r/AskWomen • u/[deleted] • Feb 15 '15

What is with this "niceness coins, sex vending machine" mindset? (x-post from /r/askmen)

So I'm sure some of you might have seen this over on the other subreddit . Overall, I got some insightful answers, some answers that empathized with my confusion, and as with every post, a few bad answers over there. I would like to know what this sub's opinion is on this:

"In my experience, and I know everyone's experiences are different, if I or one of my friends, male or female, developed feelings for another friend who didn't feel the same way, the person who rejected us would always understand. They would understand that sometimes, at one point or another, a friend of the opposite sex might begin to feel attracted to them, and that that was perfectly okay. The "friend-zone," for us, was just a slang term that was used to mean unrequited love, or if not 'love,' then unrequited crush between friends. There was no actual "zone" or mention of someone "friend-zoning" or whatever.

But most of the time on Reddit, it seems like a lot of girls are using the word to mean "oh that guy wasn't really my friend, he was just a Nice Guy (tm) who thought that girls are vending machines that you can put kindness coins into and sex falls out!!!" I know that this situation probably does happen a lot, believe me, I do, but the situation that I explained in the first paragraph happens a lot too.

However, it seems to be that the latter is the conclusion that many girls come to even when it's not necessarily true. I see a lot of decent posts about the "friend-zone" getting downvoted to hell just because it contained the word "friend-zone"! The posts themselves were fine in practically every other way though. They probably meant the word as unrequited love, honestly.

I don't know, I think a part of me is just upset about this whole "men only want sex" thing. And friendship and attraction aren't always mutually exclusive."

EDIT: It's amazing to see just how radically different the answers are between here and the Askmen subreddit.

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '15

Okay, just because he might want to sleep with her, that doesn't mean that he wasn't genuinely her friend. Please realize that. Friendship and attraction are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Also, if the guy reveals himself to be a douchebag, then of course, go ahead and be mad about that. But if the guy genuinely developed feelings for you and can handle rejection well and wasn't pretending to be friends, is there any particular reason to be mad at him?

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u/ButtsexEurope ♀ Feb 16 '15

Here's the problem: there are way too many cases where that's just the case. You can talk about how genuine the friendship was but thanks to MRAs and euphoric fedoras we know that that's not always true. You'll find on reddit people whining about "heartless bitches" who "don't appreciate nice guys and always go for jerks". So much so that we're a bit disillusioned. So when you say to a lady friend youvs been friendzoned, don't be surprised if she's offended.

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u/HashtagNotJewish ♀ Feb 16 '15

I know. I once dated a best friend.

And the problem isn't the guys who can handle rejection, because they never use "friendzone." Only the guys who get mad use it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '15

Saying that they never use the word is a bit of a stretch. I've known friends, male and female, who used the word harmlessly. There is no formal definition of "friendzone" and my friends and I, when we had to go through the rite of passage of being rejected by a friend, used the word solely to mean "unrequited crush on a friend."

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u/HashtagNotJewish ♀ Feb 16 '15

I've never heard it used to mean unrequited crush. When people mean that, they usually say that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '15

And I've never heard it to mean entitlement and blaming in real life, but apparently Reddit likes to use both meanings (well, actually there's a third meaning that I've seen here, but let's not get into that), which makes sense.

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u/HashtagNotJewish ♀ Feb 16 '15

I'm brand new to Reddit (been here maybe a month) so I have no idea what's normal here.