In Male Friends, I Do Not Trust
an essay about male violence & abuse and its relationship to platonic female friendships.
There is a cigarette burn on my right wrist. I keep looking at it, hoping it’ll disappear. The birth happened yesterday—after accidentally lips’ing my wrist with a friend’s cigarette butt when going in for a silly handshake. A hiss of fire to exposed adult-baby skin, and I retreated, rubbing at the sour spot, praying for my arm to come out unscathed. Throughout the night, I kept my wrist to the underboob of an Aperol spritz glass, trying to stop the imprint from forming. My male friend caught me looking at it throughout the conversation, my forehead wrinkles glowering, as the opacity of the burn amplified. My friend didn’t want to feel guilty, but of course, he felt a pang in his stomach from the inability to eagerly take my wrist and kiss it better. Muah.
I realized that this was my Trauma-Versary.
This cigarette burn was originally an internal sore, but now has shown itself exterior, tethering to a faint moment that happened last year’s May. A Saturday night in specifics, where, a week after my graduation, I was spit on by one of my previous male friends. This memory, a moment tattooed into the 27th of May crossed the calendar again this year, and I didn't even notice. I didn't think about it not even in the tiniest of moments. I proceeded about my day per usual:
took a shower
probably a shit
forgot to eat breakfast
had some juice
caught the sunlight
put too much gel in my hair
I had a normal day. Yesterday, during the backside of July, a cigarette touched my skin and I forgot where I was.
The humid weather of New York was starting to pick up a chill, and a Sunset District fog, like I was back in San Francisco. The smell of tar and licorice was perfuming the air, and my long-term male friends were starting to shed the skin of which I see them now and mutate into the ghosts of trauma’s past. They were mirroring into a duo I still sometimes imagine I see in a crowd.
In this moment, rubbing my wrist, I am remembering what it is to feel preyed on. I want to paint my face blush in tears but I have to keep a face more cautioned in surprise than terror.
Doubled consciousness usually looks and feels like walking past a group of men, but isn’t it so frightening to experience its sphered perception when facing an attack dead on? I don't think that the male friends I’m around at the moment want to hurt me. Nevertheless, I'm brought back to bitterness of what it feels to be outnumbered by men—their wood-chipped fingernails, swigged drinks, and illustrious nights—where certain buttons don’t have to be pressed too hard to feel pushed. So that's when I feel fear.
Last year, I could wipe the saliva off, and it couldn’t leave a physical mark, but I do grow anxious that I am forever tethered to that moment because of what taints my wrist now.
I always speak highly of having platonic male friends. The term when stripped down to its baby blue innocence—boyfriends. Friends that are just for yelling obnoxiously in the train station with, friends I can walk with and stumble a burp out of the drawer of my chest and keep laughing with. Sometimes with them, I don't have to carry the baggage of grieving parts of me that were taken advantage of, parts that are still healing; that are sometimes only noticeable to those with similar scars. Oftentimes, those faceless soldiers are women. I’m guest-starring in boy-world, and it’s fun.
But then other days I walk home in a cloud.
The night of the spit situation, I am taken home in the backseat, hidden over leather like loot from a robbery. In the blackness behind my eyelids, I imagine I’m anywhere but inside this four-seater. I cover myself in numbness so that the trauma can’t puncture too deep on a first offense. I let the perpetrator sleep on the carpet, and the other friend takes the opportunity to whisper, “I’m sorry” before the night rolls onto its back. Guilt’s too thick at midnight to shake for the designated driver and romantic bystander.
I wake up the next morning and organize clothes at my retail job like I am not angry, like my eyes do not beg for a closeted moment to weep in sorrow; I want to be ugly, I want to be alone—I yearn for my mother’s warmth.
Everything that happens the day before whistles, a tea kettle when she’s ready, and the assailant or previous male friend, however you prefer to label him, reaches out with a damp apology.
I realize we make many excuses for the violence of men. Yesterday's moments of fear, memories with word for word verbatim about being told that if I order an Uber I'll be followed home, come with a chain of nicotine events where a stench of smoke puts a freckled chill down my post-Scoliosis spine. And that cannot evaporate by the windshield of a limp “I’m sorry,” “I was so fucked up,” “I realize that what I did crossed the line.” —Can’t you be sorry before your drunkenness persists? Can’t you be sorry that you could even fathom wanting to be sorry? Be sorry in the cabinets of your misery, instead of forcing yourself to make company.
I tumble through a rage that sprouts from the deepest weeds, and the designated driver still believes we’ll be going to Napa next Tuesday. Guilt is thick but forgiveness is aqueous. I’m hiding in the women’s designer aisle of my job telling him to collect anything he’s left at my house. He comes over when the sun sets, and there’s indifference to my hurt. My roommate hears us barking outside, and this friend tilts back in victimhood because of the punctuality of my feelings. With one side hug, he believes all of the betrayal crashes away on Ocean Beach. It’s a Yearbook highlight that this is the first time a man has been delusional enough to lay hands on me. Baby’s first assault! It is because the community of men, young men, skaters in their twenties, grown but mentally destitute men, men that replace the responsibility in their brain for Twisted Teas and nollies, San Franciscan men do worse, have done worse, continue to do worse, and they’ll go to Casanova right after.
Anonymous reads: I know a guy who poured a drink on his ex-girlfriend because they got into an argument. I know a guy that got way too fucked and chased after his girlfriend for five blocks because she wouldn’t talk to him. Don’t go to this bar on Geary because there’s a group of men in their late-twenties who talk to young college girls and tickle their Cosmopolitans with magic.
When us roses are unbloomed, instances of trauma endured recur like leap years and four-leaf clovers. Those images pop up when making strawberry smoothies and fizzle away when the edges of our mouths start to point downward. The assailant’s spit wedges down the chimney of my ear and I become a fire having to explain why this is an issue to our mutual friend. He holds his hands up in surrender, objecting to any responsibility even if his card’s on tab to pay. I will always be a woman before I was his friend. I asked him if things would be difficult if I were his girl. Would I hold the moments that I have now if he had felt that I belonged to him? It's both a question and a statement. If he could say that he had my body—had entitlement to me as now more woman than friend, would he have allowed his partner in crime to still commit one?
“I guess, yeah.” Protection comes with membership. He does not pay subscriptions on my body, so he does not pay care on behalf of my feelings.
As I sit with new male friends, bumping cold ones together, sitting back while the fireflies sparkle in the empty air, I recognize that sometimes they could feel that exact way too. What is it about a woman that should come with so much ownership? It isn’t to frame the friends that I have now, it isn’t to label them as those to steer clear of—I love them with intention but I can acknowledge that the feeling of their accidental cigarette butt to my wrist is contingent with unconscious biases and unchopped roots of misogyny. Sometimes I can sit with them and feel like a rumor. It is so much more interesting to discuss their growing rosters, which I don't even mind, but when I rotate the conversation back to me—uno-reverse card—marketing my love life, our rollercoaster of dialogue gets stuck at the height of the mountain and you can feel a pinch of disdain rust at the wheels. The conversation grows awkward, it’s a turn-off that I might not be there just to engage their pining antics. It is unfair to take off my mascot head to showcase my personhood.
I too suffer with longing, I stutter over the pain of having an empty bed, of missing the warmth of laying my frizzy curls on my partner’s shoulder while we fall asleep to rain sounds. I talk of my partner’s impending arrival like a dog that knows it’s about to go on a walk. Yet, because my eyes do not dilate for them, I am shut down. They speak of giving their significant situations blackberry-hickeys, and if I let it slip that I also have impure thoughts, closing my legs on the train when my brain wanders too deep, they stare in bewilderment, unsure of how to respond.
Saliva gulped, and eye contact broken.
They think I don't watch them. They think I don't see how they exchange looks when friends in a larger group ask me about my previous exes and foes. They don’t think I can see them passing glimpses to each other, working shamelessly to tether themselves to the possibility of romance—not even out of an undeniable unrequited love—but because to them it feels senseless to not have access to me at all. They have disbelief that there is a timeline where they cannot have me. Just because of the inquisition of believing that they just can.
I've had other male friends, ones that read more as sociable acquaintances, ask about my partner to scope out the scenery. I bump into a friend on the L train, and his first question for why our text chat has become deserted, imminent of emoji tumbleweeds is: “Are you still cuffed?” Things that are true about me: I have anxiety. I don’t speak to my dad. I get face dysmorphia, or I think I have that if that’s real, and my mother almost died when I was twelve. I can be distant, overstimulated, passive-aggressive, and aesthetically non-confrontational, and I have wrinkles from consumption of high fructose corn syrup and sugar. And yet out of all the questions, out of all the reactions this male friend had for me was whether or not my relationship to him—or lack thereof, was connected to another relationship—or lack thereof. As if my existence and complexities as a human being could be simplified, a quadratic function broken down, to a man. I exist as long as a man exists in my life.
If I haven’t told friends about my partner yet, they presume he’s non-existent, preparing to converse with me as if we’re in limbo that nudges at something more sensual. All it could take is some doused drinks and some sly conversation to make us end up at the foot of either one’s bed, topless like uncapped bottles, yearning in deep slopes. Sometimes they test the waters with subtle touches on the waist and gestures of protection that show these characteristics as performance art. The initial inertia of youthful banter on the subway and grievances from past hurt and disadvantages don’t seem to be so separate from each other. If both are from men who don’t value you, then it doesn’t matter. Again, you are just a woman before you are a friend.
And isn’t it so disheartening when people disappoint you? And isn’t it worse that friendships between men and women are such debate topics—it’s almost distasteful that there could be a space of platonic love? It almost screams:
“How dare you not want to fuck me? How dare you not need my approval? How dare you prioritize my humanness over the fact that your sexuality is drawn to the body I inhabit? How dare you not have opinions about my body at all? Especially when I have so many about yours.”
I think that it is isolating to know love with certain men will always be contractual. My new cigarette burn reminds me that I'm still blowing over hot wounds and raising my eyebrow at possible new ones. I hope to find that there is a space of respect for varying identities to have friendships on the same accord without asserting ellipses at something more.
Some of us have come to realize how much the secret intentions of our male friends have become our burdens when we were never in alignment about anything other than friendship. We have apologized for not exposing a shell of ourselves that would only be open for people we’ve deliberately wanted to be intimate with. And we’ve watched the love we’ve built for these tantalizing friendships become unfocused since we didn’t uphold their attention in the initial way they imagined. We didn’t live out fantasies or friends-to-lovers tropes that would explain well in stories at the bar about meet-cutes.
We were exactly what we offered: boundaries, truth, accountability, vulnerability, and most needed: friendship.
I gave you everything that I told you I could give, and because my body was exempt—ownership not included—it was overruled. I was a woman before I was a friend. My new cigarette burn makes me go, “Where have all of my male friends gone?” Who can I turn to again and mimic accents at the outside bar, holding onto teardrop glasses with clammy hands? Is it for certain that my truly platonic friendships and practical sibling banters have been stolen from me? For male friends, I do not trust.
I do not know who my male friends are. But I know it is not the ones that want to spit on me. And there are no exceptions for those who think they can own me either. If I am a woman before I am a friend, then God just let me be a woman.
j.