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Benefits sold separately.

This past weekend, my best friend came to visit me at my University.  My goal for the weekend was to give her a taste of my college experience—my food, my bars, my friends, my typical Saturday night.  We got back from dinner and drinks and met some of my friends at my apartment, where from the evening unfolded.  All seemed to be going according to plan.  Everyone was getting along.  Then, when my best friend got up to go to the bathroom, a disturbing conversation between my college friends ensued:

Guy 1:  Hey man, are you going to hit that?

Guy 2:  I uh—

Me:  EXCUSE ME?!!

It was almost as if the guys had a mutual understanding that I had invited them to share my company for the sole purpose of getting with my friend.  And—don’t get me wrong—she is pretty and smart and funny.  The works.  Otherwise she wouldn’t be my best friend!  Call me naïve, but I’m appalled by the assumption that most guys seem to have regarding college visits: that your friend, your sister, even your mom, are all fair game, simply because you’ve paraded them in front of a few sex-starved, testosterone dispensers.  You know, because it’s not like they serve any other purpose.

This all occurred in light of CNN’s recent report that, due to the modern hookup culture, women remain “unsatisfactorily single.”  Is our hookup culture so depraved that we now find it acceptable to sell our friends to our Saturday night social scenes?  Said Emma Miller, third year at the University of Virginia, “I was once locked in a bathroom for thirty minutes with a friend of a friend who wanted us to hook up.”

“I would never do it, but I’m probably the only guy who hasn’t,” said John Murray, senior at UCLA.

If the events of this weekend have shown me anything, it’s that it’s time to re-evaluate our hookup culture insomuch as it pertains to devaluing friendship.  I never thought I would say this, but there is a limit to how much college students should be allowed to act like chimpanzees in heat.  And I’m drawing the line in the sand at “giving up your out-of-town friends as sacrificial sex offerings to the Weekend Gods.”

Evolutionary psychologists at the University of Illinois have bad news: Freud was right, and you’re totally into your mom.

In 1891, Edward Westermarck translated the “ick-factor” of incest into scientific terms: he proposed the Westermarck theory, which asserted that children are sexually desensitized to individuals in their immediate surroundings.  Westermarck’s theory sought to account for how a mechanism would evolve wherein organisms would avoid mating with their relatives.  Such an adaptation might be favorable due to the often-mortal consequences of inbreeding, which sometimes prevent progeny from reaching sexual maturity.

However, R. Chris Fraley and Michael J. Marks have published experiments in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that suggest that an aversion to incest might just be a social construct, and that humans do, subliminally, find their relatives sexually attractive.  Fraley and Marks conducted three experiments to evaluate familial attraction.  In the first, they asked volunteers to rate the attractiveness of strangers.  Before showing the participants the images, however, researchers flashed a picture of their opposite-sex parent on the screen.

A statistically significant number of participants rated the strangers’ photographs as more attractive when primed with a picture of their opposite-sex parent than with a picture of someone else’s opposite-sex parent.

In the second experiment, participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of strangers’ faces that had been morphed with their own.  Again, the participants rated the faces that shared their own features higher than faces that were morphed with other strangers’ faces.  The third experiment involved informing the participants that their likenesses were morphed with strangers’ faces.  According to Westmarckian theory, the participants who were told that researchers used their pictures should have found the representations equally as repulsive as participants who were not aware.  However, Fraley and Marks found that the participants who were informed of their likenesses rated the pictures as less sexually appealing than those participants who were unaware that their own faces were used in morphing.

Fraley and Marks acknowledge, however, that many studies point to a decrease in sexual attraction among people who are familiar with one another.  Using their findings, Fraley and Marks suggest that instead of a Westmarckian evolutionary mechanism to detect relatedness, related individuals do not mate due to sexual habituation—that is, after some time, sexual “passion” wanes, just as it is shown to in any relationship.  If their research accomplishes anything, Fraley and Marks said, they hoped to re-ignite the century-dead debate between Freud and Westmarck that researchers claim Westermarck prematurely won.

Harry inevitably sleeps with Sally. Did I just ruin the movie?

Actor and comedian Steve Harvey went on CNN recently, promoting his new book, Straight Talk, No Chaser, and made the allegation that men and women can’t be friends.  This idea is not new; in 1989, the concept pervaded popular culture with the classic romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally.  When Harry meets Sally, so to speak, they have one of the most hilarious conversations in film wherein Harry explains to an incredulous Sally that men and women can’t be friends.  Of course, by the end of the movie, Harry is proven right in another classic monologue from the film about how he loves Sally for crinkling her nose and taking a really long time to order a sandwich at the deli, giving best friends everywhere hope for eternal love.

Harvey alleges that men and women cannot be friends, using the classic justification, in so many words, that “men are horny.”  He told the woman interviewing him for CNN, “You have male friends because they know it can be nothing else right now.”  However, I find this view both sexist and incorrect.  Sexist, first, because it reduces man to an indiscriminate being who is somehow less complex than his female counterpart.  The view is wrong because there is an abundance of evidence to the contrary.  And that’s the problem with absolute statements—if you go on the record saying “all men do this,” the only argument needed to disprove you is a single contradictory example.

I can’t count on my fingers and toes how many platonic, opposite-sex friendships I observe between people who love each other but would not like to make love to each other.  John Brownlee, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, spoke about one of his best friends, whom he met in his first year of school.  He said, “She and I are like brother and sister, to an absurd degree.  Like, I cannot think of her in a sexual or romantic way. I get an instant block, because it feels like thinking about my sister in that way.”

But it’s not just individual examples that prove Harvey (and Billy Crystal) wrong.  There is a theory in biology called the “Westermarck Effect,” which posits that children are sexually desensitized at a young age to individuals in their immediate surroundings.  Scientists believe the Westermarck Effect accounts for why we find the prospect of sex with our siblings so repulsive.  When you think about the detrimental effects of inbreeding, you can understand how such a mechanism might evolve.  Ergo, no more sexy bath time with the next door neighbor; you missed your shot all those times when you were four.  (But at least you’ll have the memory forever etched into your brain—and the photographs your mother passes around at Thanksgiving.)

I have many male friends, and either they don’t have romantic feelings for me, or they’re really good at hiding it.  And it’s not like I’m disfigured or I look like I got into a fight with an 18-wheeler; by all accounts I’m pretty attractive.  I think a pretty clear indicator of a platonic friendship is when both parties openly talk about their love lives.  I do this all the time with my male friends and they do it with me.  I view it as something of an advantage to have friends of the opposite sex: I tell them to be confident and just ask her out, and they tell me that he meant “hello” when he texted me “hello,” and not “I can’t stop thinking about you and I’ve already booked the University Chapel for our wedding.”

Finally, if for no other reason, men and women must be friends out of necessity.  Said Carter Giegerich, a junior at East Tennessee State University, “Men and women have to be friends.  Otherwise girls would have to hang out with other girls all the time, which is terrifying even to imagine.”