This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Well eff me, it’s another post in the Alphabet Series. So many great f-words to choose from – some are obvious picks, some, not so much. You mighta thought I’d have gone for the word ‘feminism’, and trust me, I am going to do a post on the various feminisms and ‘pills’ that are confusing the hell out of everyone – but not at this time. I do have an ongoing series exploring my Birth as a Feminist, if you’re interested in development and evolution in the ways of what men and their lib-fems call ‘man-hating’.

F is also for ‘fuck’ and all its various offshoots – another obvious target and subject of some debate regarding usage in feminist circles, and I’m not talking about that today either. Same with F is for Freedom! which I will address in another post as it is something I want to explore in depth – it is just one of those words that means something different to each person around the world, and is the subject of an annoying lie and source of propaganda churned out by Western countries in order to finger-wag at countries outwardly proud of their racism, sexism and dictatorships. As well, F is for the fight-flight-freeze-fawn set of reactions to threats; fantasy (check out my ongoing Year of the Fantasy series); feminine vs feminizing (an upcoming post); forgiveness (part of the Enabler toolbox and also addressed in a 2015 post here); and family (a fragile, but crucial, cornerstone of patriarchy and female oppression and isolation. Family will come up a little bit today as it is hard to talk about the actual topic without addressing family.

So, we’re going for something different, and on the surface, seemingly juvenile – well, it is, in the sense that it starts in childhood and shapes the trajectory of adult lives. But in reality, this topic is an extremely serious issue for women and girls, and one that is seldom talked about for a few very obvious reasons that I’ll get into.

F is for Friendship.

As ‘friend’ is one of those words that can be a bit of a catch-all in that it can mean everything and nothing at the same time, I’m going to attempt to define it first, with the aid of some categories that describe different functions of friendship. I’ll mention a few differences in how males and females see friendship. And then I’ll get into why friendship is the most important kind of relationship for women, despite not being treated as such, and why it just isn’t possible for women to achieve authentic friendship as long as male dominance and compulsory heterosexuality (they are inseparable, actually) go unquestioned. Finally, I’ll fantasize a little about what female friendship could be.

What is a Friend?

The concept of friendship has been around and written about for millennia, and I won’t delve into the history here because it is vast and has been written about extensively by researchers of human evolution, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and cross-cultural studies. In addition, I’m a little more concerned with the here and now as well as the meaning and mechanics of friendship for women, specifically. A lot of the writings focus on men and how fucking awesome they are (or how deprived they are, the poor dears), and often, tsk-tsky articles are written about female pettiness and bitchiness towards one another without examining why or how that may have come about.

So I’ll start with a simple definition and jump off from there. Briefly, friendship is supposed to be a bond of mutual affection or genial affiliation between two people on equal footing that exists separately from sexual or familial ties. Friends are supposed to enhance your life and provide benefits that you don’t typically expect to get from lovers or family. And it is in engaging in friendship that you are supposed to have the most choice in members and freedom to be oneself – compared to family and other forced or ‘necessary’ ties, that is.

For many people, even today, friends have ended up being neighbours and classmates and (for men for all of history; women only recently) colleagues at work, simply because they were convenient, necessary for survival, and may have had something in common, even if it was only living on the same street. However, as life has become more global, with more migration and travel, and of course with the onset of the digital age, many things have changed, including the possibilities for and definitions of friendship. Traditional childhood friends still exist, especially if one is a person who stays in the town they grew up in, but many people now have ‘friends’ who are random digital strangers who have connected with them through Facebook and who ‘like’ their cat videos. There may, in fact, be no conversation, ever, and they will never meet in person, but they are called ‘friends’, nonetheless. Another modern development in friendship has come with the breakdown of the traditional family and with the gradual disconnect of parents from the lives and health of their children. Increasingly independent of their family, friendship has, for some people, become more important than family relationships, so much so that people may choose to spend holidays with friends rather than family.

There has been some hysteria over the last decade or two about a ‘loneliness epidemic’. Some of you may have seen one of those freaky documentaries about the Japanese and their widespread self-isolation and lack of social connections. You’re left with the impression that Japan is a country full of rape-cartoon-loving, capsule-apartment-dwelling people who pay strangers to eat meals with them because they have no friends. And then you’re wondering whether it’s going to spread around the world because porn is taking over, and more and more of our lives are lived online (especially in light of this never-ending pandemic bullshit). Never fear. First, documentaries, while I love them dearly, aren’t about normal people. How boring would that be, right? The Japanese are a social lot, well-travelled, and rather adventurous. Every country’s got their incels and their extreme social anxiety sufferers, though. Some live in basements, and others live in teeny-tiny apartments, depending on the culture and space available. If you look at the research (here’s an example), there is no actual evidence of widespread loneliness when you compare generations now, or the same age groups across time. One study, in fact, found that today’s teens report less loneliness than those in the past. That’s not to say that the quality of human connection hasn’t changed over time, but people are not really any more or less lonely than they used to be. They do have other issues that arise from an increase in social media involvement, however. I suspect the hysteria over loneliness is just propaganda designed to a) shit on ‘rich’ countries, b) encourage traditional values and heterosexuality by falsely equating being alone with loneliness, and c) to try to prove that the digital world leads to fewer real friends. Let’s just say that this is a massive and complicated issue.

Types of Friendship

I’m a psych person by training, so I sighed and settled in with familiar discomfort in my search for how the ‘experts’ define types of friendship. Everyone needs to put their own stamp on things, so there is a ton of stuff all basically saying the same thing in different ways. I combed and combined what I found into roughly four accepted categories.

1. Friendships of Utility: which exist between you and someone who is useful to you in some way
2. Friendships of Pleasure: which are maintained between you and those whose company you enjoy
3. Friendships of the Good: which are based on mutual respect and admiration
4. Friendships of the Right: which are bonds based on shared values, morals, or ethics.

Now, that is what I saw, but I take issue with the first category. Friendships of utility are relationships, but I am loathe to call them ‘friendship’. There is no affection or geniality there, which is basic to the definition of friendship. I strongly suspect that this category was posited by males, because this is generally how all males see people and things. “How can I use that thing/person?” “How is that thing/person beneficial to me?” And if it has no use, it doesn’t exist. If it does exist on their radar, males usually want it destroyed. Basic male psychology. Follow that easy rule, and you will have a much, much simpler life with much, much less agony. Now, males also make use of category two, and if there is pleasure, there is always utility. This describes the whole ‘friends with benefits’ scheme that males cooked up and sold to women as modern female liberation. No commitment or investment from men, but they can use and take pleasure from women. Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free, right?

Friendships of utility are also the most common connections that straight and breeder women have with other women. Once a woman is committed to a male and especially after she has popped out a kid, she only sees other women in terms of how they can help her or fit into her busy and crucial-to-society lifestyle. Even though she chose her situation, she still feels burdened and believes it is other women’s duty to pitch in for free or get together to listen to her endless complaints about her choice for a shot at a privileged life, especially if these ‘friends’ are less burdened and less ‘woman’ in her mind (e.g., lesbians, singles, and the child-free). It is extremely difficult to maintain friendships with women once they go off with a male and go into breeder-mode.

The third category of friendship doesn’t exist for men in relation to women. No male admires or respects women regardless of the line he uses publicly to appear like a Nice Guy^TM. Don’t listen to the words, observe his actions, especially the ones that he assumes aren’t being watched. Likewise with the fourth category, which is a common ploy used by men to get women sexually, and which is extremely common in activist and religious groups. Nothing gets an activist female doing free labour or spreading her legs like believing a male shares her world-saving agenda.

Also note that most women are incapable of seeing their ‘friendships’ with men clearly and accurately. The male will have a friendship of utility with a woman, while she is feeling respect and admiration for and possibly shared values with him. And she usually assumes it is mutual. It is not. Even with a friends-with-benefits situation, women will generally assume there is some kind of mutual respect going on, while it is actually completely one-directional from her to him. It is pure delusion, and eventually, the willingly ignorant woman encounters evidence to show her the truth. But she seldom accepts what is going on, choosing instead to remain used and often abused. Or she’ll assume it’s a one-off and move on to the next Machiavellian mister, who will respect her for sure, she assumes wrongly.

Hetero Pair-Bonding and Friendship?

How often have you heard a straight woman say “my husband/boyfriend is my best friend”, and did you manage not to laugh? This is a very, very recent development in hetero relationships. I strongly suspect that is is part of the velvet backlash against feminism and female economic freedom. For many years, ‘protection’, ‘romance’ and ‘love’ were the hooks/promises/lies used to keep women marrying men, but most recently, friendship has been sold to women as a great reason to keep spreading their legs and diverting their newfound financial resources (still much less than men’s, but still enough to live on) into male consumption rather than actual female freedom. Of course, men make better friends for women than other women! How could you believe otherwise? Today’s male is emotional and sensitive and a great listener. Males and females are EQUAL now (a requirement for friendship). He does half, nay! more than half, of the household chores. He wishes he could be the one to become pregnant and put his career on hold and cut ties with his friends and lower his IQ by engaging in baby-talk most of his waking hours for numerous years. Now that is friendship! I’ve never personally met one of these awesome friend-men, but hey… But, of course, it is friends with benefits. So you still have to let him fuck you, and you have to do it. No male is going to stay with you if you say, “Hey friend, let’s stop having sex, ‘kay?”

So, it’s not really a friendship. Males and females, despite liberal protest, are NOT equal. It’s still a sex slavery relationship, but this time, you’re choosing to be a subordinate instead of having no options except public prostitution, nunnery or suicide like throughout almost all of women’s history. And by the way, best friends are usually good for sharing secrets. For hetero women, that means having someone to bitch to about what your owner does to them that annoys or even hurts them, or how marriage isn’t what they expected it to be, or jeez, he really changed after getting hitched… Are these chicks seriously telling their hubbies that they’re sad they get one orgasm for every 50 that he gets and that porn makes them feel sub-human? I wonder to myself, in the absence of an actual friend to talk to, whether these women just live in more denial than a 1950’s housewife… As a long-time student of psychological warfare, I truly admire the husband-best-friend campaign as a smashing psychological success in maintaining female slavery despite the cage door having been sitting wide open for several decades now. Well done!

Same-Sex Friendships

It is really hard to find modern research on friendship that doesn’t address sex, sexuality, romance, or dating. The more ‘free’ societies and people supposedly get (meaning distance from religion & magical thinking and the embracing of science, human rights, social justice, etc.), the more that fucking, sexuality, identity, and the objectification and abuse of women (and the justification of it!!!) seems to be a part of absolutely every aspect of daily life. Men have always polluted society with their sexual deviancy throughout time, but we are living in a time where it is in your face 24/7 and has been normalized. And friendship has not gone unaffected by this. In traditional societies and in the traditional past of Western societies, female intimacy was common and relatively unstigmatized. But today, in ‘free’ societies, women are afraid of friendly intimacy with other women for fear of appearing to be lesbian – the absolute worst thing you can be labelled as a woman anywhere in the world (possibly worse than being called a prostitute).

In traditional China, where I spent many years, it is very common for women to walk around holding hands. And it is not strange for same-sex (both male-only and female-only) friends to be very physical with one another. I remember tutoring a small group of 14-year-old boys at their home one time, and one of the boys was giving his friend a calf massage. Hilariously, I was relating this information to a ‘trans man’ – aka a woman – I was forced to live with last year, and her comment was “that’s weird”. Yeah, women holding hands is weird, but a woman taking hormones and pretending she is a male isn’t weird at all… fucking idiot. Traditional societies are homophobic as hell, but physical intimacy that doen’t involve genitals is not necessarily seen as sexual in same-sex situations. Likewise in the past in Western cultures, adult female friends could share a bed and cuddle one another and it wasn’t polluted with sexual accusations.

I suspect the stigma against non-sexual, friendly, female intimacy is part of the move to keep women serving men and having it ‘make sense’ as I mentioned above. Women today are supposed to focus on finding a single male friend who will eventually become a best friend and then a husband and sperm-donor. Becoming too close, especially affection-wise, with female friends is a strong indicator of lesbian tendencies, which is only cool if you still fuck men the majority of the time and bring the friends home for your male partner to take advantage of.

Let’s explore same-sex friendships more.

Male-Male Friendships

Male friendships have been celebrated and described in literature for millennia and in film since its beginnings. These bonds are rich and layered and they form a very important psychological part of male identity. Men are able to bond over so many things, and seem to be able to forgive one another anything (especially if they can bond over blaming a woman for whatever is wrong). Although I’ve never seen this myself – ever – it seems to be a commonly held belief that males can solve a disagreement by punching each other out and then moving on. I don’t know if that is true. Like I said, I’ve never once seen evidence of this. Males generally don’t compete with one another over that much, and when something goes wrong, there is always a convenient female to gang up on and blame.

But boys and men have always been allowed to have rich lives of freedom compared to females. Able to go anywhere they please with few threats to their safety. They are also given a lot of freedom and forgiveness as children, so they learn that to take and demand are their rights. They aren’t forced to deal with limited freedoms and resources, and are not forced to compete to survive or get attention, so friendship between males is, on average, much easier than that between females.

Female-Female Friendships

One of the most disappointing and angst-producing things in my life is my lack of quality female friendships. Coming from an abusive home with a domineering and severely mentally fucked up mother, and then eventually going no-contact with the entire narcissist-enabling family horde in very early adulthood, I’ve always taken friendship more seriously than most. But from an early age, it was hard to relate to other girls and to deal with the constant, bizarre betrayals. I am neither overly masculine nor feminine in behaviour or appearance, so I didn’t automatically fit in to either the male or female camp and my friends fit two categories. Misfits or outcasts of both sexes. And abusive girls. Both probably stemmed from child abuse patterns I was living. I had a damaged identity, so I couldn’t find a community, and in addition, was a ready-made target for domineering females resembling my mother, until I figured out what was going on and learned to avoid these kinds of people. Once I got to grad school and had a gay community, which, in the 1990’s was blessedly before the trans popped into existence and destroyed everything lesbian, I was in heaven as no one was really what they were supposed to be and revelled in it. But childhood and the teen years were pure hell. I was always a bit of a community surfer – and have remained that way as I fit in less and less, especially in an increasingly lesbian- and reality- and woman-hating world.

With age, experience, and growing feminist awareness, female friendship got even harder. I lost friends to marriage and children and traditional, small, stay-in-place lives. I moved around the world, lived a simple, low-income and portable life, and realized how easy it was and still is for males in my situation to make same-sex friends in any culture. It’s much harder for women no matter where they are in the world. While I can meet child-free women my age in Western countries (although most of them are still hetero, male apologists/enablers, and liberal morons), in a traditional culture, it is next to impossible to create bonds with women who are all married by 25. Even if they are working outside the home, these jobs and potential friendships take second place to family duties. Friendships, if they have any, tend to be long-time ones and they certainly aren’t looking for new ones.

If you are a non-traditional woman and not a man-chaser, finding even partially like-minded women in the meat world is really, really difficult. I’ve learned to let go of any and all expectations of substantive friendship, and I focus on compartmentalized, shared interests. And I don’t seek to push the acquaintance beyond that interest. Female friendships just feel so fragile to me. And there are many reasons for this.

As I alluded to above, most females are forced into sensitivity mode from birth. We’re criticized, micromanaged, punished, and forced into adopting submissive and apologetic behaviours in order to get along in this world. It doesn’t work for all females; some just have the right combination of attributes to withstand brainwashing, and they end up stronger and freer as a result. But if you’ve ended up molded because of this brainwashing, you learn very quickly to be on guard. You’re never really safe. Criticism is a comment on your whole person, your value, your identity. The effects of this are even more pronounced if you have experienced narcissistic abuse as a child. So to be blunt and frank in a friendship is a risky business. You have been taught to accept male aggression and not to stand up to it, but at the same time, you expect other females to be like you. You have been groomed to keep the peace, and to withdraw if there is a hint of war. So what does that mean when you have a relationship between two sensitive people (i.e., two average females?) who are afraid of rocking the boat? You have a very fragile friendship. Misunderstanding is rife.

Add to that the competition for scarce resources and attention that males don’t experience, and you have a recipe for constant war between women over very little. It comes across as petty and bitchy, but it is the natural outcome of repeated punishment and grooming that all girls go through. Males just don’t experience the punishment and deprivation as a class that females do, so they don’t turn out the same way, and they certainly aren’t capable of understanding this kind of psychological slavery.

What ends up happening as girls get older is that there is always the natural draw to other females, but because of the hetero brainwashing, women and girls become ‘placeholders’ instead of real friends. ‘Friends’ are there until they are not needed (meaning a male comes along who needs servicing). It’s like putting the salt and pepper shakers away after eating a meal. You take them out when you need them, then you put them away and forget about them. And in the case of women, friends are there for emotional support, especially after the male master enacts his privilege upon his servant. Women also provide free labour, financial support, entertainment, a safe haven, and the like to their female friends. And when the male snaps his fingers, the friends are put away. Forgotten until needed again.

Of the women who are born with the types of attributes that lead to resistance to brainwashing, and are fortunate enough not to be abused as children, things can go a few ways. Some become very devoted to women, especially if lesbian. If they are lucky, they can find a community, and friendships become more like those men experience, although much richer and more valuable. Frequently, though, many girls who are considered tomboyish as children get turned off by the nonsense that girls get herded into. They may tend to say things like “most of my friends are male” or even “I’m not like other girls”. This is a red flag for me. These are deeply misogynistic women. I mean, I get it. They didn’t fit in with the average female trained idiot and were probably frequently treated like shit by girls as a result. Why would you beg to be let into a club you don’t fit in with or are abused by for petty things? Males treat females like shit in different ways, but it is easier to navigate, and if you are a tomboyish female, the boys will treat you differently. Not equally, but they may not treat you blatantly like a cunt on legs like they do to more naturally feminine girls. The incorrect assumption these girls make is that males respect them as they do other males. Wrong. You may not end up getting raped like a feminine girl (or you might; you just don’t know what males will do), but you will never be one of the boys.

What Could Female Friendship Look Like?

It IS possible for women to have high-quality, lasting, satisfying friendships. I believe it. Truly. Is it going to be common any time soon? Hell no. You need a certain set of conditions in order to allow women to have the qualities necessary to make friendship work. I’m mostly working on fantasy here, but I will say that I have one friend who is as close to ideal as is possible. I’ll describe what we have, and then I’ll talk about necessary conditions.

My closest friend is more than 20 years younger than me. We are from two very different cultures. We don’t agree on everything, and we each have life experience the other can’t relate to. We have had a couple of big arguments, and have recovered pretty easily. We have travelled together. We have helped each other out of a few pickles. She feels like what a sister should be like, but is nothing like what I had with the disaster of a sister I grew up with. We have bonded over a few things: we both have horrific, NPD mothers and suffer similar shit as a result. We both enjoy reading and philosophy and travel and independence. We love animals and don’t want children. Neither of us is interested in men. We can talk about any topic and dig into it, argue about it, theorize, argue some more, and then come to some sort of conclusion (unless it is paused for continuation another day). We comfort each other and offer both serious and funny and sweet support. She is the best hugger I know, despite not coming from a hugging culture. And as of going on two years now, we live more than 10,000 km apart, which kills my soul and hurts my heart. Often. Luckily, we chat online a few times a week. Except for the geographical distance, this is what female friendship should be. It has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with intimacy on multiple levels.

So what conditions do women need to foster this kind of incredible friendship? No heterosexuality, no demanding males in the picture. Preferably no kids, although I’ll say no boy-children for sure. Compassion. Empathy. A firm grip on reality. No enabling behaviour – you should be able to be supporting and critical (meaning, able to point out stuff without being an asshole). Acceptance. You don’t have to agree on everything, and you should know and accept their imperfections. And BOTH people have to be this way. Equality is the key to friendship. Otherwise, you end up in some co-dependent shitfest.

Finally, and ideally, a female friendship is a combination of categories 2, 3 and 4 that I talked about above. Pleasure in another’s company, respect and admiration, and shared values. Utility is for tools, not friendship, and the only human tools are male 😉

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