Break up with your boy friends

On guy friends, male intellectuals, and gender, of course!

TW: This essay contains mentions of SA/descriptions of sex

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When I moved to London, I set a deliberate goal for myself. I wanted to be an extrovert. I had spent so long being shy and awkward and saying my train station was the other way so I didn’t have to walk with acquaintances. But I needed to make friends and I wanted to be a sociable, fun person.

Imagine my surprise when, during improv classes (I know, but you have to understand I was new to the city and not yet taking antidepressants), I began to befriend a species completely foreign to me: boys. All of a sudden I was a guy’s girl. I had spent the entirety of my youth avoiding all interactions with men; I didn’t trust them, and I didn’t want them to be attracted to me. Or, more intimidatingly, not to be attracted to me.

In London, though, I embraced all of that. I decided that I couldn’t determine if people were attracted to me, and that anything I did could be misconstrued as attraction towards them. So why not lean into it? And then why not befriend men?

I had one male friend already; American, somewhat older, and married. I met him and his wife at the same time, but was always tighter with him. In London, I met a guy that reminded me of him. He was also older, also married, and also flirted with me, but in a fun, “this is just our relationship and my wife is cool with it” kind of way.

In the Spring, the American guy’s wife called me up and told me that he had cheated on her with his twenty year-old employee. The only reason he told her was that he was being forced to resign. I was aghast. And also not surprised. He seemed like the kind of guy who would never cheat on his wife. And he seemed like the guy that would, of course, cheat on his wife. I remembered why I spent all that time keeping my distance from men.

He was a guy comfortable in his masculinity, comfortable commenting on other men’s attractiveness. He defended women and volunteered at fundraisers for SA prevention and awareness. He asked people their pronouns. I had thought, with all that information, that he must have thought of women as people.

But, as they say, nevertheless I persisted. My guy’s girl tendencies amped up as I realized how easy it is to get male validation. I had spent so long thinking that they wouldn’t give it to me if I wanted it, but it turns out that men merely befriending you fulfills that inherent, patriarchal need. Boys like me! I thought. I’m cool, and I must be hot, because boys aren’t friends with girls they don’t think are hot. That’s just science.

After a well-documented humiliation at the hands of one of these male friends, I had to reconsider. This guy, much like my small sample size of previous male friends, was Woke. He laughed and awkwardly changed the subject when guys made SA jokes. King behavior! I didn’t think about the fact that he could just as easily shut them down, or tell them off. He did the bare minimum, and we all applauded him for it. He told me that his ex did a comedy routine where she called him a narcissist. Huh. I thought. As our friendship continued and got messier and more unpleasant, this fabled ex’s words rang in my head. He brought visiting friends out with us one summer night, and they said some crass, nasty things. He stood there and laughed.

I distanced myself, and then one night he asked if we could talk. I said sure, because I was trying to be emotionally mature. He called me and yelled at me for an hour. He called me a manipulative liar, who was turning everyone against him. I brought up the incident with his friends, and he said that wasn’t on him, because he had told them beforehand not to say stuff like that in front of me. In front of me. Like I was the delicate flower that they had to tone down the fun with. There’s a lady present!

I realized that he, like all the other straight men I had tried to befriend, hadn’t thought of us as equals. All the effort he made to say the right thing and be an ally to women was merely for his own benefit, for his reputation. As he berated me on that call, he said that me telling people about his friends was hurting his image. Not once did he say that he didn’t agree with the way they acted, or that he cared about his own actions. He yelled at me because he felt entitled to respect I had stopped giving him. Respect that he had never given me. But, I realized, he didn’t think of me like that. He didn’t think of me, or indeed any of the other women in our group, as worthy of respect. He probably hadn’t given it any thought at all.

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And now, for an abrupt change of topic, The Files. There are names on those emails that no one is surprised by (Mick Jagger, the Cuomos). But there are also names of men who have made their careers about being intelligent, liberal, thoughtful people. Noam Chomsky, the so-called “activist” who’s famously spent his academic career questioning and critiquing power structures, spent years emailing with a known p*dophile like the oldest and best of chums. Some have called him the most intelligent man in the world. Then there’s author Deepak Chopra, famous for implementing kindness and love as key pillars of his teachings, with 4,000 plus emails scattered through the files mentioning “girls”. Not women. Girls.

Arden Rose on TikTok put it perfectly: “You would assume that if a person gets to a certain level of intellect, if someone gets smart enough, they would be able to reckon with the idea that women are human beings…that person is so smart, so they must see me as a human being. Or, that person is a prolific, well-known leftist…so they must not be a misogynist…they don’t see you as a human being, they don’t value emotional intelligence. They only value power.”

I once heard that psychology is the hardest science because it requires people to be honest. The data comes from trusting that people are being truthful. These men may fully think they were on the right side. Or they may know what they did, what they continue to do, is wrong. But what we can be certain of is that they knew what to present to us, the public. Are the men in your life doing the same?

When I was an obnoxious college freshman, I ranted to my friend in a toxic relationship about how I thought that all men, deep down, hated women, and that if they couldn’t express it in daily life they expressed it sexually. She began to cry. Two years later, she and her boyfriend broke up and she told us all about how awful he had been. Then, she met a new guy at work. She told us how comfortable he was with his sexuality (a bi guy who had once married a man for a green card), how respectful he was, how thoughtful he was, and how the sex they were having was so rough it left bruises. When three women accused him of SA, she stayed with him and said "You know, women make things up sometimes. We’re not supposed to say that, but they do.”

After my “conversation” on the phone with the boy whose reputation I was ruining, I called up the girls that were in our friend group. To one, I sniffled my way through a teary recounting of the conversation. She comforted me. A week later, she told another friend not to mention to me that she was hanging out with that guy the next night. I was confused. I didn’t want to tell her who she could be friends with. But we were far tighter than she and him. And for me, it’s simple; I will happily drop a man who has made my friends unhappy. If he doesn’t respect them, he doesn’t respect me. He won’t. I am not the exception. But she remains friends with him to this day, and I’ve had to pull away. Is it that gratifying to have the validation of a male friend? Does it feel that great to know that there are men who have, at least for a little, decided you are worthy of their attention? Worthy of them pretending they see you as a person? The way a man talks about his least favorite woman on Earth is the way he is willing to talk about you, and all the other women in his life. They tolerate women as long as they are useful to them, or to their egos. This kind of man does not like women. He may be attracted to them, he may sometimes enjoy their company. But he does not like them.

Think about the men in your life. Really think. How many of them are you sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, consider women their equals? How many of them don’t have to think about defending women to guys making sexist jokes, especially when there are no women in the room? How many of them would stay friends with a man who had been accused of something unsavory?

There are a small handful of men who do respect women, I think. But there is a much larger quantity of men who have learned, in our modern culture, to pretend they respect women. Or perhaps to convince themselves that they do, until it is no longer necessary. I’m grateful for the few men I know who I do trust. But I can’t help but feel, especially reading through the thousands of emails being released, that I must keep them at an arm’s length. I will no longer make excuses for the men in my life. I have to raise the bar. I hope they can keep up.