People are conflating “not having female friends” with “hating/disliking other women”.
One is not the same as the other.
The OP quoted a post where the poster only mentioned women who have no female friends. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons for doing so, and it doesn’t automatically mean you hate any other woman who crosses your path. Simply that you either move in social circles where women are vastly outnumbered by men, or that the women you have come across just aren’t interested in the same hobbies/interests that you are. There’s nothing wrong with that.
What most posters seem to have latched on to, however, is the “I hate other women” meme. Which is unhealthy, but does not seem to be the driving force behind most of the posters here who’ve said that they don’t have other female friends.
I have women friends, good friends, friends for years and years. But there was a lot more work involved to develop those friendships, and a lot of culling to find them.
Sometimes I think they’re just humoring me, like- “she’s socially retarded when it comes to this woman thing, but she means well, so we’ll let her be a part of this.” I just don’t quite read the cues correctly. Almost, but not quite. Good enough to get along in most situations, but typically I feel like an outsider, half a step out of the loop. Many times it’s easier to just turn around and walk away, than to sit and try to decipher what kind of goofy neuroses~that is constantly changing~ that I need to adapt to.
Men are much simpler for me to decipher. So, naturally I am more comfortable around them.
It seems like some of the posters here are taking this thread as a personal assault. Don’t, it’s just an explanation.
It’s like being left handed, it’s part of who I am. Sure, I can teach myself to write with my right hand, and do many things ambidextrously, but I have to work at it, it doesn’t come naturally.
But what you are talking about fisha, isn’t what the OP asks. What the OP is talking about is women who can’t get along with other women. You simply prefer men, but have female friends - some of them good friends. I know what you are talking about, until about ten or fifteen years ago, when I started getting together with my bookclub, my female friends were superficial at best. In fact, that was why I started bookclub, because I felt like maybe I hadn’t given my female acquaintances a fair shake.
I have a life. It just doesn’t seem to involve going many places where there are usually women present. I’d talk to the women at the gun range near my house if I ever saw any there.
Just where the fuck do you suggest I go?
Actually considering that my mom and my sister tend to care only about shit like shopping, HGTV, and American Idol, yes it does include them. They don’t have any interests in common with me. Trying to discuss my interests with them gets me nothing but blank stares, and I can hardly participate in conversations about HGTV and American Idol because I don’t watch them.
It’s not that they’re ‘better’. It’s that I actually have something in common with them.
My three best friends are men. Two of them I have been friends with for eight years, and the other it’s been five years. I’ve never had a friendship with any female last that long.
Since I was five years old and I convinced my dad’s barber to chop off my hair and my dad to let me join the pee wee baseball team. I thought I was a boy until I was in first grade and they had to explain to me that I had to use the girls’ bathroom.
Out of curiosity, what kind of books does your book club read?
I’ve gone through phases where all or almost all of my friends were male, or at least the closest friends were male. I didn’t “hate” women at that point in time, but it was a situation where I couldn’t relate to the pool of females I was around. I have serious doubts that there are many women who actually “hate” other women, and those that do are, in my experience, bullies with a prejudice against their own gender. Not finding things in common with other women really doesn’t mean you don’t like them; it just means that you’re not surrounded by people of both genders who share your interests.
Oh, darn near everything. Right now we are reading The Audacity of Hope. We just did the Golden Compass Trilogy. We’ve read A Brief History of Time and Le Mort de Arthur and The Flame and the Flower and the Chalice and the Blade. We read what takes the groups interest - we tend to read in threes - three books about homosexuality, three books about Asian Americans, three graphic novels. They tend to have odd themes - the “comic book holocaust” cycle was my favorite for odd cycles (Maus, Maus II and The Amazing Adventures of Cavelier and Clay)
I haven’t found any people who like to read mostly sci-fi type stuff and extremely fucked up murder books. I tend to like them twisted, like the kind where the killer is making milkshakes out of their livers and stuff, and also stuff like Douglas Adams and Isaac Asimov.
There are Oprah book clubs around here, but few people share my ‘books: sick and morbid’ interest.
What I find interesting is that you almost never see the converse. I’ve known exactly 1 guy who fit the mold of “Man with No Male Friends”, but dozens of women who fit the “Women With No Female Friends” mold. Why is it some women feel so comfortable with men, but few men feel so comfortable with women?
Because it’s more socially acceptable for women to be into stereotypical guy things. Guys who pal around with girls to the exclusion of males are more likely to be viewed as gay or aberrant, not cool and edgy.
It’s definitely strange. I feel like I can be myself more around men than women, mainly because most of my interests are traditionally “male” things like video games and football. I have both male and female friends, and my close female friends are great, but if I’m in a roomful of people I don’t know well, I tend to spend more time conversing with the men than I do with the women. It’s definitely odd when I’m at parties with my husband’s friends, because the crowds tend to break down gender lines much more than when I’m with my friends. It’s not like I don’t get along with his friends’ wives, I just find it much easier to keep a conversation going with his friends. Sometimes I’ll say something that I think is totally normal, but will cause his friends’ wives to look at me like I just sprouted an additional head.
At work, I am friendly with as many women as men, perhaps because we all have something in common that we can use to spark conversation.
Funny how nobody ever talks about a guy with mostly female friends being threatened, insecure, an asshole, untrustworthy, self-centered, fake, or against his own gender.
I’m in agreement with the fact that it’s a red flag. A HUGE red flag. Anyone that cannot get along with a set demographic has major issues. Not just women. If someone claims they can’t get along with black people, how different would that be than a woman who claims she can’t get along with other women? I can understand it to a point, but to have ZERO female friends is definately very fishy in my books. Personally, I can get along with pretty much anyone that’s not dishonest, or a bad person in general. There’s no reason why a woman shouldn’t be able to get along with other women.
I think it’s perfectly natural to not get along with a certain demographic. It’s not women per se that the posters here don’t get along with - it’s a specific type of culture that’s been defined by society as belonging to women, and that the majority of women identify with.
I am able to get along with women and I don’t exactly hate the entirety of female kind. And if you’re looking through my mobile phone for someone to hang out with, you’ll find that there aren’t any female names in the category friends. It’s not a deliberate attempt to exclude all females, it’s that I really don’t know any who actually share my interests.
I don’t know any girls who I could call up today and say ‘Hey, wanna hit the range and then watch Doctor Who while cleaning guns? After that we can hit up a bar and have some beer.’
My problem is that I’m an INTP personality type and I look like a lazy slob version of the Marilyn Monroe type. Curvey tall blonde conventional beauty.
I’m only saying this bluntly because I’m tired of women telling me that I have “issues” because I don’t get along with women as well as I do men.
Standard MO in my life is that I meet a new female friend (this is happening right now) and the woman is absolutely besotted with me. I think its because my INTP personality is a very masculine personality and plus I’m very tall 5 11 so that women tend to “look up to me” I"m the female version of the gay male best friend.
Yes it is I Rupert Everett in a blonde wig. I’m blunt and a dick, rather than a bitc h and so women love this crap.
But then, we start hanging out and the menfolk show me more attention. I could give two shits and dress down and usually don’t take it seriously which tends to piss the women off for some reason. I guess because it seems like I’m “snobbing it off” but its not that. I’m married to a man I love and have three kids. Not interested in boys playing fantasy so then what usually happens is that the men start taking me seriously. Woman is still in competative mode so she starts flirting with the men and competing with me. To me its no competition because I don’t give a shit either way. You want all the men! Great take them all I don’t care.
Anyway I don’t know if anyone else gets this but its this cycle of animosity that wells up and then eventually the woman starts pointing out everything that’s wrong with me in this ha ha so funny kind of way. Like “Well you’re a GIIIIIANT!” and in my head I silently shut down the “yeah it must really bug the crap out of that in spite of all my flaws men still like me eh?” but I say nothing.
So then I cut off the friendship because the emotional flood starts getting so damn draining.
I dont’ care but other women really have a hard time with it, it seems.
I have male friends, I have female friends. I’m quite happy to be den mother to my male friends and the shoulder to cry on to my female friends.
I like people, and I don’t really mind tailoring my conversation to the interests of the person I’m talking to or offering a friendly ear, because that’s how you get to know people better and be a friend to them.
Yes, I’ve learnt more than I ever wanted to about sound systems, motorbikes and sport, but there you go, I’m probably a better person for the extra knowledge and I have closer friendships with the guys I know as a result.
There is, however one female in my husband’s circle of friends who I cannot stand.
She is everything wolf in second hand clothing was talking about. She is a pretty, wealthy girl who is:
a) mind-bogglingly selfish- she has quit every job she has ever had within 3 weeks, she didn’t work her notice, she just stopped turning up -“because it’s boring”.
b) incredibly high maintainence
c) bitchy beyond belief
d) the sort of person who resorts to asking for things in an ickle-baby-voice or turning on the waterworks if she can’t get what she wants.
e) insecure to the point where she pitched a fit because I (a happily married woman) spoke to one of her new boyfriends at a party.
In actual fact I was asking if he knew anyone else at the party because the poor thing looked lonely and ignored (she was showing off and flirting with her little harem of male friends) and I thought if I could find someone else he knew he might have more fun.
She hasn’t got a single female friend because we are tired of the way she behaves and the fact that she seems to hurt people just because she can,and oh, yeah, we don’t fall for the crocodile tears either.
It makes me sad that some of our male friends are in love with her (although for the life of me I don’t know why), because she has broken their hearts and treated them like crap, over and over again.
That kind of a female…that’s a whole forest of red flags waving at you.
That’s what most of the women my book club reads for fun - SF and Fantasy and murder mysteries. We don’t read it for bookclub often because we read it on our own anyway and bookclub is supposed to “stretch.” The other reason is that we have a number of friends who are published SF writers/editors and that world is really small - so there is a certain creepiness about reading a book a friend (or someone who isn’t a friend, but you just know far too much about).
See, I find this astounding. But then, I have a history in Fandom where gun toting, beer drinking, Doctor Who fans can start their own club. (They may also be polygamous, bisexual pagans - and I guess scotch is slightly more common than beer).
I’m an INTJ that - when I was younger - looked like Audrey Hepburn with a better body. If you are still young you are likely to grow out of that - but probably not until your mid 30s. You’ll be less of a looker, the women will be less insecure. Marriage (yours and theirs) also helps that (yours more than theirs) - although getting along with women isn’t exactly a great reason to get married.
I have a couple of guy friends, but the majority of my friends are female. None of us watch Oprah. We don’t discuss makeup. We don’t sit around gossiping about celebrities or do the vapid things that I’m told groups of women are supposed to do.
We do talk about shoes, though–most of us are into costuming and historical reenactment. We’ll also discuss hats, corsets and masks. We make dirty jokes in Latin, talk about the reproductive habits of arachnids, ramble philosophically about the human condition and what constitutes sentience, debate what would have happened if everyone suddenly gained magical powers during the American Revolution, and giggle over boys.
The idea that women in general or groups of women must be “stereotypically girly” and stupid is grossly offensive.