Women have good friends. Men have "bromances", apparently.

AruhiKIng · 2017-06-10T07:01:40+00:00

Just more language to denigrate males. Terms like "bro" and "dude" are used by by men to establish camaraderie. Feminists turn them into terms of abuse. Consider the new terms "dudebro" or "brogrammer" (apparently referring to a well muscled computer geek who pounds brewskies and cat calls women in his spare time). Madness. Absolute madness.

ThatNinaGAL · 2017-06-10T12:58:02+00:00

The problem isn't homophobia, it's a homomaniac reading of sexual motives into any intimacy, tenderness, and loyalty between male friends. Male camaraderie is what's under suspicion.

The very nature of football, focused as it is on strength, virility, grace and manly bonding, has an obvious homoerotic component for those who play and for those who watch.

The word "obvious" is supposed to keep you from seeing what to me is obvious, that he swapped one kind of love for another. Eros for philia.

Part of the reason homosexuality is anathema in football, the reason gay players hide their sexual identity and fear rumors will keep them from getting drafted, is the worry that the affection could go too far and force the rest of the team to confront something uncomfortable in their bonds.

Oh, come on! Who's the homophobe here?! Heterosexual male athletes are afraid that their friendships will feel sexual? That's not my understanding of male heterosexuality. I haven't interviewed every heterosexual male on this subject, but I don't think heterosexual men worry that if they hang around indoors with their male friends long enough, there will be blow jobs.

People who make snarky remarks about the homoeroticism of football don't on the whole genuinely believe that jocks are repressed homosexuals. They're playing out r/thathappened nerd fantasies where they imagine the football players triggered into homophobic fury by the insinuation. In reality, jocks can and do build up intense male friendships without giving rise to "knowing smirks" from homomaniacs.

The boy most disadvantaged by homomania is the shy, gentle, late developer. The bullies might have called him a fag one way or another, but now even his kinder classmates and teachers assume the boy is gay, while patting themselves on the back for how tolerant and understanding they are. The timid boy clams up in large groups, preferring to get to know other boys individually instead. This focus on a single friend at a time, and the eagerness to have long deep talks instead of just joking around, raises the suspicion of a romantic motive and makes it harder for the socially isolated boy to make friends.

In these kinds of discussions, men are accused of being emotionally repressed and self-censoring. This is certainly the case for heterosexual men in their interactions with women, given the social sanctions of being perceived as a creep or a harasser. The prevailing progressive wisdom is that men should repress their emotions and self-censor around women, that they should be hesitant about saying or doing anything that (regardless of intentions) might be interpreted sexually or taken the wrong way. But when men are cautious about treating other men in a way that might be interpreted sexually or taken the wrong way (or more to the point, when they're unenthusiastic for their friendships to be described as bromances), they're accused of homophobia - Why wouldn't you want to send a social signal that's interpreted as repressed homosexuality? When you deny it, we all know what that means. Why should you care what other people think? It's a hypocritical double bind, and it's designed to isolate men.

And there's a notion that heterosexual men needed gay men to teach them how to be gentle with each other. The extraordinary cultural license gay men have been given (in the interest of shocking the bourgeois and bringing down the patriarchy) to be unkind, objectifying, and appearance-obsessed certainly doesn't support the case that they have anything to teach heterosexual men about being kind and gentle. The idea that heterosexual men need other men to teach them kindness also goes somewhat against the narrative that men need women to teach them how to be kind.

A Requiem for Friendship - Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution

Shakespeare, or his narrative persona, expressed in his sonnets a passionate love for an unnamed and not too loyal young man, so Shakespeare must have been homosexual—despite the absence of evidence, and despite his persona’s explicit statement in sonnet that the young man’s sexual accoutrements are of no interest (or use) to him whatever.

The bachelor Abe Lincoln long shared a bed with his closest friend, Joshua Speed, and later wrote letters expressing, with what seems a touch of self-deprecating irony, his fear that he would be lonely once Speed had taken a wife. Lincoln therefore must be homosexual. No matter that men (and women too) commonly shared beds, and also commonly spoke of their friendship in strong, earthy language that now embarrasses. The poet Edmund Spenser, celebrator of his own wedding in one of the most brilliant poems in English, used to share a bed with his friend and fellow scholar at Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey. There you go.

“Your love to me was finer than the love of women,” laments David in a public song, when he learns of the death of his friend Jonathan. We know why. The godlike hero Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu walk hand in hand into the dark forest of Humbaba. No wonder then that at Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh will weep inconsolably, letting his hair grow long, flinging away his royal robes, and leaving the city to wander in the wilderness.

Language is not language if it is not communal; it is a neat trick of political abracadabra to argue for an individual’s right to change the very medium of our thought and our social intercourse. If clothing is optional on a beach, then that is a nude beach. It cannot be a nude beach for some and an ordinary beach for others; to wear clothes at that beach at the very least means something that it had not meant before. If you may paint your house phosphorescent orange and violet, and you persuade a couple of your neighbors to do likewise, you no longer have what anybody would call a historic neighborhood.

If all of Kate’s friends leap into bed with whatever male gives them a hearty dinner at Burger King and a round of miniature golf, and Kate chooses instead to kiss her date once on the cheek and leave him on the porch, she will suggest to everybody that she is a prude. She may be, or may not be; she may be more firmly in the grip of lust than they are, for all we know, and may just detest the boy. But her actions have connotations they did not use to have.

Imagine a world wherein the taboo has been broken and incest is loudly and defiantly celebrated. Your wife’s unmarried brother puts his hand on your daughter’s shoulder. That gesture, once innocent, must now mean something, or at least suggest something. If the uncle were wise and considerate, he would not make it in the first place. You see a father hugging his teenage daughter as she leaves the car to go to school. The possibility flits before your mind. The language has changed, and the individual can do nothing about it.

By now the reader must see the point. I might say that of all human actions there is nothing more powerfully public than what two consenting adults do with their bodies behind (we hope) closed doors. Open homosexuality, loudly and defiantly celebrated, changes the language for everyone. If a man throws his arm around another man’s waist, it is now a sign—whether he is on the political right or the left, whether he believes in biblical proscriptions of homosexuality or not.

If a man cradles the head of his weeping friend, the shadow of suspicion must cross your mind. If a teenage boy is found skinny-dipping with another boy—not five of them, but two—it is the first thing you will think, and you will think it despite the obvious fact that until swim trunks were invented this was exactly how two men or boys would go for a swim.

Because language is communal, the individual can choose to make a sign or not. He cannot determine what the sign is to mean, not to others, not to the one he signals, and not even to himself.

... Return to the example of Lincoln. His age was surely not more tolerant of homosexuality or of sexual deviancy generally than is ours: Accounts of the Civil War show young men brought to the brink of blackest despair by their inability to break the habit of self-abuse. How, then, if deviancy was such a reproach, could Lincoln risk sharing a bed with a man and having the fact be publicly known? But that is precisely the point. Only in such a case is the bed-sharing possible.

I am sorry to have to use strong language, but only when sodomy is treated as a matter of course for everyone (as in the institutionalized buggery of boys and young men in ancient Sparta) or when it is met with such opprobrium that nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it, could Lincoln and his friend share that bed without suffering ridicule. The stigma against sodomy cleared away ample space for an emotionally powerful friendship that did not involve sexual intercourse, exactly as the stigma against incest allows for the physical and emotional freedom of a family.

Anunkash · 2017-06-10T12:46:03+00:00

Ive never felt degraded when my friend and my relationship was referred to as a bromance

2017-06-12T17:06:12+00:00

Women are so foreign to the context of an ACTUAL friendship they need to make up words to bring men down, like "bromance". It's literally their jealousy eeking out into a stupid meme that just reinforces the fact that men can be actual friends because we're real and honest, were as women are only "friends" with eachother so they have someone to judge and validate their own shitty, shallow feelings. They're just terrible creatures that project all their shittiness onto men, and society promotes it.

Wolosocu · 2017-06-10T13:29:57+00:00

LOL women don't have good (women) friends.

Title	Women have good friends. Men have "bromances", apparently.
Author	Taxus_Calyx
Upvotes	43
Comments	17
Date	June 10, 2017 4:15 AM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/6gde8a/women_have_good_friends_men_have_bromances/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/women-have-good-friends-men-have-bromances.920779 https://theredarchive.com/post/920779

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