Do most straight men reserve their truest love and romance for other men? Marilyn Frye thinks so, and today we consider a quote from her classic book of feminist essays The Politics of Reality

We found ourselves in agreement with Frye's observations. But we debate and detail the angles:

• Is heterosexual male culture (always) homoerotic?
• Do men save their 'best' for each other?
• Do many men find truer friendship with other men because they feel more comfortable around each other? Why?
• Is this a problem? How much so?
• Why would a man be 'less himself' around women?
• Is this because a man might be capable of friendship with women, but change his behaviour around a woman he wants to sleep with?
• Maybe it's heterosexual people thinking of each other as alien species that causes the problem?
• But does heterosexuality rely on just this, treating each other as alien and maintaining a sense of difference?
• Is there some anger, bitterness or frustration in the quote?
• Is the author a separatist feminist as Joe guessed? (Yes).
• What is romance anyway?
• Has the truth in this quote shifted over time?
• Is it also true about women and other women? And is it possible to judge those two realities by the same standard?
• Why are people on dating apps talking about polarity and being in their feminine energy? Do they just mean 'someone else sort everything out?'
• Are we at the point where we can begin to expect equal levels of maturity and responsibility from both men and women?

"To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom the imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence, and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women, they want devotion, service, and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving."

And if r/feminism is consulted, you will find much agreement there. As NoMommy- posted:

Do men even like women? It doesn’t fuckin sound like it.

I want to be with someone who likes me. Likes talking to me, likes my sense of humor, likes hanging out with me. Someone who, even if we weren’t together/he wasn’t attracted to me, he would still want to hang out with me because he likes me as a person.

I want someone who shows affection and does nice things, not because he expects something in return, but because he wants to make me happy.

Is that too much to ask??? I say this to my friends who date and they’re all like, “fat fuckin chance,” “good luck with that.”

It’s just sad and frustrating

The Ten Thousand Things, well, Sam would like to say to you in reply "u/NoMommy- I get you, cos that's what I want also. No, it's not too much to ask. It's not easy to create this reality for ourselves, but many men do feel the same way. Maybe all humans feel the same way. We all want to be loved unconditionally, but we fear that any love we get is conditional, and pre-empt or retaliate. It's not impossible to create this better love with others, but we would have to start with the assumption that everyone has been hurt, and we ourselves are not necessarily easy to live with. And we all wonder if we can ever really be known by others, and still be loved. If we were known fully by someone, we may fear that we would not be loved.

Meanwhile, over at Good Men Project, Franklin Madison quotes Frye and issues a heartfelt appeal to men to have a high quality of friendship with men, but hold the same respect, acceptance and quality of friendship with women:

We reserve real love for these men. For many of us, we “believe” love isn’t really what we transmit to the women in our lives. Imagine, if we loved the women in our lives the same as we love the men in our lives: We never lied to them; we always supported them; we listened to them; we took their advice; we truly respected them. Then and only then will we truly love these women whom we inadequately love now.

There, I said it. Live with it because you know as well as I do that’s the truth.

He also urges men to be comfortable with the touch of other men and not deny it to themselves on homophobic grounds. https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/non-toxic-masculinity-male-male-affection-friendship-lbkr/

-----------------------------
More about Frye:

Marilyn Frye (born 1941) is an American philosopher and radical feminist theorist. She is known for her theories on sexism, racism, oppression, and sexuality. Her writings offer discussions of feminist topics, such as: white supremacy, male privilege, and gay and lesbian marginalization. Although she approaches the issues from the perspective of justice, she is also engaged with the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology of social categories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Frye

After a bit more reading, I learned that Frye is a reference point for separatist feminists. As I understand it, separatist feminists are women who assert, with cause, that they should not put their energy, presence, love or even thoughts towards men. Men are not where they should invest energy of any kind, that they want to prioritise other women, particularly those who have been hurt, and particularly those hurt by men.

There is a long history of women doing it for themselves throughout recorded human existence, and earlier still. Among our primate relatives, Bonobo chimpanzees have a society that operates through female bonds, and men must cooperate in order to have any stake in it. While among other chimpanzees each troop has a dominant male who keeps harems. The only way to access reproduction is to sneak around or kill or drive off the other male. I think the better choice here is obvious.

Women often saw benefit or survival in in banding together: for safety, mutual aid, religion, and many other causes. Women have had to fend for themselves after abandonment, during peace and war, or after losing male family members to war, famine, disease, migration, economic collapse, husbands press ganged into the navy, or killed accidentally in work. As there are 'men going their own way' now, and perhaps there has always been. It seems in difficult times women support each other, and perhaps, so do men. But we also ...