Category: feminism

6 “Just Unicorns” – a dissection of The Friend Zone

September 16, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · sex

A friend on Facebook recently asked about whether or not I think “The Friend Zone” exists. I gave a short (for me) response, but I wanted to flesh out where I am in this debate more fully. For some personal history on where I once was on this topic, I encourage you to read my post: I Was a Nice Guy™.

Also, the subject matter of this post requires me to be far more cisnormative and heteronormative than I usually try to be – I hope the reason for this writing choice is clear from the context of the post (but I will gratefully receive any offered criticisms if I overstep that justification).

What is “The Friend Zone”

The highest-rated entry on Urban Dictionary is somewhat revelatory of a central dichotomy within the very concept of the Friend Zone:

What you attain after you fail to impress a woman you’re attracted to. Usually initiated by the woman saying, “You’re such a good friend”. Usually associated with long days of suffering and watching your love interest hop from one bad relationship to another. Verb tense is “Friend-ed”.

One should not fail to note, by the way, the gendered language in the definition. We will return to this later in the discussion.

The more generous definition of the Friend Zone describes a situation in which one person (‘the friender’) maintains a non-romantic relationship with a person who would prefer to have a romantic one (‘the friended’). Reasons for this situation vary. In some cases, the friender is simply unaware of the friended’s interest, perhaps wilfully so. In other, more nefarious cases, the friender is aware of the non-reciprocated interest but keeps the friended person around for reasons of psychological self-gratification or because the friended provides some sort of benefit (companionship, emotional support, sometimes even material support). In the latter case, the friender is exploiting the romantic feelings of the friended in order to maintain a relationship that, in the absence of the romantic interest (and tantalizingly possible romantic involvement), would not persist. The key is that the friended does not derive the desired benefit from the relationship, and has either decided to ‘settle’ or is hoping that some day romantic reciprocation will occur.

The least generous definition of the Friend Zone is one in which the friended party is a predator, waiting for a lapse in judgement or self-restraint in order to foist a romantic relationship on the friender. Friended people are misrepresenting themselves as genuine friends as part of a ploy to gain the confidence of the friender. The friender believes that the relationship is organic and free of sexual potential, and that both parties spend time together simply because they enjoy each other’s company – as friends do. Under this definition, it is the friended who is misrepresenting the relationship, and the friender who is the wronged party.

It is my position that, at some point in time, both of these definitions have accurately described a situation between two people. There are a broad variety of possible relationships between human beings, and some of those are not constructive or healthy. There are, almost certainly, people who have exploited someone’s romantic interest for their own selfish purposes. There are, almost certainly, people who have dissembled platonic interest solely as part of a gambit to propagate a sexual encounter. … Continue Reading

6 The salience of hatred

July 8, 2014
by Crommunist
· feminism · hate · race · racism

Feminista Jones has the post to read about the events that spawned this post. Please read hers first.

And from the woodwork, another emerges:

Apparently, Anthony Cumia, the shock jock better known as half of the duo “Opie and Anthony,” had a bad Tuesday night in New York. He claims that he was taking pictures when a woman just happened to wander into the frame and then assaulted him. If his account is true, it is highly unfortunate.

…

But whether or not Cumia was assaulted is not actually the point. Cumia himself made sure of that when he took to Twitter in the small hours on Wednesday morning to pontificate on the state of New York and African Americans in a rant amply documented by Gawker. (Both the Gawker post and links to Cumia’s tweets that appear later in this piece contain wildly obscene and offensive language.)

I first caught wind of Anthony Cumia’s tweets when one of my favourite rappers started retweeting them. At first I thought it was parody – some sort of tasteless piece of performance art that would be explained away as “satire”. My next reaction was to remember that the internet is full of people with opinions, and if you want to find hateful stuff out there, you can. But this wasn’t some anonymous nobody tweeting from some basement den for lulz, this was the host of a fairly popular radio show.

Unfortunately, the rest of this piece won’t make much sense if you don’t read the tweets, but for those of you who (wisely, I assure you) avoided clicking on the Gawker link in the pull-quote, I will attempt to summarize. Mr. Cumia claimed to have been taking photos when a black woman happened to enter the frame. She confronted Cumia angrily (allegedly physically assaulting him), and he responded by calling her a name*. A number of black men came to the aid of the young woman, who (again allegedly**) struck him repeatedly. In response to the confrontation, the assault, and the men taking the side of the assaulter rather than the assaultee, Cumia wrote a long and sweeping condemnation of the woman specifically, black people more generally, and (for some reason that eludes ready explanation) “illegals”. … Continue Reading

16 Single? It’s probably because you’re an asshole

May 27, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · gender · personal · privilege

This post is going to be more navel-gazey than is normal for this blog. That’s not a disclaimer of apology, just a ‘heads up’. This piece is also very much rooted in gender binary language, and that is a disclaimer of apology. I am speaking most often from my own experience. As a mono cis hetero guy, my romantic experience falls along a gender binary with a single partner. This is not to elevate or normalize mono cishet relationships above others, but I don’t want to speak too far out of my own depth. I am sure that relationships between queer and poly people have dimensions that I simply cannot address, and I don’t want to do it hamfistedly. I am very interested to hear what parts of this post do and don’t resonate with your own experiences, particularly if they are different from my own.

I am sure that I’ve made oblique reference to this before, perhaps even on this blog, but my sexual and dating history are perhaps a bit atypical. I say ‘perhaps’ because a pretty decent argument can be made that everyone’s dating history is atypical. However, from the standpoint that the average age at which people in Canada have their first sexual encounter is some time in their teens, my history is slightly to noticably atypical. This has a lot of explanations, some of which I am capable of explaining in some detail; others that I am still puzzled over. I’ve talked a bit about this process in a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

After a year spent in a different doomed-to-fail relationship in my first year of undergraduate (this time I ended things, and for what at the time seemed like noble reasons), I embarked on a long journey into my own bruised psyche to try and figure out what it was about me that made me so undesirable while everyone else had girlfriends (author’s note: most of my friends at the time were single). It was an endless pattern: I’d meet someone, we’d hit it off, I’d eventually work up the courage to ask her out, and then I’d get rejected. In my feelings of dejected misery and frustration and need for self-affirmation, and because there was a whole intellectual institution created around it, I embraced the “nice guys don’t get laid” myth wholeheartedly.

So, I didn’t get laid a lot. That “endless pattern” lasted, for the most part, for around 8 years. After I broke up with Jane (not her real name) in fall of 2004, I didn’t enter into another committed relationship until spring of 2012. During that intervening period, I had a small handful of flings with women, but nothing that lasted longer than 6 weeks or so. None of this did anything to disabuse me of the notion that I was, at some deep, fundamental level, incapable of being loved or having a lasting, meaningful relationship. It wasn’t all bad, as I’ll discuss further down the page, but there were a lot of pretty despondent nights. … Continue Reading

16 On “toxic feminism” – The Nation and the people

January 30, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism

Michelle Goldberg’s article in The Nation got me pretty steamed yesterday, but I want to use that debacle as a ‘jumping off point’ to make a larger point about what is actually happening in these ‘spaces’ and ‘debates’. I’ve made a similar argument in a previous article:

Walking hand-in-hand with privilege is a grossly-misplaced sense of entitlement. All spaces are assumed to be welcome and open, and your opinion is always appreciated and listened to. The fact that you lack relevant knowledge and experience is immaterial – you still deserve a place in the conversation. This is why you see creationists sneer their way through “why are there still monkeys” questions on evolution forums. It also explains why they react with butthurt whines and a cloud of scripture whenever their ignorance is revealed, and especially when it is pilloried. They have never experienced a circumstance where faith was not accepted as evidence; where sincere belief is not a substitute for fact.

The Real Issues

Part of this issue, I think, is that people disconnect the message from the intended audience, and assume that all people having a discussion are having that discussion for the sake of everyone who could possibly be watching. When a person, new to a topic, decides that their perspective on, say “reverse racism” or “misandry” is clearly being neglected and needs to be added to the discussion, they jump in with both feet. This is, in a way that I hope is obvious to readers of this blog, extremely problematic. The term “derailing” describes a circumstance in which someone enters a conversation and tries to change the topic to something ze wants to talk about instead. It’s rude at best, and erodes the possibility of conversation at worst. … Continue Reading

9 Feminism: for all your 2000 parts

November 18, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · feminism · politics

I was having a discussion with a (cis-female) friend of mine about the challenges she was having meeting date-able guys. She’s quite tall, and has a difficult time dating guys who are much shorter than she is because of a long list of complicated reasons, some mechanical some psychological, which restricts the pool quite precipitously. But she said beyond the simple fact of physical compatibility (we’ll ignore for now the proportion of tall guys who she’s nonetheless not attracted to physically), the biggest obstacle she was having is findings guys who didn’t piss her off during their first date by saying or doing something that betrays a shitty, gender-essentialist, retrograde attitude toward women. This is a sentiment I have heard from many other friends – even ‘nice’ guys who might otherwise be fine to date take themselves out of the running by holding on to (and voicing) anti-feminist and/or misogynist attitudes.

If you (like me) are an openly feminist cis gendered heterosexual (‘cishet’, hereafter) guy, you’ve probably encountered the meme that guys are just pretending to be feminists to get laid (or worse, I suppose, actually adopting the tenets of feminism and self-brainwashing in order to get some consensual hotslappy going). ‘Real men aren’t feminists’, is the implication (if only there were a longer discussion of this topic somewhere). ‘Real men’ are deeply invested in perpetuating a rigid definition of masculinity, and any deviation from such perpetuation is a revocation of their ‘man card’; either that or they are actually adhering to the idea that men will do pretty much anything to get sex, including either mass deception or self-delusion. … Continue Reading

3 All models are wrong; some models are useful

October 25, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · feminism · race

This is a phrase I use often in my work: “All models are wrong; some models are useful”. A meaningful portion of my job involves using statistical methods to create models. Some of those are the kind that one thinks of when you use the phrase “statistical model”, which is often some sort of regression analysis – you take a bunch of variables, apply some kind of mathematical rules to them, and then interpret the results. I’ve made vague reference to this before.

The other kind of model that it’s common for someone in my field to build is referred to properly as a ‘Health State Transition Model’, but colloquially called a ‘Markov Model’, or even more colloquially simply as ‘a model’. In these sorts of models, a matrix or array stands in as a possible state of health that someone can be in, and you describe mathematical rules that govern the likelihood that values held in one ‘state’ might migrate to another ‘state’.

3 Secular Woman: Thank You

October 11, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · feminism · freethought community · gender · politics · privilege · secularism

I am tremendously honoured, surprised, and deeply flattered to accept Secular Woman’s award for Man of the Year 2013. It is particularly gratifying to be so named, considering the other names put forward as their award recipients. I have always been grateful to anyone who reads or otherwise notices my work toward racial and gender equality, and to be named with such distinction is not something I ever expected.

As the secular community grows, like all political movements it must begin to look inward and reflect on its actions. For those of us whose motivation toward a secular world is grounded in humanist values, we must periodically turn the lens of scrutiny and the tools of inquiry upon ourselves and interrogate whether we are living up to our own values.

Among the foremost of these is the idea of ‘equality’, and what that means to us. To some, equality means nothing more than “treat everyone the same”, a definition that seems laudable at a superficial level but which, upon any amount of honest scrutiny, is deeply flawed. We do not live in a world where a ‘level playing field’ exists. We live in a world in which individuals are treated according to shopworn stereotypes about the social group they belong to; whether that is race, class, sexuality, and of course gender. In many cases, such treatment happens even in the absence of intentional or conscious malice. The forces arrayed against members of minority groups are simply not the same as those arrayed against the majority, and an “equal” response to those forces will only serve to perpetuate these discrepancies. … Continue Reading

4 A conversation about “dogmatic and overzealous” feminists

September 28, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · freethought community

This conversation continues from one that happened on Twitter.

Blake, my interlocutor, sent me this e-mail as a way of expressing his arguments and concerns more clearly: … Continue Reading

30 A Week In The Life Of Jamie

May 22, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · feminism · forces of stupid · Jamie · privilege · skeptivism

An enormous confetti bomb of white privilege and transphobia has exploded through my entire life in the past week, and as I’ve been doing a lot of pretty important writing about it, I’d like to share some of it with you here. There are two core issues at work here. The first concerns SlutWalk, and the second concerns the environmental movement. In both cases, the best of the worst of white privilege and transphobia have precipitated. All in one week! If you’re having a bad day, I’d advise against reading this post until you’re in better spirits.

Also, profanity warning, and trigger warning for racism, mega radfem transphobia, and misogyny.

91 “In Bad Faith”

April 10, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · feminism · forces of stupid · freethought community · Jamie · racism

It seems to me that whenever someone in the atheist/secular community fucks up, the favourite line of defence is “They didn’t do it in bad faith”. Well, my friends, in case no one has told you before, intent isn’t fucking magical.

Also? That is literally about the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard an atheist say to shield another atheist from any kind of criticism.

Trigger warning for discussion of racist language, colonial history, and extremely sexist bullshit.

Tone police warning for excessive profanity and volumes more to come if you so much as dare try to tell me or anyone else that I would get my point across better without it.

Concern troll warning for Jamie calling Richard Dawkins out for saying something racist and then being an enormous fucking racist dipshit by repeatedly defending it. Wring your hands and clutch your fucking pearls all you need to, it doesn’t change that I’m not accusing him of being A Racist, but of saying and repeatedly defending racist shit while continuing to say it over and over again. Jamie also calls someone out for saying something incredibly fucking stupid about rape, and then spending four days defending it despite being called out by several people. The offender changed his mind about what he had done, so he has no use for your disingenuous declarations of concern, and neither does anyone else. Jamie also calls out pig-headed FEMEN protesters for incorporating heavy doses of cultural imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia in their recent protests “in solidarity with” Muslim women — who they then promptly insult when those very Muslim women start counter-protesting/calling out their bullshit.

Racism apologists warning for the “That’s not racist!” defence — which isn’t a fucking defence for being racist — what was said was racist from the start and the continual defence of it was too. End of story.

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