Let's talk about the Friendzone

Today seems as good a day as any to talk about the friendzone. The friendzone is defined as when you want to date someone, but they only want to be friends.

The problem with the friendzone is it makes it seem like the person whose “zone” you are in is actively keeping you there. This allows the person in the friendzone to blame them and get bitter about it, believing that they are the passive participant in this social exchange, that this is happening to them. However, if you are stuck in the friendzone state of mind, it’s your fault. You can stop being friends with them, you can try and stop feeling that way about them (fake it ‘til you make it, amirite), there is something you can do to get out. The person “friendzoning” you is only acting according to their feelings, which will not be changed by your complaints about the friendzone. Men and women have found themselves in the friendzone, and if they deal with it like responsible adults, no one gets hurt.

Many men complain about being “stuck” in the friendzone of a woman and don’t think of these ways out. Men often have a sense that they “deserve” women, “deserve” to have sex with them, regardless of what the woman wants (because that is what society and media have taught them from childhood. The hero always gets the girl after all that hard work, because he deserves her, regardless of any reason the “girl” would want the hero). This leads a man “stuck” in the friendzone to believe even more strongly that it is the woman who is causing the problem, because this is the sex he deserves because he has worked hard feigning friendship and must deserve it by now, right?

What has actually happened here is that these men are no longer stuck in the friendzone as they believe. (In fact, if his understanding of their relationship with this woman and his entitlement have become even a little bit apparent, the woman might not even want to be friends anymore.) The man has moved past being interested in friendship and only wants a romantic and/or sexual relationship. On Tumblr, this has become known as “Girlfriendzoning.” The man cannot perceive the woman as a friend but a potential girlfriend. Notice that here, the active verb is given to the subject who actually does the action.

This can also be linked to what I like to refer to as “Nice Guy Syndrome,” where a man believes he is being a perfect gentleman yet gets turned down at every attempt to “get the girl,” leading him to believe that “girls only like douchebags.” Little do these men know, often their behavior reflects this attitude, ironically making them douchebags.

Unfortunately, sometimes this entitlement and need to prove that they “deserve” women leads men to violence. This violence is often attributed to mental illness, or- our favorite scapegoat these days- video games. The women involved may even wrongly get the blame for it. The real problem? Toxic masculinity. Men are told to “man up,” which apparently means assert their strength through violence. This results in shootings because “I deserve girls much more than all those slobs” or stabbings because of a rejected prom proposal.

(If you need more explanation on how those translate, I encourage you to watch the documentary Tough Guise, or its sequel Tough Guise 2, unfortunately not available on Netflix at this time. A ten-minute intro can be found here, and Jackson Katz’s Ted Talk on men’s violence can be found here.)

However, women are not prizes. You do not “deserve” to have a girlfriend. Stalking is not an acceptable response to rejection, nor is harassment, nor is murder. Threatening women with violence is not the way to their hearts, it's the way to avoidance and a restraining order. Blaming women for not responding favorably to these threats puts them in danger.

Elliot Rodger may have had some mental health issue (ETA because I couldn't figure out how to word it: mental health issues are more likely to result in self harm than outward violence), but his actions were not caused by the actions of young women. His actions were caused by a society that tells young men that they deserve sex, that to be a virgin at 22 is a tragedy, and that men must prove their manliness through acts of violence. 

The Women I Never Learned About

When I was younger I was a huge fan of Marie Curie. My elementary school class did a "wax museum" where we all did a report on someone and dressed up as them. I naturally picked Marie Curie. The reason I was so stuck on Marie Curie was because at that point she was pretty much the only female scientist I had heard of, the only woman in science that had come up in my elementary school curriculum. This is interesting, considering the important contributions women have made.

• I learned about Watson and Crick discovering the double-helix shape of DNA in middle school. I didn't learn about Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photos were used without her knowledge or permission, and who was not credited with this large albeit unwitting contribution.
• I only heard about Lise Meitner because I wrote a report in high school about the atomic bomb. She discovered nuclear fission, and should therefore be at least mentioned next to the Manhattan Project that used that concept, but instead it took me some digging to discover her.
•  Mary Anning was a palaeontologist who discovered many "firsts" of dinosaur fossils. I only learned about her because I stumbled upon a small book about her when I was bored and out of things to read. She revolutionized palaeontology and most people have never heard of her (unless they were curious about the google doodle that reminded me I had a subject to rant about today)
• Computers are a guy thing, right? Wrong. Charles Babbage may have built the first computer, but Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs. In fact, computer programming was first considered a woman's job, until male programmers decided they wanted less competition for jobs. Grace Hopper (another person made slightly more well-known via Google) developed the first compiler, as well as popularizing the term "debugging."

This is hardly a complete list. In fact, these women are mostly white, meaning I will have to dig deeper to learn the names of female scientists of color who have been even more obscured by ignorance. Ignoring the achievements of people who are not white men is incredibly prevalent in many fields. I read a back-of-the-book summary on an H. G. Wells book proclaiming him the father of science fiction. An interesting title, considering Frankenstein was written (by Mary Shelley, a woman) nearly fifty years before H. G. Wells was born. (Interesting how a genre effectively created by a woman is now considered a male-dominated genre, and any women who express interest are accused of doing so for male attention... but that's a whole other post.)
In science, many women who made discoveries received no awards for them or had co-workers steal their work, and then were ignored by history. This is absurd, as it makes it seem like female scientists are rare and unusual. This is wrong, because it dismisses the advances that women have made in science. This is unfair, because it takes away potential inspiration from young women like me who have an interest in science. So when people learn I'm studying physics, it's virtually unheard of for them. They are impressed that I'm studying a field that women rarely go into, when they should be impressed that I am in a field that makes it difficult for women to succeed.
One of my professors, when introducing a concept, often says "we love famous dead people, because they've already done the work for us." Unfortunately, it seems all the love is given to the famous dead white men.