What Do You Do When Your Lady Friends Say Sexist Things?

And ideas about what’s appealing and what’s proper don’t always line up with actual political positions. Some women totally believe in equal pay, a woman for president, paid maternity leave, keeping your own last name, but they wouldn’t be caught dead out without full makeup and a good bra because you never know when you will run into the One, and you can’t fuck that up with the wrong kind of bouncy tits and any woman who doesn’t abide by that sort of practical thinking is Looney Tunes, OK?

Sucks they don’t want to unpack that. Sucks you can’t really make them. Sucks that neither of us is even technically sure they need to. All I know is most women I know have spent far more of their lives trying to meet a cultural criteria for “respectable” and only a shorter, more recent part of adulthood getting good and pissed about it—if at all. Often women don’t realize how much they’ve been fucked around by this shit until they get older, or become mothers, or otherwise wake up. Or even if they have, they don’t know how to stop holding themselves and other women to this retrograde set of standards.

What I’m saying is that you’ve got to give everyone a chance to arrive at that place on their own. Some might not ever do so, though. Can you still be buds?

Regardless, ideological lockstep is a high bar, friend. At this point in my life I have more friends who I would guess “think like me” than perhaps at any other time in my existence, and yet, we still disagree. Sometimes we argue over class stuff, race stuff, charter schools, you name it—when you’re with people who are mostly just like you, you can then move on to experience the joy of something called the narcissism of petty differences, AKA, agreeing about 99 percent of the big stuff, thereby spending all your time and energy arguing violently over that 1 percent you don’t agree on. For an abundance of examples, see the comments on any post on this website.

I have come to see that I don’t necessarily need my friends to think like me, but one criteria I have for all my friendships that I put effort into is this: I can’t hang out with anyone who isn’t willing to own their opinions, who doesn’t enjoy debating them at least a little, who isn’t willing to scrutinize them from time to time. That doesn’t mean I can’t go out and get drinks with virtually anyone just for fun. But the most fun I have with people I consider good, close friends usually involves sitting around talking and turning things over. For this reason, even strong disagreements aren’t dealbreakers, because there’s a spirit of openness involved, a willingness to be wrong. (I’m not talking about hanging out with a neo-Nazi, but, say, like, a perfectly decent dude who would never call himself a feminist.)

You have to make room for linguistic missteps, misguided thoughts, and differing worldviews. I also have lots of women in my life who aren’t feminists but who I admire a lot for how they live their lives, which, even as I’ve told them, espouse feminist values whether they realize it or not. Some people are hung up on the word. I try not to be hung up on that. I think the values and the life matter more than the errant utterance.

So depending on the person and their openness, I might or might not bring it up seriously, faux-argumentatively, mockingly, or otherwise—all based on how other discussions had gone. And if we hit a standstill, it’s always an individual calculus about whether it’s worth it to press the issue or keep things as-is, in order to maintain whatever level of otherwise greatness we had. Friends can be good for different kinds of hangs—the person I’d meet at a bar is much different than who I’d hit up the Farmers’ Market with. Finding friends who feel precisely as you do about the world is the friend jackpot. That only happens a few times in a life, if even.

Besides, I think there’s a real danger to the idea that we should only surround ourselves with people who think like us anyway, particularly to a card-carrying degree. I believe you should try to be friends with good people even when they have flawed thinking. I roll my eyes every time I see another Facebook update from someone who is bragging about successfully blocking everyone who says anything offensive so they don’t have to experience it. I personally almost never hide or unfriend anyone on Facebook. It’s a thing I do because for some reason I feel compelled to know the especially contradictory points of view of others in my general acquaintance circle. The offensive, bigoted, awfulness—I don’t enjoy it, it often makes me sick, though sometimes I marvel at its wrongheadedness—but I still feel it’s my duty to understand the world as it is, not how I would like it to be.

I draw the line somewhere, of course. I pick my battles, and sometimes pick fights. Some stuff sticks harder in my craw than other stuff. I hate when people spout evo-psych bullshit about how women and men are different, and I will happily argue all night long in a drunk, yelly way over it because for me, that juice never runs out. But this is part of my personality, and I’m doing this with friends who also like to argue, and in general, I’m fully prepared to have things go south if need be. I gauge all the time what low-simmering level of dumb shit I’m willing to be around, and I usually only make an effort to get someone talking about it when I think it will be fun for me, or them, or possibly enlightening for both of us. Or at least where we can yell super good at each other.

The thing is, I have to be willing to take it too. I might be right about one thing, but wrong about something else. That’s a two-way street, and you can’t assume you’re always on the right side of the ideological fence either. And the next thing you know, you’re an unassailable feminist but an elitist snob, and someone else will be writing a letter asking how to fix you.

Image via Fox/screengrab