Dorothy Rowe - Friends and Enemies - Our Need to Love and Hate

This is a major claim to make, though he did acknowledge that heterosexual women could sustain friendships if their familial responsibilities have not overwhelmed them. Heterosexual men have suffered ‘great spiritual and emotional impoverishment’ because ‘the fear of male intimacy, which is intrinsically connected to the fear of homosexuality, has too often denied straight men the bonds they need to sustain themselves through life’s difficulties. When they socialize they often demand the chaperone of sports or work to avoid the appearance of being gay.’ 8

Tim Lott’s novel White City Blue concerns four men who call themselves close friends but whose friendships fail through lack of intimacy. Fear of homosexuality is certainly present in their relationships, but so is intense competition. In an article accompanying the publication of his novel Tim Lott commented on how women, unlike men, will talk to one another at length on the phone and even make conversation in a public washroom:

This seems to me a fundamentally different approach to male friendship. For men, friendship is far more a performance art. You go out, and you try to entertain each other. You grandstand, you try and get attention, you aim for the loudest laugh. This need for competition – which is another way of saying this need for domination – is an increasingly thin shell, and I believe it is slowly cracking up. Men are showing all the signs of admitting to be humans rather than just men, and, in this case, this means admitting to being more like women. 9

I have not observed homosexual men being any less competitive than heterosexual men. Most hold the distinctly masculine view that competition is what life is about. I am not sure the homosexuality itself creates a special talent for friendship. Having sex with another person does not constitute a friendship, and, while some homosexual men form loving relationships with a long-term partner, many homosexual men spend an enormous amount of time and energy in promiscuous sex. I do not think that this is because homosexual men have a particular propensity for sex. If women were as interested in sex as men are, heterosexual men would be able to be as promiscuous as homosexual men.

Having sex is an excellent way of avoiding intimacy. You do not have to talk. Or you can talk but it is sex talk, which nowadays goes on in bed, out of bed, in entertainment and in selling things. The journalist Charlotte Raven, a very sharp-eyed observer, wrote,

This is what the sexual sell does. Far from revealing reality, it ends up concealing the truth. This may strike us as strange. We are used to reading sexual candour as evidence of openness. We tend to believe, as a culture, that the more we talk about sex, the more we are revealing of ourselves.

This may once have been true, but in the current over-stimulated climate sex talk is, perversely, becoming an excuse for not revealing anything important. All the usual rules have been inverted. Sex talk is small talk, a kind of background gibberish that covers up our inability to have real conversations. Therefore, the more we reveal about orgasms and erectile dysfunctions, the less we really know about ourselves. 10

I agree with Charlotte, though I have to say that I have never known a time when talking about sex revealed the truth. When I discovered sex in the late forties women said nothing publicly about sex and many did not talk about it privately. My mother never mentioned menstruation or conception or childbirth to me, though she did, by implication, give me to understand that marriage entailed something unpleasant for a woman. In my teens I had to keep secret from her the fact that my sister, who was training to be a teacher, had given me a pamphlet to read on menstruation. I was in my thirties before I said the word ‘fuck’ publicly, and then only in the context of the punchline of a then very daring joke. I had had to learn the word, though not the joke, from my husband in bed.

In the sixties and seventies we thought we were being open and truthful about sex. But actually the same secrecy, misunderstanding and refusal to listen were still there, though the context might have changed. Men still operated on the old principle of propositioning every woman because, as my husband once explained to me, even though you got a lot of knock-backs, you get some acceptances, only now men expected every woman to be on the pill and so to have no reason to refuse their offer. Women were prepared to forgo the security of a marriage ring but they still wanted a relationship along with the sex.

Nothing of importance had changed because sex still posed the danger that it had always posed. Sex renders us vulnerable in the way we fear the most. We have to protect our sense of being a person for in failing to do so we risk being annihilated as a person. In orgasm our sense of self can dissipate in splendour, but we can also be wiped out as a person by the power of our partner, or, in the case of men, by failing to perform. So we lie about sex to one another and, sometimes, foolishly, we lie to ourselves.

During the seventies the Women’s Movement enabled many women to reveal that their sexual interest was in other women. After so many centuries in the shadows it was only human for them to claim that they were special. Having been less than nothing they needed to be more than most, as all disadvantaged groups do when they claim their birthright. So the myth was born that lesbians were able to combine the sensitivity, caring and empathy which all women possess with the passion of sex, and lesbian relationships would therefore not be torn apart by the jealousies, angers, hatreds and betrayals that turn heterosexual relationships into nightmares.

This myth completely ignored the fact that some women have all the sensitivity, caring and empathy of a pile of old bricks, and that sex and love, whatever the gender of the couple, are always accompanied by the passions of jealousy, anger, hatred and betrayal. A lot of women were hurt by this myth. I remember a young woman who came to talk to me about a book she was writing but who drifted off the subject to tell me about her partner’s faithlessness. What troubled her most was her guilt for failing to live up to the myth. She was jealous.

If you want an untroubled, utterly faithful relationship get a dog. Did you know that a survey by the British Veterinary Association revealed that 93 per cent of pet owners questioned bought their pet a Christmas present, and more than half the pets also received Christmas cards? 11

Friends as friends and lovers as friends might be difficult but what about family? Can family be friends?

Alice was very clear that people as friends were different from family as friends. When I asked her if Miles was a friend she immediately answered yes, but when I pointed out to her that she hadn’t included him in her list of friends she said, ‘Well, he’s my brother.’

‘And what’s the difference between being a friend friend and being a brother friend?’

‘Well, he’s living with you. Friends don’t live with you, and brothers do. Eli’s my friend too.’ Eli was then only a few weeks old but he was fascinated with Alice and no doubt regarded her as a friend.

I asked, ‘Is Mummy your friend?’

‘Sort of. In the middle, I think.’

‘In the middle of what?’

‘In the middle means a bit of my friend – half. Half of my friend.’

Her mother Jo looked stricken.

I asked, ‘Is Daddy your friend?’

‘Yes. Daddy’s my friend.’

We went on to talk about enemies and then Jo, who was cooking, asked Alice why she did not think Mummy was a friend. Alice went over to Jo and, smiling broadly, started thumping her. She said, ‘Mummy, sometimes you shout at me and say I’m horrible.’