FANTASIES OF CASUALNESS – DISORDER – AND CONTROL
So a new person in town complains because he wants a relationship leading to marriage and dates nice women he meets at Mass, but none is interested in any arrangement except “friends with benefits.” He is horrified and asked me about it. I said I was also horrified but that this arrangement was in fashion.
I had not known that women were also seeking this arrangement since the people who keep pursuing me for it are men. Usually they tell me they are asking me because Louisiana women, being conservative, turn them down for it and they are hoping that I, a Californian, will be more amenable. Now I discover that women are also seeking this arrangement. I wonder why they have not met the men I have.
NO PASSION, NO SIN?
Neither the new person nor I really understand what the proposed arrangement entails. To extend sexual “benefits” to friends sounds strange to us. Nobody else agrees. We have bonded over this issue, although we are not going to extend each other “benefits.” I said that if I were going to hand out favors I would prefer to do it in an organized fashion, perhaps patriotically, to disabled veterans. Everyone was horrified except the new person, who laughed.
So far as we can tell, the arrangement means that you have a friend you are not interested in as a lover, but that is a real friend, and out of some sort of desperation, poor boundaries, or general laziness you sleep with them on and off. Or that there is someone you have found out will sleep with you any time, but that you are not interested in. So you wave to them in a friendly way when you see them, but do not talk to them much. When you see them at a bar on a night you are cruising, and nobody else is available, you move on in.
We cannot understand why anyone would want this kind of arrangement. Why not just take a lover, is our question, although we know that those who seek the “friends with benefits” arrangement fear passion. One of my former students explains that “friends with benefits” does mean taking a lover, except that the word “lover” connotes sin. If you say “lover” then you cannot take Communion, but if you say “friends with benefits” everything is less HOTT. Your virtue is preserved and you can chew that wafer with the holiest of chewers.
DUPLICITY
The new person points out that the people who want “friends with benefits” always take Communion and always vote Republican. Another former student says that is because of superficiality and duplicity, and also the sincere aspiration to an image of virtue you cannot actually attain. At the very least you want to keep up certain appearances, and also to continue on in a certain kind of behavior. Therefore you cannot take lovers, you must have “friends with benefits.”
I still want to know, what is a “friend with benefits?” The arrangement sounds like a reliable recipe for bad sex, and I am fascinated by the use of the language of HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT in this context. It was in response to this workplace related terminology that the last time “friendship with benefits” was proposed to me, I said that kind of friendship would cost $500 per hour, in cash and in advance, or $2,500 for the whole night. This was considered very outrageous and I did not understand why. I suppose I do now, if having “friends with benefits” is all about keeping up appearances.
AUTHORITARIANISM
One meaning of authoritarianism is getting what you want through connections, or through manipulation, and not having to care about community values or about what your getting what you wanted may have cost anyone else.
The same former student who explained the meaning of “friends with benefits” also says that the idea that racism (which is of course something Black people perpetrate upon whites) will continue as long as Black people remain informed of what whites have done to them, is very common.
My ceramics class, composed of conservative white Christians, has accepted the Obama victory, but my 12 stepping friend – actually a member of this class – wants a gun to protect herself from the Black men who will now be attacking her. She says I am in denial because I do not believe her. Thus she proves once again how serene and superior she is. I lost it one day and informed her that it was clear she does not really know Jesus. She is upset, and is calling me judgmental. And I am judgmental. I judge that we should repeal Proposition 8.
I would not be at all surprised if those who pushed Proposition 8 through were busy negotiating “friends with benefits” deals, possibly with members of their same sex, right now.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’m curious: Are these people Catholics or Baptists?
In the land of racial hypocrisy, sexual hypocrisy isn’t such a big deal?
Emotional laziness?
1. They are Catholics except the ceramics teacher who is Methodist.
2. I don’t know that this area is more hypocritical racially than the rest of the country – it is very possible that it is less so. But Human, below, explains that it is race-o-phobic … wants to avoid the topic.
2.1. But this “friends with benefits” fashion is certainly sexual hypocrisy and the logic is indeed parallel to the argument on why racial history shouldn’t be taught. In both cases, people want to do exploitative things and not be called on that.
2.2. And there are a lot of other forms of hypocrisy here so in that sense maybe you’re right – one is hypocritical about many things so one is also hypocritical about sex. HMMM. But see point 4, below, which may trump all of this.
2.3. I am still fascinated that people seem to want all this lukewarm sex. I am amazed at the way I have been approached for it: people seem to ask for sex as they would a favor, and they expect you’d provide it that way, as though you were lending them a couple of eggs for their cake or something.
3. It is definitely emotional and intellectual laziness but wouldn’t it be terribly stressful to live that way? I don’t get it at all.
4. REALIZATION: Actually it is against AUTHORITARIANISM I guess I am railing. I got all of this material because I was in a very exhausting party. Here I only recorded the least exhausting parts because the more exhausting parts have to be confidential. All I can say re those parts is that I am tired of people complaining about what is and yet insisting upon remaining too afraid to do anything about it.
The book on the matter of authoritarianism is noted here:
http://sptc.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/eduardo-torres-arancivia/
Speaking from the viewpoint of someone who has had friends with benefits, I have to say I really like it. For me it has meant that I have a friend whom I do not love who is also willing on occasion to be a sexual partner (either party can initiate or refuse sex), that it is not exclusive and it is not “headed anywhere” in terms of a more restrictive or permanent arrangement.
This idea of racism as being something black people do to whites seems to have caught on fairly recently. You see it spoken of that way in the news and on some blogs and so on and it seems so very strange to me.
But even when I was younger and did not understand racism very well, I don’t remember thinking of it that way. Instead racism was something I was terrified I would be accused of. To be racist was maybe the worst thing you could be, but it was (I though) very easy to accidentally do something that would result in some black person calling you racist, and as a result I found it was often easier to simply avoid black people. Being accused of racism was something I experienced as a very painful humiliation, though of course it never occurred to me to wonder how it felt to be on the receiving end of racism.
It was also very, very, very important never to acknowledge in any way that some people were black and others white. If you did that you opened yourself to an accusation of racism. When I moved to the DC area and was riding on the metro with a friend and he made the observation that more black people ride the green line and more white people ride the orange line (true, depending where you get on), I was horrified and embarrassed that he would actually say that out loud in public.
I wonder if people in Louisiana still insist on ignoring the very existence of race in this way.
Human – some, yes. I’ve shocked people the way your DC friend shocked you. But many white people do not deny race exists at all – they are happy to say very racist things, as long as they are on private property or hiding behind a pseudonym.
Racism as something people are terrified of being accused of, yes, that is very big here. But it’s just a white trip. My *first grade* teacher wouldn’t let them stay in their own heads like that. Or hmmm … maybe I shouldn’t be so impatient: maybe being afraid to be called racist is about being shamed as white trash by more blueblooded Yankees?
The definition of racism as something Blacks do to whites is new and evil, and it appears to be nationwide. I think it comes from talk radio or somewhere like that.
*
S – I’d call that a lover or a friend, it being the case that different friendships have different aspects! But then I learned the term “friend with benefits” here, where there is all sorts of mayhem generally, and it always seems to presuppose some sort of notion of using people as sex providers.
I rail about it when really I should probably be railing about the larger context of gender relations.
I think it is also more ridiculous because this new person in town and I are both well over 40, and we are getting accosted by people our age for this who have very retro ideas about gender relations. This new person isn’t white and it is white women who keep propositioning him in this way, explaining that they can’t have anything more public or more formal going on because he isn’t white. He is supposed to understand and accept this.
I have the impression, when I am asked, that I am supposed to understand and accept that not being from here and not being more mainstream, it is the best I can do. It is all the more ludicrous because these propositions come out of the blue from people I would not be interested in for anything, much less….
Also, Human – your comment explains something else I was railing about today, namely, the way people who hint that they might accuse someone of racism get to do whatever they want, anything at all, just so nobody will have to deal with being accused of racism.
I don’t understand it and don’t have patience with it because I am not afraid of being accused of racism. I am sure I *am* racist – it is virtually impossible not to be in a society structured on racism – and if it’s pointed out I can see it. If it is a false and manipulative accusation I am confident I can see that, too.
But to have that attitude you have to accept the fact that you really might be and it really might be something you have to work on. It seems to me, and I am perhaps too unkind, that people don’t want to have it pointed out because they don’t want to have to work on anything, look at themselves, change their way of being, admit responsibility, etc.
That’s why the theory that if Blacks didn’t know there had been slavery/Jim Crow, we would all get along better, is so popular. Racism is something that existed in the past, it has nothing to do with us, so we should be able to pretend it is not here and that the past has nothing to do with the present.
I on the other hand come from a big slaveowning family and I know it, there is no escaping it, it is a fact. I don’t feel guilty about it – I didn’t choose to be born as their descendant, it isn’t something I can do anything about, etc. People keep asking me how it makes me feel, don’t I feel awful about it, but I really don’t, not as an individual … what I am much more concerned about is the fact that some people get racially profiled TODAY and I don’t, etc., etc.
I guess it all means I am a really privileged person to be able to have these attitudes, and I should be nicer to and about people who haven’t been able to get past it so well, etc. … but I secretly feel, get with the program folks. I am in the minority on everything, though, I also don’t believe the U.S. is a more virtuous country than other countries, etc., and all sorts of faux patriotic things people believe.
Yet I would and sometimes do (for example) ride a bicycle out of patriotism to save on oil, whereas others believe their citizenship is license to gas guzzle. I don’t know.
Still: my point: your point about how HORRIBLE people feel about the possibility that they could be accused of racism explains a lot, and illuminates a conversation I had today, so I now “get” something I didn’t get before.
P.S. in general so is this post about:
authoritarianism – abdication of responsibility – duplicity – exploitative attitudes … is that what I am really railing about???
It’s caused by a lack of individualism. They don’t like to “work on” themselves, as you put it, because they don’t feel that there is a self there to work upon. In fact, when they are accused of racism, it is really embarrassing for them, because, behind the accusation they hear a deeper one: “You have no self awareness. perhaps it is because you have no self.”
I would wager that this is really the factor that freaks them out.
Jennifer, I’m sure you’re right. I will sleep on this and meditate.
And … hmm … on “friends with benefits” … it has been presented to me as a concept in a very conservative social context where everything is a power play of some kind. Everything is about stealing some kind of self. That is where my disagreement lies.
PZ– my sense of this comes from what you said, and how it seemed to be logical to feel threatened by being called a racist if you had no self-awareness, but it also comes from my own misplaced efforts, in tutoring, to try to cater to the students’ individuated selves by deferring to them in various ways, only to find that they felt this to be considerably threatening, since by giving them room to demonstate something special like creativity or particular aptitudes, I was really giving them room to show that they had no idea.
That may explain a lot about *my* students. (And yet if they feel they do have creativity, a self, or any aptitudes, they then think they need no skills or facts.)