The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

Speaking of friendship: there is an account on Twitter whose owner sticks up for friendship and sometimes blogs against the Christian obsession with marriage or the stupid Billy Graham Rule. That account is (Link): Forbidden Friendships (@MenWomenFriends)

The Atlantic has a very long article about societal shifts concerning the delay or demise of marriage and the rise of female friendships, as they discuss it in the context of some television show called “Broads” that is about two lady friends. I’ve never seen the show.

(Link):  Broad City and the Triumph of the Platonic Rom-Com by Megan Garber

Excerpts:

The show’s new season asks what its heroines, Abbi and Ilana, are to each other: friends? Partners? More?

….Abbi and Ilana share, basically, what a lot of young women—and young men—share in this age of delayed marriage and emergent adulthood and platonic roommates and geographic peripateticism and economic prosperity and economic uncertainty: a friendship that occupies the psychic space that used to be devoted to spouses and children.

While the (Link): marriage plot may still, dissolved and distended, drive many of Hollywood’s cultural products, Broad City reflects friendship’s age-old, but also new, reality: The show is suggesting that its heroines are already, effectively, married. To each other.

…The women’s partnership [which is platonic; they don’t have sex with each other], crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman (Link): put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives.

Which makes Broad City, on the one hand, yet more evidence that we are living, as The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg (Link): put it, in “a golden age of female friendship.”

How To Stop Sexualizing Everything by D. C. McAllister

How To Stop Sexualizing Everything by D. C. McAllister

This is rather long, but well worth the read:

(Link): How To Stop Sexualizing Everything by D C McAllister

Excerpts:

• Our society needs a phileo resurgence so we can express ourselves with the nonsexual passion and love we really feel.
• … I guess I am kind of weird. I confess: I’m very passionate about my friends. But am I the abnormal one, or is there something wrong with our society? My daughter isn’t unusual, and her response was pretty typical. Many people have that reaction to women who are passionate about their friends—and even more so for men!…I wish “bromance” would disappear from the American lexicon forever.
• That’s because it represents everything that’s wrong with our culture when it comes to friendship.Instead of friendship being noble, nonromantic, and normal, it has become the exception, romanticized to the point that we’re uncomfortable describing it and experiencing it for what it is. Even as we try to distinguish it from homosexuality, we are corrupting real friendship by placing it in the context of romance….How Romanticism and Puritanism Corrupts Friendship

  The problem with our modern culture is friendship has been corrupted. Lewis says it began with the age of sentimentality and romanticism.

This Is Why Being a Nice Guy Just Isn’t Enough by E. Tatum / Double Standards By The Anti-Celibacy Crowd About Friendships and Sexualization of Everything

This Is Why Being a Nice Guy Just Isn’t Enough by E. Tatum / Double Standards By The Anti-Celibacy Crowd About Friendships and Sexualization of Everything

You’ll have to use the link below to read the entire page entitled, “This Is Why Being a Nice Guy Just Isn’t Enough”, because I don’t want to copy their entire post here on my blog.

One thing I want to point out is a bit of a double standard going on here.

First of all, I first became aware of this “Nice Guys” article by way of Facebook group SCCL (Stuff Christian Culture Likes). Sometimes I agree with some of this group’s views on some issues, sometimes I do not.

SCCL is a group that regularly mocks or criticizes the traditional Christian position of upholding or defending the notions of celibacy, or of being a virgin until marriage – sometimes these concepts are all lumped together by them, and by others elsewhere on the internet, under the term “purity culture”.

I have argued on my blog the last few years that it is possible to be celibate, to refrain from having sex, and for men and women to be platonic friends.

I have also argued that it is society, both secular culture, as well as conservative and progressive Christian culture, and most secular feminism, which perpetuates the sexualization all male-female relationships (or even male-male, or female-female relationships).

For doing all this, for defending my choice, or the choice of others to be celibate, and for pointing out that not everything in life has to be sexual or is about sex, I sometimes get insulted or mocked by other people on the internet.

Everyone from secular feminists, to ex-Christians, to conservative Christians, to atheists (yes, ’tis so, click here to read), to political liberals, to political conservatives insult me or ridicule me for all this.

All these groups, who normally loathe each other – the atheists cannot stand conservative Christians, the liberals don’t like the conservatives and so on- all never- the- less totally agree that there is something bad, wrong, or weird about adults who choose to stay celibate, whatever their reason.

All these disparate groups fight like cats on dogs on many other topics, but they all come into agreement on this: they despise and ridicule celibacy (and sometimes, asexuality).

Do these people in these groups ever stop to consider, “Hey, other groups I normally disagree with on fundamental life choices happen to share with me a suspicion, dislike, or fear of celibacy, does this mean something, like maybe I’ve been wrong in my views about celibacy?”

I think it does. That your arch enemy chooses to fight with you on all other issues yet mocks celibacy right along with you might indicate that both of you are either misinformed about celibacy or terribly biased against celibates. Yeah, you might want to ponder that one for awhile.

There are more comments by me below this long excerpt:

(Link): This Is Why Being a Nice Guy Just Isn’t Enough by E. Tatum

Excerpts:

• There are a lot of really wonderful, well-intentioned men who have a difficult time understanding the difference between being nice to women and being an ally to women and women’s causes.
• Then there are other men who pretend to be nice in order to validate their manipulation of women for sex and romance. These are the people who I like to refer to as Nice Guys™.
• While this article is dedicated to helping nice men become better feminist allies, I want to take a second to clarify the difference between an authentically nice guy and a Nice Guy™.
• (Link): Nice Guys™, as many of you know, have become the object of  (Link): much loathing in feminist circles and among women and girls in general.Online, this is the guy who posts hashtags like #NotAllMen and (Link): #ReverseSexism, whenever we publish articles about (Link): street harassment,  (Link): rape culture, and (Link): male privilege.
• He is the exaggeratedly faux timid (read: passive aggressive) dude who still complains about the girls that didn’t date him in high school on message boards and in every other status update.
• Though the most stereotypical incarnation of the Nice Guy™ is a fedora-clad dudebro who spends too much time on Reddit and would probably push a six-year-old girl out of the way to get his hands on My Little Pony merchandise, the more garden-variety Nice Guy™ can be more difficult to spot. 
• Basically, he’s anyone who regards sex as the ultimate goal of interacting with women, and in turn views the idea of a nonsexual friendship with a woman as an abysmal failure.
• Trademarks of a Nice Guy™ include trying to guilt trip women into having sex, claiming that sex should be the inevitable reward for basic acts of friendship, and only being interested in building a friendship until the woman in question rejects them romantically.
• When he gets rejected, he cites every single time they did something nice for her, repeatedly asks her out (as in stalks her), and calls her a coldhearted bitch if she refuses to magically reciprocate his feelings within an almost instantaneous period of time.
• A Nice Guy™ truly cements his status as soon as he begins to complain that (Link): “women only date assholes.”