How I Came To Have Very Few Male Friends
I am happiest in the Women’s Residence. A bunch of girls gathered together with our blankets, green teas and welcoming puns, hiding from fast-moving campus bullshit under loud laughter and angry sighs. A striking feature about this scene is that there is no dude in sight.
My idea of good company didn’t always look like this. Before I took off to college, I lived in Bangalore finishing high school and doing small content writing assignments. Most of my friends were men I met through work, social media, at events and through common friends. I attended an all girls’ PU college where I was stumbling socially -- perhaps that had something to do with my social inclinations. I nurtured those friendships carefully and with attention to their different features. Some of these guys are still my go-to people.
Meanwhile, my politics had begun to take shape. Overwhelmed by rampant anti-feminism from men and women, I began to wonder: What makes genuine people with reliable belief systems? The first incident that shook up the default answers I had was women at Jadavpur University fiercely calling out Ekalavya Chaudhuri for being a serial sexual predator. I remember glaring at those disturbing screenshots of conversations between him and his victims, who were roughly my age. Here was a man: educated, English-speaking, proficient, articulate, respected in the debating and spoken word circles, and vocal. Everything I had unconsciously taken as green signals for goodness turned out to be classist and false. I felt lost, and attending an unabashedly elite liberal arts university only made it worse.
Disillusionment 101
First year of college brought out an extroversion I never knew I was capable of. I interacted with both men and women a lot. While the elation, the newness, the 46 hugs per day habits wore off, my political location moved further to the Left, and more complexly feminist. I began to notice my University’s structure, the nature of on-campus conversation, and the various emotions that come with it all. The era of problematic dudes 360 degrees around had begun.
I read personal essays about vocally feminist men being abusive, men whose support was merely a performance, and feminists baffled by these betrayals. I wasn’t short of real life examples either. Soon, they really did seem like caricatures, with an unstoppable pattern that I could not unsee once I recognised it. Most people have seen the NiceGuy™, the NotAllMen™ and the Mansplainer™, but I’ve also often known Devil’s Advocate Boi™ : the guy who feels entitled to a conversation whether or not you’re available or willing, requests you to explain a certain feminist nuance, and instead of listening to and responding to you, nonsensically counters you every step of the way because he’s already made up his mind and is actually here to… charm you out of your feminism by creating an obstacle course of arguments? He isn’t sure either. Or perhaps you might enjoy the more sophisticated company of a Liberal/Centrist™ who’s here to confuse you about what he actually believes in because he refuses to put a problem in the context of power hierarchies. Or how about Straight Up Sexist Dudebro™ or the Only Talk No Walk™ male feminist?
Perhaps I should be giving these men more benefit of the doubt. Of course I cannot expect everyone to feel or think the same way. Maybe they relate to these wide, urgent causes in their own ways. But being confronted by the same brand of garbage over and over again exhausted me for a whole semester. I withdrew my faith in conversations significantly -- here, they accomplished nothing. I was saying the same things, hearing the same counter-arguments, hitting the same roadblocks, and feeling the same way after. The men would pat themselves on their backs for having ‘offended a feminist’, and move on unperturbed. I began to step back.
Meanwhile, women’s whisper networks grew. I regularly heard new stories of rape apologia, sexual harassment, complicity of on-campus groups within sexual harassment cultures, and female friends being hurt or disappointed by male friends or partners. Watching men respond to the Aziz Ansari story was a harsh reminder for so many women around me. We felt hopeless over and over again. My notions of friendship shifted.
Friendship = Allyship
I’d begun to listen to instinctual discomfort. I had already learnt to not treat bigotry as a mere “difference of opinion”, but as systemic oppression that invalidated certain identities and had real impact on people. This was no ‘tea or coffee’ situation. I was only able to value friendship that came with a shared core worldview. Isn’t that what friendship already is on some level? We may greatly disagree on the nuances, but we must at least believe that “kindness is a virtue” and “killing people is wrong”, right?
A political dimension just meant that I felt wildly uncomfortable being too chummy with, for instance, someone who believes there are only two genders. Beyond a certain point in time and a number of conversations, I’d just have to actively avoid the topic or always be enraged. This also applied to predicted dissonance: knowing of someone’s deliberate, provocative bigotry and the decision to not engage it. Learning how social connections are also a source of power and impunity, especially in a campus setting, set me off such acquaintances even more.
This isn’t to say that female allyships are perfect. There are many irreconcilable practices. I have slipped up many, many times. Very often, I face the same problems navigating friendships or possible friendships with women, but it’s also the women who lift me up every time. It’s among my female friend-circles that a deep sense of solidarity -- even through conflict, clashing personalities and frightening confrontations -- is felt and cultivated. It’s the female friends that point out my bullshit and help me grow. I aspire to be like them and to support them in return. It’s the female friendships that hurt the most when they are no longer there.
Discourse around The List was another major milestone. The anti-List ‘camp’ made me furious. However, it was also a rare time of introspecting feminist justice and working out incoherences. For once, the focus was on different feminisms rather than the Men’s Rights Activists. It made me realise that gender politics is all about trust. Later, I learned of unimaginably toxic behaviours of a few close male friends, both as feminists and as individuals. It cemented the way I chose to navigate my social surrounding. For the most part, it has led to distancing or cutting off friendships. There’s no time to process this half of the journey: anger, disappointment, situational constraints, loss. I thought about trust even more as I felt it crumbling. I revisited the idea of unconscious answers and the “default” response.
Navigating Trust, Punchlines and Anger
I’ve decided that my implicit default with women and non-cis men should be trust, belief, faith -- especially when it’s about our lived experiences under the capitalist Patriarchy. With cis men, I’m forced to be slightly alert. Every new #Time’sUp story refreshes the importance of this. That I must not only stay away from making paranoid assumptions about men, but also not be overjoyed and impressed by their doing the bare minimum. I try to make sure that my feminism does not constantly revolve around pandering to theirs, or making theirs comfortable. Isn’t it respectful to expect male allies to be as smart, sensitive and spirited as I expect myself to be? If an all-knowing MRA loitering about Facebook is supposedly ‘alienated’ from feminism or me because I say, “LOL what is UP with dudes”, I think it’s reasonable to say: so be it. To hell with me, too, if I can’t understand anger, humour and frustration about my areas of privilege geared at me by those who are oppressed by it.
Feminism is no place for blanket policies, of course, but what do I do with coping mechanisms and intuitions? Picking my battles, cracking startling jokes about powerful groups (chiefly, cis men) that could be read as unwarranted generalisations, and the tricky discomfort with certain conversations or people?
Currently, most of my friends are women. I often wonder if I’ve over-acclimatised to the campus. After all, it is a very specific (and very frustrating and isolating) context. My frequent dismissal of men would be privileged, obnoxious nonsense if the men around me weren’t willfully ignorant and repeatedly disappointing (despite access to information, language fluency, financial comfort and cultural privilege). My distance from men is a non-empathetic stance outside the context of prolonged unequal and enervating friendships with them. It risks closing off male victims under the Patriarchy from opening up though I don’t intend to hold back my support or listening to them. I’ve become aware of this as I’m away from campus, and as the social landscape looks full of possibilities.
Questions Ahead
I wonder if this journey has led to greater rigidity with people. I ask myself, “Do I actually feel more relieved and healthy than when I engaged men indiscriminately?” I think yes. I ask, “Has my hyper-sensitivity to tricky conversations gone too far? Do I expect agreement to arrive ready-made?” Maybe. I might need to tone it down. I suspect also if I’ve become either less forgiving or too righteous with my own politics, mistakes and inadequacies (and those of my remaining friends). My snappy aggression and gentle empathy aren’t always at yin-yang equilibrium. I’m learning that it is my responsibility to put in recovered energy into challenging my family, educating myself on caste-class, and doing the work. The dudes are just one piece in the puzzle.
Of course friendships change with upheavals in discourse, and ties with men are now harder to strengthen. Are there other ways to make sense of our current situation, emotional demands, isolation and betrayals? How do other women deal with infuriating men, and the gendered imbalances in friendship? Until I have better answers, I think I’ll stick with rolling my eyes, sipping my tea, snuggling in a friend’s room, planning feminist takeovers, and rapidly tweeting, “men are trash, amirite?”
