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Notes -
Time for some good old fashioned gender politics seethe:
https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11of65g/i_21m_asked_my_friend_21f_to_be_fwb_and_now_she/?sort=confidence
A clearly very socially awkward nerdy literal virgin (despite being 21 years old) guy thinks a cute girl in his study group is flirting with him. He takes her aside privately after a study session and asks her… does she want to be his FWB (friends with benefits)? He reasons that he wants to have fun like many young men and isn’t looking for a relationship right now.
The girl is shocked and taken aback. She turns him down flat and appears uncomfortable. He feels uncomfortable too and apologizes to her and leaves.
Over the next few weeks, she doesn’t say anything to him at study sessions. He tries to make contact again, not to proposition her, but just to resume their friendly acquaintanceship. She tells him directly that she doesn’t want to speak to him. He is hurt but understands and leaves her be. Soon enough, he learns that she has told her friends and extended social circle what happened, and he is widely reviled as a creep. He feels hurt and violated. He laments that he has lost a friend, and now feels like he’s being lambasted for an innocent error, and he wishes the whole thing would just end and go away.
My take on OP is sympathetic. He comes off as extremely awkward and clearly isn’t well versed in the endless myriad of opaque and seemingly contradictory rules of modern dating. He wanted an FWB, and he didn’t understand that the socially acceptable way to get one is to ask a girl out on a date (usually through Tinder), then hook up with her, then either stay as vague as possible for as long as possible about your intentions while continuing to periodically fuck, or to sort of half way shrug after a fuck session and say, “yeah, I’m just really not looking for anything serious right now.” OP genuinely thought he was being upfront and honest with another person, and assumed that he was proposing something mutually beneficial.
Yes, it’s not a good idea to outright proposition a girl to be an FWB in a library. It’s awkward and weird and I can see how it made her feel uncomfortable. But all signs point to OP making an innocent error. He didn’t know any better. When he became aware of his mistake, he immediately apologized, gave the offended party space, and only later attempted to reestablish contact in a friendly, non-threatening manner. He made an innocent mistake and responded in the best possible way.
And Reddit’s response to OP is… calling him a massive piece of shit in every conceivable way.
What I find interesting about the overwhelming criticisms of OP is that they split in two completely opposite directions, but seemingly from the same critics.
On the one hand, OP is relentlessly slut shamed. He is accused of treating this woman like a “flesh light,” of feeling “entitled” to sex, of creepily trying to fuck an acquaintance, of pursuing sex with a girl instead of trying to date thine lady like a proper Victorian gentleman.
On the other hand, OP is relentlessly virgin shamed. He’s an incel, a fool, a creepy moron. He’s daring to try to have casual sex when he hasn’t even lost his virginity because he is SUCH A MASSIVE FUCKING LOSER. OP doesn’t understand that casual sex is only for chads who have fucked a bunch of girls, FWBs are an unlockable perk, not a privilege of the sexually unworthy.
Fortunately, there is a minority of Reddit commenters backing OP up, but it is a small minority. Meanwhile, many more posters are saying that OP is well on the way to becoming an incel or Andrew Tate fan, and unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they think they are.
I don’t have a larger point for this post, only that it’s incredibly frustrating that a significant portion of mainstream culture has erected these standards for the dating marketplace where one false step not only does, but should result in social and moral annihilation.
If we could hear this from the woman's perspective I suspect it would go something like this:
I suspect this is the case because if you spend any amount of time in a place where women discuss their relationships you will have heard some variation of the above.
Woman meets man. Man apparently wants to be a platonic friend. They grow close. Man tries to convert platonic relationship into a romantic or sexual one. Woman declines. Suddenly man is no longer interested in being platonic friends.
We are missing the last part from this story, I suspect because the woman in question pattern matched OP's actions to this narrative and cut it off preemptively. All their friendly interactions are suddenly recast through the light of "was this an authentic interaction or did he just want to get in my pants?" She cut off the friendship with OP because she believed she could no longer trust that OP wanted to be her friend in some kind of authentic way vs being her friend as a means to get a sexual relationship with her. This also, I believe, explains the level of vitriol directed at OP from people hearing about it second hand. "Awkward guy in our study group awkwardly asked me for sex" shouldn't, and I think probably doesn't, tend towards that kind of reaction but "guy in our study group pretended to be my friend to try and sleep with me" seems like it would warrant a much harsher reaction.
This also brings us back to the "be clear about your intentions" advice. Contra some other commenters I don't think this advice is satisfied with "be direct about asking for sex when you want it." The way I understand the advice is more like "when starting a long term relationship with a woman (of whatever kind) be clear about what kind of relationship you want it to be." I think a lot of people giving this advice would say OP was not clear about his intentions, given he started the relationship indicating it would be platonic when he wanted it to be sexual. Now, I think an obvious problem with this advice is that one's intentions for a relationship can change over time. Giving OP the benefit of the doubt, he did authentically want a platonic friendship and only developed the desire to convert it to a sexual one (and belief that it could be) some substantial time in to the relationship. Unfortunately this is where I run out of ideas. It's not a position I've found myself in and there doesn't seem to be a great way to be clear about how you want the relationship to change that doesn't involve some risk of destroying the relationship as it already is, beyond what some other commenters have noted.
This argument that men pretend to be friends so that they can get sex strikes me as a rationalization. The situation makes the woman feel bad so she finds a reason to direct the blame onto the man. You never hear about this problem of "pretending to be my friend to get sex" when the feelings are reciprocated. Shouldn't the deception be just as bad a betrayal whether the feelings are reciprocated or not? If the man was more clear about his intentions it could still easily spun into a creeper accusation. The thing that actually matters is the extent to which you can avoid making the woman feel bad or uncomfortable. To the extent that you can't avoid it, you just have to accept the risk that the woman will think you're a creep.
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