The battle....

After 3 hours of trying to come up with a clever line to start an article that’s due tomorrow, I’ve decided to give up and resort to writing even more bullshit for the blog.

Topic of the day:

Can men and women be friends?

Yesterday, I would have answered: “Of course”, and laughed at the absurdity of the question, today my answer is: “Yeah, until they fuck.”

So is the question then: Are heterosexual men and women who are supposedly friends, just working their way to fucking or at least, almost getting there? Are we inherently just plain old animalistic when it comes to relationships, of any nature, between people of the opposite sex?

I am an intelligent young woman who does not see the world in black and white, but truly appreciates and lives off the grey. But my experience, something I have come to rely on more than theory these days, has taught me otherwise. I have recently realised that my friendships with men, most that is, are fraught with sexual tension. Am I, in my subconscious, secretly lusting for them? Are they, in their subconscious (or perhaps deliberately) imagining what it would be like to do “it”? As we sit there, supposedly doing normal friend things, is our animal instinct constantly at work, patiently waiting to be unleashed? Am I mentally fucking my male friends? SHEEEEEEEEEESH!

This brings me to this here question: “How are same gender friendships different from friendships between men and women?” If men have this brotherhood that ensures that their secrets and escapades are closely guarded, and women have the same kind of thing, how can both sides ever be friends? Does the female monkey have a male monkey friend from the other side of the mountain, who is only interested in listening to her rant about her boyfriend or her fight with her best friend and nothing else? Is it absurd to even begin to see the world and human relations through purely scientific concepts? Is my denial of the basics of human genetics and behaviour directly related to my constantly fumbling my way through the world? Is my belief in the existence of platonic friendships tragically naïve?

If I were to stop asking so many questions and rely on what I truly know through experience and the conversations I’ve had with my female friends, I would come to the conclusion that men and women cannot be friends because it really is all about sex, at the end of the day. Imagined sex, dreamed sex, possible sex, planned sex, suppressed sex, almost sex…..Sex, sex, sex sex…

So where does that leave my grey-area-loving self? I guess high and dry, slightly saddened and mostly mourning my notion of male friendships. You can probably tell that I’m skirting around the issue, which is purely for self protective reasons. But the point of it all is that today I decided to dedicate the little conservatism left in me into being more cautious when it comes to my friendships with men. I’m about to get downright old school!