The evolutionary psychology of fag-hag ego inflation

A Darwinian framework for looking at human behavior highlights the possibility that the environment that we inhabit now may be quite different from the one we evolved in, and that there may not have been enough time or a sufficiently strong selection pressure for genetic change to have adapted us to our strange new world.

One aspect of modern life that is at odds with the pressures facing our ancestors, and that has only existed for a single generation, is the explosion of the "gay friend" in the social lives of females. (Men cannot stand to be around them.) This is the one exception to the tendency of boys and girls to live in separate social circles during falling-crime times, unlike the more mixed-sex social lives of people going through a wave of violence. Indeed, some females even prefer the gay friend to other types of platonic relationships.

The central dysfunction that results from these friendships is an overly inflated ego in the female. Her homosexual friend fattens her up with compliments and then, like a make-up artist, cradles her self-blemished reputation in one hand, and with the other slathers on concealing reassurances that "girl, you don't have to lose weight for nobody!" and "honey, how many strangers you share your bed with ain't no thang, God gave you that booty to do what you want with it!" And sharing her enthusiasm for the same set of vapid interests like panini presses, designer toiletpaper from Target, and le journalisme of the HuffPo, he stunts her social and cultural growth, where a straight friend would have introduced her to all the exciting things that girls are normally too conformist to seek out on their own.

What makes this level of ego inflation uniquely out-of-control? -- didn't other types of friendships lead to the same thing before? Not at all. The reason is that the normal types of friends that a girl has -- straight females and males -- have an interest in giving her compliments when they don't mean it. Girls adjust for this by discounting their friends' compliments, ego massages, etc.

With her straight male friends, it's only a question of how actively they're trying to get her into bed, and any girl past the sixth grade realizes this. So she doesn't take their efforts to boost her ego very seriously, often dismissing them altogether.

With her female friends, it's only a question of how actively they're trying to plot against her, one-up her, or otherwise play the role of frenemies. Sometime in middle or high school -- college at the latest -- every girl has an experience where her closest friend reassures her that:

no, you totally don't look like a slut in that skirt! omigod are you crazyyy?!?!?!!!?! i mean, like, i would SO wear it myself, but these jeans are the only clean thing i have to wear. (omigod you're, like, making me feel so ugly now, haha!!!) i'm actually seriously jealous -- the boys are going to love you while i, like, disappear into the background! no, you should totally wear that skirt...

Meanwhile the poor girl in the skirt looks like she's wearing one of those Sexy Librarian costumes -- to school, in front of everyone. She notices that the boys aren't just looking at her more than usual, but that they've pegged her as the school slut and now only think of her as a pump-and-dump opportunity, never anyone who they would invest in or settle down with. Maybe she represses this awareness for the next day or so, but sooner or later the realization sinks in that she was stabbed in the back by that jealous bitch who I just knew was always waiting to embarrass me in front of the whole class. Needless to say, before long girls start to dismiss the compliments, etc., of their female friends -- or, as they now see them, their rivals in the dating-and-mating competition.

When her fag friend is blowing up her ego, however, neither of the other restraints kick in. After all, he's not trying to sweet-talk his way into her pants, and he's obviously not a rival in the mating arena (they may both like boys, but never the same boys). He really does have no ulterior motive in showering her with praise and reassurance, so her mind doesn't dampen the seriousness with which she takes in this flow of you're-awesome-just-the-way-you-are.

Because girls love to enthusiastically repeat back something that they agree with -- such as, that any guy would be lucky to date her -- and because gays are like that too in conversation, they both get locked into a positive feedback loop, where the ego inflation spirals ever further out of control. It is no different, then, from a junkie who gets hooked on a drug that did not pose a risk to our ancestors, or a carboholic whose sugar crashes bring them to crave even more carbs to get through the next couple hours, a dilemma that hunter-gatherers would never have found themselves trapped in.

We've managed to demonize hard drugs enough that some fraction of would-be addicts are scared away from them before they even try them out. For the moment, "health food" includes bagels with Nutella, waffles with syrup, and piles of pasta, but that could change as more people re-discover the dangers of dumping so much glucose and fructose into their bloated guts.

Taking away a modern gal's homosexual enabler friend will prove more politically difficult, since they are currently the en vogue minority group ("my Negro friend" is so 1967). Still, that shouldn't stop us from telling the women in our social circles with a gay bff addiction that it's for their own good to give it up -- cold turkey. That's for those who are already hooked. As for those who have yet to suffer fag-hag ego-bloat, nothing works better than attaching a stigma to the dangerous substance.

As recently as 1991, the top movie in America could still associate homosexuals with transvestite serial murderers, and a major pop music star of that period would only come out as gay in 1998 when he was caught cruising for anonymous sex in a Beverly Hills public restroom. Acceptance only became obvious to the average American in the late '90s when Sex and the City began. Even the gay bff in My So-Called Life, which ran during late 1994 and early 1995, was still in the closet to everyone but a handful of friends, a source of endless can't-we-all-just-get-along-ing typical of the alterna-grunge heyday.

So it's hardly too late to roll back the mainstreaming of gay enabler friends. Society has been taking it up the butt for far too long by the gay movement -- now more than ever, the Joker's plan for change has never been more urgent: This town needs an enema!