Walking down the third floor hallway in the Saylor-Ackermann (SA) building, I saw a bulletin board that disturbed me. Bulletin boards, which are put up in hallways by Resident Assistants, are an effort to engage residents and usually lean toward the educational. In my hallway, on the 2nd floor of Schaaf, the activity board displays an A-Z list of famous black inventors, and other boards I’ve seen include facts about sexually-transmitted diseases, housing information, or questions for residents to answer.
However, the offending board on the third floor of SA did not educate or share any facts with me. It asked,
“Are you in the friend zone?”
It was a choose your own adventure type activity, with different choices leading you down diverse narrative paths.
I automatically balk at the term “friend zone,” which I’ve often heard associated with women who prefer to keep a relationship platonic, as if a woman has done wrong by rejecting sexual or romantic advances.
The top definition on Urbandictionary.com explains the friend zone as “What you attain after you fail to impress a woman you’re attracted to.” The example of friend zone that accompanies the definition says “I spent all that money on a date just to find out she put me in the friend zone.”
From the get-go, the top definition specifies that friend zoning is a female rejection. The example sentence is also representative of how I’ve seen the term friend zone used, especially when observing the speaker’s toxic incredulity. He spent money on this woman and received nothing in return! Women seem to be regarded simply as objects to place kindness or money into to get the desired result, whether it’s sex, companionship, or both.
Sadly, the choose your own adventure format of the bulletin board seems to share this dangerous view of women as passive objects in some twisted game. By picking the right answers, the player can reach the “end zone,” which seems to be the most desirable outcome on the board.
Aside from my problems with the friend zone concept, the use of the word “end zone” was even more troubling. The desirable ending didn’t even seem to result in some mutual companionship, but rather in the player “scoring.” The positive end of the game seems to explicitly point toward sex.
“[The board] makes me uncomfortable,” Nala Hampton, who lives in the hallway with the friend zone bulletin board, said. “Women are always looked at as some sort of prize to obtain, like a trophy at the end of a race.”
“I think the board is specifically for straight males, and, in my opinion, I think a bulletin board should be a general statement that could benefit the entire hallway and not a specific portion; even if that portion is the majority,” an anonymous male resident of the hallway said.
Although the bulletin board struck me and other residents as offensive and crass, I don’t think the Resident Assistant who made it was really trying to make anyone uncomfortable. Maybe we just sometimes fail to think critically about our actions.
“We constantly have to examine our words and actions and ask, ‘is this destructive?’” Almar Walter, director of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, said.
“It was to give some humor into something we all likely have experienced, letting others know that they are not alone, and that others have been there and understand,” Christian Callison, the RA who created the board, said. “If it created discussion and legitimized feelings, then hasn’t it indeed informed others and encouraged dialogue?”
As someone who has recently felt the cold sting of rejection, which specifically included the phrase, “I’m more comfortable being friends,” I’m still baffled when I hear about this weird sense of entitlement conveyed by the friend zone. Rejection really sucks, but as a rational, respectful person, I know that going on a date with someone isn’t a guarantee of sex or affection, and I know that the other person involved doesn’t owe me anything. Both women and men are not objects or prizes to be won in some game, but simply humans looking for happiness, hoping to be treated with respect on the way there.
