Women Can’t Be Friends With Each Other
And other myths the patriarchy promotes among us like failing the Bechdel Test is normal, men and women can’t be friends, and men can’t open up to each other either.
I’ve been very happy with the new friends I’ve made since moving to Florida. I’m glad I’ve kept touch with my friends back in California, too.
I know I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never experienced the kind of betrayal some of my friends have: a close girlfriend cheating with their boyfriend or spouse.
I can see how relationships aren’t easy for single women, especially as we age.
At the same time, if you’re a single woman socializing with other women, what type of person would take the opportunity to go after someone else’s partner? How low can you go, girl?
Even in 2023, there are still large numbers of women who don’t know how to be friends with other women. Instead, they run their lives based on what a man
Tells them to do
Wants them to do
or … if they don’t ‘have’ a man
doing whatever to ‘get’ a man
It’s like living your whole life in a film that fails the Bechdel test.
Male-focused, anti-woman behavior was never approved, but it was common. When I was growing up, I remember rumors of a notorious “Doctor Wife Swap” in my hometown of Redlands. Two well-known doctors were married to their office managers. Both couples had affairs, ultimately divorcing and remarrying the opposite ones’ office managers/side women.
In my generation, after we girls got too old to play with dolls, all too often the “mean girl” syndrome kicked in. I have a lot of friends who were teased by mean girls in school. Some of the only 80s movies that pass the Bechdel Test are ones like Heathers, which is a “black comedy” about a nerdy girl who manages to defeat a vicious clique and survive a relationship with Christian Slater. This movie lampoons mean girl cliques but barely shows normal friendships.
Then there was the Brady Bunch. The episode I remember most is Marcia and the football.
Yeah, Marcia’s social life suffered terribly because she had a big, swollen nose.
Marcia, Jan, and Cindy Brady were loving sisters, but they were too far apart in age to be like close girlfriends.
Few women have made approaches toward Bruce, Mike, or any other man I’ve been involved with while I’ve been around. However, one woman did aggressively make a pass at Alan Rodgers at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY. I wasn’t “with” Alan at that time but he was sitting with a group of writers near me when a woman came up, threw herself in his lap, and started kissing him.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said.
“Who is she?”
“She’s Richard Matheson’s companion.” Richard Matheson is the author of I Am Legend and various other horror novels, and also writer of the largest number of Twilight Zone episodes.
I estimated this woman to be in her mid-30s. I realized I had seen her before: pushing Matheson around the hotel in his wheelchair.
“Why didn’t you tell her to get off of you?” I asked Alan. She was really aggressive and he looked uncomfortable. Others were laughing at him.
But, men and their egos. Later, I saw her acting the same way with several other men, including married ones. And then there was poor Richard Matheson who’d had a stroke, in his wheelchair.
After that, often when I’ve seen a woman make a pass at an older man, especially one who seems either rich, disabled, or both, I remember the strange behavior of this woman who seemed so starved for male attention.
Most women who seek to improve their self-esteem by how many men they can attract aren’t quite as physically aggressive as this woman was.
Your Life: Failing the Bechdel Test
The rules for the Bechdel Test are simple: a film must 1) have at least two named women; 2) the women talk to each other; 3) the conversation isn’t about men.
So many women, especially my age and older, have turned their lives into movies that fail the Bechdel test. They don’t have any real friends at all, whether man or woman. Their lives revolve only around attracting a man, keeping a man, and showing off their possessions or other status symbols.
Our society has finally begun to openly talk about this behavior, giving people ways to live better and form real friendships with each other.
When I asked questions on social media about this, I learned of Dar Williams’ song “As Cool as I Am.”
The song is about a woman who liberates herself from a man who acts like Alan Rodgers. Alan always had a word for any woman in his vicinity and it was always aimed at putting both them and me down; he was exactly like the man in a song.
No matter what the manipulative man says or does, Dar sings, “I will not be afraid of women.”
And I’m only mentioning Alan because he was so trapped in the patriarchy and so trapped in the 20th century.
Until his sister and brother got in touch, Alan was absolutely alone after he had suffered several devastating strokes. The only person who would visit him was me.
The same behavior that makes women so competitive with other women that they can’t be friends with another woman or even themselves hurts men as well. Men supposedly “do things” together but they seldom talk about emotional topics.
They don’t provide the support and caring for one another that women do when we have real friendships.
I’m writing this because I’ve been backstabbed by a theoretical “friend” in a way that would fit right into an 80s movie like Heathers, which passes the Bechdel test on paper but only because it includes three repulsive named female characters and one that’s only likeable if you’re addicted to 80s “dark comedies”.
I feel some pity for the person who did the backstabbing. But that’s about it.
We all have choices regardless of how we were raised, abuse we may have suffered, and the way our culture pushes anti-social, self-centered, yet ultimately self-destructive behavior models on all of us.
Yes, I greatly value my female friendships. Without them, I couldn’t have gotten through any of the tough times in my life.
And I would like to think they feel the same about me. I am there for them, because fortunately, I didn’t fall for the movies and TV shows that so miserably fail the Bechdel test.
If anyone ever needed more proof that life isn’t like the movies, this is it. Just because friendless Hollywood creeps create these tales doesn’t mean we have to live their way.
It's depressing. I remember waking up to this happening as early as middle school, and then it being in full flower in high school. I didn't understand why girls were so willing to subjugate and hamstring themselves for boys (or men, in some instances) that demeaned them. As if a switch were thrown over sixth grade summer, and the first day of seventh grade girls who had liked science and reading acted dumb and mean, as if they'd all come out of a factory. It was baffling, and didn't get better.
I'm not entirely sure how much it's changed since the 80s-90s, but it's unquestionably in the open now, and something talked about.
I have never been one of those kind of men, having always been surrounded by assertive women who gave me an example of how they are supposed to be, as well as many similar media figures, so I know trying to behave in a dated patriarchal fashion does not serve me well.