Phasmal said:
Damien Granz said:
You can consider someone's feelings til the cows come home. If you aren't attracted to them, you can't really have a relationship with them, so while it does come down to attractiveness, that's not shallow, just how it is. If you have all the qualities of a partner but there is no chemistry, you are just a friend.
I had a friend I knew liked me. I was not attracted to him at all, and all he did was put me on a pedestal. When I started going out with my ex-boyfriend, this friend acted horribly. As if the knowledge that he liked me (even if I didn't like him) should prevent me from going out with someone else.
And if someone does claim to love you for your brains and all that, and you just don't feel the same way, going out with someone else (FOR ANY REASON) does not make you shallow. It might suck to see someone you wanted to go out with go out with someone else, but once again that is just life. I'm not referring to genders because this happens both ways, I've known more guys try the sneaky friendship thing but that's just my personal experience.
I can understand not wanting to be friends when you know it will come to nothing more, its a bit of a dick move, but if you have to do it to spare your feelings it's understandable. But it can hurt from the other side. Like `Oh that's how much our friendship meant to you then`.
If you want to say that everybody only has relationships because of physical attractiveness, and that
everybody are ultimately shallow, then fine by me, just be honest with it, rather than this "All men are chauvinistic pigs, all women want relationships for their partner's mind and only want to be loved, while men only want sex and physical appearance" sort of bull.
If you want to roll the punches as 'everybody is shallow and therefor that's all you should expect in general is shallowness', fine. I can't really debate that.
Because the whole "You can't be friends with this guy because he only wants to have sex with hot women and doesn't respect you for your personality" thing happens just as much. It's not one sided.
I don't mind so much if the conclusion that comes out are 'people everywhere can be shallow assholes', but I don't like the idea of seeing the behavior come from one side, and it's chauvinism, and it come form the other side and it's just men being too insecure to be a friend and nothing more.
That if a guy is rejected and quits being friends with the person who's rejected him, then later makes up shit to make her look like a *****, that's somehow 'unfair', but if a woman is rejected and quits being friends with that man, then later tries to convince herself that he's a shallow prick who only wants giant breasts and a tiny waist line, then that's completely legit? I don't buy that disconnect, I'm sorry.
That's my problem with this sort of defense of the 'friend zone'. Does that make more sense?
I'm not trying to say that all women are assholes, and that men aren't, by any stretch of the imagination. But I don't care for this conclusion that all men are automatically assholes if they do something, but women doing the same exact thing aren't.
Either, to me, seeing the same behavior from both sides, everybody is capable of being shallow assholes and should be called what they are; shallow assholes, or if that behavior doesn't make you shallow if you're a woman, then I reason it shouldn't make you shallow if you're a man, then the word 'shallow' has no meaning, whatsoever, period. Because it's literally impossible to be shallow. At which point, yes. The friend zoned men should stop bitching about being friend zoned. But women that aren't selected to be dated because men who only want a warm piece of meat can shut up just as well because the feeling is apparently mutual on all sides.
That's my thoughts on the situation. Doing otherwise, to me, seems sexist.
Because to me, it's no different, no less sexist, than if we have a population of 90% of men don't understand astrophysics and then 1 man understands it, and it's 'men are good at math because that one man is good at math', then you have 90% of women don't understand it, and 1 woman that does, well.. women are mostly dumb at math, and that one woman is just unusually smart, despite her handicap.
I'd call that sexism too. It would bother me just as much. I don't care if the conclusion you come to is that 1 person proves humans are good at math, or 90% of people prove that everybody is equally crappy at math, but I wouldn't stand for the idea that the same evidence on both sides proves that men are somehow better than women when they both fail. Or, in this case, vice verse.