For the last few days, these tweets from an American social media user has been making its rounds around twitter.

A woman’s idea of “Let just be friends” is “Hey listen to all my problems and keep me company…while I have sex with someone else.”

— Chef Nol (@UR_SO_COOL_NOL) September 14, 2017

If I met you without the intention of ever having anything serious then yes it’s cool if we’re just “friends”.

— Chef Nol (@UR_SO_COOL_NOL) September 14, 2017

The general sentiment expressed in this tweet is one that we have seen men repeatedly display, either verbally or through their behaviour. If you do a basic search of women who have either been killed or physically harmed or harassed because they turned down a man’s sexual advance and suggested instead that they remain friends, the sheer number of results Google turns up with overwhelm you. But this sentiment is so pervasively misogynist and damaging that it deserves to be unpacked and examined properly for what it is.

First of all, this sentiment that women cannot refuse a man’s sexual interest and still maintain some kind of friendship with them is stupid. It suggests that women can either be a sexual conquest or platonic friend, never both. It suggests that women are sorted into several groups and only accorded the benefits of each group and are not allowed on the pain of death or physical violence or at the least alienation, the alternative. Because our society does not allow women to actively pursue men without losing their ‘value’, every woman must wait to be approached by men they are sexually attracted to, while all men who are sexually attracted to her can simply walk up to her and stake their claim.

Secondly, when women suggest friendship as an alternative to sexual interest, it is often not because the woman actually finds the man sexually attractive, it is because she has seen evidence that she must assuage a man’s ego when he is rejected because he often responds with violence. Suggesting friendship offers the unspoken palliative, it suggests that the woman is not outrightly dismissing the man’s sexual advances, instead she feels for him, just not with the intensity that he does her. Millions of women have to fake friendships with men they don’t particularly like or share anything in common because they fear the alternative (outright rejection) might put them at risk. Men on the other hand, see friendship as some kind of holding pen, a waiting period where they can learn the woman’s weaknesses or earn her trust and use that trust and those weakenesses as a way to get the sex that attracted him to her in the first place.

Women are not your sexual objects, they do not exist to whet your appetite to fuel your ego, to temporarily dispel the loneliness men feel because they are unable to form lasting intimate but platonic relationships with other men. We need our men to do better.

No is not a ‘maybe’ or a ‘convince’ me.

Editor