." The desire-to-date question used the same nine-point scale, with "Definitely not," "Neutral / Unsure," and "Definitely yes" as the descriptors for scores one, five, and nine, respectively. You'll notice that neither the men nor the women have averages that rise past the mid-point of the scale. They aren't at opposite ends of the attraction spectrum, just two points both pretty close to the middle, one a little higher than the other.

If we assume that attraction scores are normally distributed (and they may not be, I'm just guessing here), we can fit a normal curve for each gender based on their mean and standard deviation and then compare distributions on the same axes. They look like this:

Oh man look at how totally different men and women are! Those horny men, they're so despicable, always preying on those innocent women who never feel attraction to anyone. The world must be FULL of male-female friendships where there's such a huge gap between the intentions of each party that honest communication and fun shared activities are IMPOSSIBLE!

I understand that sarcasm is more difficult to interpret in text than in speech, so I should point out that the above paragraph is sarcastic. Yes, men are more likely to be attracted to their female friends than vice-versa. But it's not as though there are no women who report being attracted to their male friends, and it certainly isn't the case that all men report strong attraction to their female friends. Men's average attraction is only moderate, and womens' falls just below moderate. No need to unfurl the "Platonic Friendships Are Nothing But A Sham!" banners.

Plus, and I think this is key, asking someone if they're attracted to a person isn't the same as asking someone if they're planning to make a move on that person. The prevailing pop-culture assumption is that if someone feels attraction to their friend but never acts on it, then those two aren't really "just friends." But the way these researchers define friendship for the purposes of the study, those two people are just friends: "genetically unrelated, reproductive aged males and females engaged in non-sexual, supportive relationships" are engaged in friendships, regardless of either party's feelings or desires. I agree with this designation. The nature of your relationship with someone is defined by what you do together, not what one of you might wish to do together. If the besotted party decides not to escalate the friendship, for whatever reason, then that relationship is still "just" a friendship.

The question of how much each friend wants to go on a date with the other is a little more to the point-- regardless of how sexy/unsexy you think this person is, do you want to initiate a different, more romantic kind of relationship with this person?

The distributions are even closer together on this one. For both men and women, more than 50% of the responses fall below "neutral" (assuming the scores are normally distributed). So it's not really accurate to say that the men in cross-sex friendships always want to turn them into sexual relationships. You could say that men are more likely than women to be open to the idea of turning a friendship into a romantic relationship, but not that the differences in desires are so vast that female friendship can never satisfy a man.

Ultimately, the study concludes (based on additional data they gathered later, on men's and women's perception of friendship in general) that "attraction between cross-sex friends is common, and it is perceived more often as a burden than as a benefit." Not great news, but a pretty far cry from Scientific American's assertion that men and women absolutely can't be friends.

The study acknowledges that cross-sex friendships are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. In ancient times, we married off our daughters early in their lives and women didn't tend to have many relationships with men outside their immediate families. Nowadays, the study affirms, "[men and women] work together, entertain their children together, play sports together, and pursue vocational training and hobbies together... Historical accounts suggest that these non-reproductive interactions are unique to modern society." They wanted to examine whether men's and women's evolved mating strategies complicate cross-sex friendships, but they certainly believe that such friendships exist. If they didn't exist, then who the heck are all those people who took the survey?

Boy-ghosts and girl-ghosts can have platonic friendships because their genitals are just billowing sheets.

The discussion of the newness of cross-sex friendship also brings up the kind of relationships we picture when asked if men and women can be "just friends." Generally, it's the "When Harry Met Sally" example that comes to mind: a single man and a single woman who spend much of their free time together without other friends around. But that model fails to cover the majority of modern cross-sex friendships. Most people don't interact with just one friend at a time; friends gather together in groups. And there are a number of "non-sexual, supportive relationships" that certainly count as friendships for the purpose of this study: workplace friendships, book club friendships, competitive sports team friendships, classmate friendships, friendships between teachers and students, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

If you think about it, most of your friends are people with whom you interact casually on an infrequent basis; rarer are the very close friends with whom you share your deepest secrets. Yet it's only ever that second type of friendship, the very close kind, that people picture when considering whether a man and a woman can be "just friends." What they're really asking is if a man and a woman can be just best friends. And I will concede that it's very difficult to maintain that kind of relationship. When you put two people of compatible genders and orientations in a very close, deeply committed one-on-one relationship, it's quite natural that one or both parties will develop romantic feelings, and that things will sour quickly if they don't both feel the same way. Harry probably can't be "just friends" with Sally, but is Sally isn't the only woman with whom Harry ever interacts. He probably has many casual friendships with members of both sexes, just like we all do.

It's true that the friendly relationships I have with my male coworkers and classmates would have been unlikely to occur a couple hundred years ago. But I don't think that the historical novelty of such relationships makes it impossible for me to enjoy playing video games with a group of mixed-sex friends, or that the IT guy can't possibly have a conversation with me because he's thinking about my boobs too much, or that the guys with whom I've performed in plays, tried to form a band, or competed in Quiz Bowl are incapable of sharing satisfying, fun experiences with me because I'm a girl. The varied spectrum of relationships that fall under the heading "friendship" is too vast, in my opinion, to be entirely devoted to sex. Sometimes a boy wants to hang out with a girl because she has tits, but sometimes it's just because she's the one hosting the Settlers of Catan party.

We really need to stop saying that men and women can't be friends. It's insulting to women-- we're too dumb to recognize attraction when we see it, or else we're bitchy ice-queens. It's insulting to men-- they're powerless against the might of their raging boners, and can't stand next to a woman without raping her. It's insulting to humanity to suggest that we're so flummoxed by our own bodily functions that we can't interact normally with literally half of all the people who exist. It's just stupid, and so are the people who keep asking the question.

So let's stop asking if men and women can be friends, and have a big mixed-sex friend party. I'll bring beer and Settlers of Catan. The only one who isn't invited is the guy who made that dumb video.