A Look Into Male Friendships

In the second episode of our Masculinity miniseries, we unpack everything to do with male friendships. While it comes as no surprise to some of us, the fact that men don’t have supportive friendships has been in the news a lot of late, with claims that there’s a male friendship recession and that men are lonelier than ever.

After years of wondering what men talk to their friends about, we thought we’d find out for ourselves. In the process, we’ve probably lost all of our (admittedly, very few) male friends by asking them endless questions about their friendships.

We start by talking about men’s friendships with other men, and let us say, it really is looking quite dire. We discuss how they make plans, what they do together, what they talk about and, specifically, how they talk about sex and relationships.

Our survey on masculinity asked whether masculinity is something we’re attracted to in friends, so we also hear from non-male people how masculinity plays into their friendships, and whether they want to be friends with men. 

There seems to be a lot of suspicion from all sides towards men and women being friends, so we also ask whether men and women can truly be friends, whether conversations with male friends and female friends are the same and how women often take on a lot of emotional labour from men if they can’t process their feelings. We also ponder the ethics of having male friends when you’re in a (straight) relationship, and how our endless societal programming towards seeking male validation can be wrongly interpreted by our male friends. 

We hope you enjoy this episode, it’s worth noting we are aware some of these conversations are very binary and heteronormative, and also generalise. This episode is based on our own research and interpretation of that, and we definitely don’t think our findings are true across the board. If you have different experiences with friendship you feel aren’t covered, please feel free to share with us over email sextraspodcast@gmail.com or you can find us on social media @sextrasworld. We’d love to hear your perspective! 

We’ll be back next week with the wonderful activist Ben Hurst to talk about moving towards a positive masculinity, but in the meantime you can find more content about masculinity over on Sextras Magazine. 

Produced by Mable Productions 

Original music by Sacha Puttnam