¶ … Friend by Any Other Name
Sex matters between friends. No, not in the way you might think -- or the kind of sex that you might think. Sex matters in terms of gender: Male friendship and female friendship really is different from each other. Of course, there are always exceptions to statements as broad as this, and other traits of any individual dyad matters a great deal. Race matters as well as gender, and age, and physical disability, and personality.
But aside from all of these factors there are substantial differences between the ways in which men and women (and before them, boys and girls) conceptualize and practice the art of friendship. These differing definitions of friendship reflect larger social and cultural ideas about gender, a point that will be taken up below in this paper that examines how sex -- that is, gender -- affects friendships.
The basis for this paper is a miniature qualitative study that included semi-structured interviews with two individuals, a man and a woman. Of course, this is a very small sample indeed and if one were conducting quantitative research it would have no validity, both because of its size and because the subjects were not selected randomly.
However, for the purposes of this paper (and setting their answers within the framework provided by previous research on this topic), the answers that they give can be considered to be valid and as a possible stepping-off point for a larger study should that be desired.
Literature Review
While there is a high level of agreement among scholars from different disciplines that male friendship is very different from female friendship in key ways, there is not a lot of agreement about why this should be. The variety of explanations arises in part precisely because the answers are being offered by scholars with different backgrounds. An evolutionary biologist, for example, will no doubt offer a different explanation of why men and women bond differently than will a social psychologist.
To some extent, the different explanations for different types of friendship can be divided into the nature v. nurture divide. Researchers who study non-human primates have tended to focus on how purely biological concerns affect friendships, with cross-sex friendships being common in primate groups in which there is a relatively high potential for violence, especially infanticide. In non-human primate groups where there is a low potential for violence, friendships tend to be single-sex dyads or groups.
In other words, female primates choose male primates for friends when they need to be protected from other males. Absent such threats of physical violence, primates tend to choose friends among their own sex. Rather, female primates tend to choose female friends, leaving males no course but to associate with other males (Moscovice et al., 2010).
But what does this have to do with human friendships, one might ask? Baboons or chimps or marmosets, after all, are not people. True, but researchers agree essentially without exception that the behavior of non-human primates parallels and helps to explain the behavior of humans as well, given that other primates are evolutionarily close to us. And when one watches other primates, it is indeed difficult not to feel a close connection to their behavior, as males and females gather with their same-sex friends to groom each other, share food, wrestle, and inspect potential mates (Hamilton & Busse, 1982).
Other researchers take a middle-ground approach, arguing that the sex-segregation that is common to humans is partly biological, partly cultural and social. For example, Mehta & Strough (2009) argue that sex-segregation in friendship begins in childhood and continues through old age based on a combination of the following factors as each of them intersect with the biological factors of human development:
Individuals' socio-cultural contexts in childhood, adolescence, and early and later adulthood
Behavioral compatibility
Communication styles
Third-party resistance to other-sex relationships
Institutional barriers to other-sex relationships
Still other researchers focus entirely on cultural aspects of friendship and how friendships come to be focused on same-sex individuals. Benenson & Alavi (2004), for example, examine how from a very early age, girls (and then women) invest more in friendships than do men. Girls are willing...
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