Maybe it’s because I’m a misanthrope that I am such a skilled cock blocker. But like many of my fellows, I’ve had to become one out of necessity. I remember one Thursday evening last fall when my friend Sarah (not her real name) and I were sitting on the floor of her room with glasses of wine waiting for her to receive a text saying she had gotten hosed. She had been expecting the rejection, but she curled up into a ball when she got the news.
All over campus, people were being told whether or not bicker had worked out for them and getting exhilarated and drunk or, alternatively, seething and drunk. It was shaping up to be a night of ugly, hammered self-loathing, eating club taprooms full of people who were going out because staying in their rooms would have been crushingly depressing.
And so it went the only way it could go. We went out by ourselves, and it fell to me to take care of my already sloshed friend. We ended up at TI, whose basement taproom teemed with aggressive, intoxicated people getting progressively more soaked in beer as the night progressed. I felt tipsy and awkward, and she was full on drunk and vulnerable, and so I resigned myself to a long night of cock blocking. In other words, I was going to stay close to her and try to accomplish the difficult task of keeping predatory men away from an attractive, woozy girl.
In essence, cock blocking is simply the opposite of wingmanning: cock blocking is keeping a male from “scoring.” It’s conceived of either as a gaffe or the result of ill will. It is also pretty much the only foolproof way to keep two drunk people from going home together when one of them doesn’t want to but is too drunk to say no and maybe the other is just drunk enough not to pick up on that.
One of Urban Dictionary’s most pointed definitions of cock blocking is: “An act of ill etiquette in which a male is speaking to one female in a group of females, and the alpha female creates a disruptive environment.” I don’t flatter myself so deeply that I think I’m an alpha female, and that night I certainly didn’t feel like one. The whole time, I was essentially herding one incredibly drunk cat through a jungle, standing a few feet away from her to avoid seeming like I was standing guard. A few times, to give myself something to do, I wandered to the tap and got a beer and tilted my head back and poured it down my throat. Or I would get to talking with a friend or an acquaintance, but all too soon I would look around and realize Sarah was no longer in my field of vision. Or maybe I would make eye contact with some guy who seemed pretty nice and sober and we’d start a conversation, but inevitably I’d need to excuse myself with what sounded, I’m sure, like a pretext to run off: “I have to go take care of my friend.”
I remember telling myself that it wasn’t about whether I had a good time: it was about Sarah making the usual circuit around the eating clubs unscathed so reality could be deferred until the next day.
I cannot remember how many fictitious beers I enticed Sarah to come get in order to tug her away from someone. This was not overprotectiveness, though I went through moments of fearing it was. Sarah would be smiling and nodding at everything some bro in a tank top was saying, leaning close to be heard over the din, and I came up and told her fabrications as plausible as, “Your roommate is throwing up,” or as half-baked as, “Remember, we have that thing?” and she would shake her head, but I would link arms with her and march her away. The bro would glare at me, maybe puzzled, maybe frustrated and possessive. I would fear I had stepped in the middle of an actual desired interaction, but then Sarah would say something along the lines of, “Oh, thank goodness you saved me,” after I had torn her away.
We eventually ended up at Terrace. At night, it is full of music and cigarette smoke and grime, and a lot of the same people that were at TI, except they’ve gotten more drunk, more tired, more desperate, or less inhibited. Sarah was sprawled on a couch, and two freshman boys started hovering around her, leering—their intentions were clearly at least a little unsavory because there was no way she could, at that BAC level, have been much of a conversationalist.
I darted around the room chatting with various friends, and when I’d made my way back around, the boys were still there. They were probably harmless, but for some reason they gave me the creeps. So I took one of them aside and hissed at him to “just get out.”
This night was a long time ago, but it stuck clearly in my mind, especially that moment of pure venom. If I could distinguish the components of that venom, I would say it came from within and without. It was sisterly instinct projected outward into fierce defensiveness and indignation and contempt and why can’t they just leave people alone and a growing, itching feeling that nobody is a very good person at 3 a.m.
That is what I do when I cock block, but why do I do it? After all, perhaps Sarah should just drink less such that she can fend for herself. But neither she nor I are to blame for the most readily available ways of dealing with our problems: drink to “let off steam,” because you’re feeling unhappy and that means you “need a drink;” go to a party because it’s supposed to be fun, and if you don’t have fun, drink to get yourself through it. And it is inequitable that a woman is not able to get irresponsible levels of “wasted” and forget about her pain with the same sense of security a man enjoys. To be sure, drinking is not risk-free either for men or for women, and students of both genders experience violence and sexual assault. But this article is more concerned with the experience of female Princeton students, 1 out of 6 of whom experienced “non-consensual vaginal penetration,” according to a 2008 University survey that the ‘Prince’ published last year.
It is also true that perhaps Sarah should have been able to tell these men herself to stop harassing her, but there is so much social pressure for women to smile and never complain and never assert themselves and never contradict anyone else that it is hard to shake people off, even those who are harassing you.
Defying this standard of niceness is both very simple and very difficult. Crossed arms and bitch face are a good defense against being called upon to entertain someone with conversation, with flirting, with dancing, with anything. But putting on this façade has social costs. The descriptor “bitch face” really is indicative of how people react to girls who have too much attitude. It’s effective and leaves me free to walk around generally unmolested, but it makes people think I’m a mean person and doesn’t work all the time. Some men are, I can only conclude, willfully dense about picking up on women’s lack of interest. One form of good defense against harassment is to stop trying to convey your disinterest with simple body language and outright say, “leave me alone”—but this is easier in theory than in practice. Sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway observed in a 2001 study that “in mixed-sex or male-linked contexts, women’s efforts to assert authority will evoke resistance and dislike, which reduce their ability to get others to comply with them and, consequently, their power.” In other words, women pay a social price for going against gender expectations and being assertive. The less risky option is still a female friend taking care of you. Something as stigmatized as cock blocking is so important to female friendship because it’s an act of protectiveness that you may not be completely aware of while it’s happening but that signifies: I have your back and would rather make absolutely sure you’re all right than avoid awkwardness. I care.
In our culture, female friends are stereotyped as being the opposite of caring: jealous, catty, self-obsessed, gossip-mongering and frivolous. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf picks up on the poverty of literature when it comes to relationships between women that aren’t based on jealousy and competition over a man. “I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends,” the extensively well-read Woolf recalls. “Almost without exception they are shown in relation to men.” Like Virginia Woolf, I would struggle to pick out from fiction a truly legendary female friendship on par with those uniting Gilgamesh and Enkidu, King David and Jonathan, or Jason Segel and Paul Rudd’s characters in I Love You, Man. And yet female friendship is just as powerful and loving and noble as male friendship. It’s just that most cultural productions don’t even depict women as able to harbor such elevated feelings for their friends. This makes it harder to attribute noble motives to women’s actions. So on the Street, for instance, when men might be trying to wingman each other and women might be trying to do damage control, it’s inevitable that some people have opposite purposes: trying to make sex happen versus trying to keep sex from happening. And women rarely get the benefit of the doubt.
Sometimes, all you see of a friendship are a few actions, like a girl pulling her friend away from you because she just got hosed or dumped and drank a lot to make sure she had fun despite all that, and she really looks like she’s pretty sober and pretty into you but she’s actually just clutching your arm for support, because she is close to falling over. What the sober friend has done is an act of caring whose motivation you don’t see; all you know is that it is at cross-purposes with your desires for the other girl who has just been whisked away from you. And if this happens multiple times, you just get this vague sense that there’s malevolence behind it.
Of late I’ve tried to avoid being in a position where I have to intervene, to be the bitch that gets in the way of bros scoring. One recent Saturday night reminded me why I hate being that person. Terrace was packed with stumbling people and bad vibes. I don’t think I talked to anyone who said they hadn’t had a strange time.
That night, I ended up looking after Sarah again. While she was dancing, one guy slunk towards her from behind and put his hands on her hips and started to grind. She looked at me and made a face that screamed “HELP” and I grabbed her hand and pulled her away. “Next time,” I said, “you can just walk away, you know.” But as he started to step towards her again, she remained glued where she was, not quite ready to relinquish her precarious position of power that she had over him. So I gave her the out she knew I was going to give her, and I took her hand again and told him flatly: “get lost.”
“You’re just jealous,” he replied, and something in me tensed up—I turned away but then I could not resist coming back around to snap at him: “Well, you’re just a creep, so—“
Someone soothingly told me it was okay and that I was a good friend. I turned my attention elsewhere but that stung. I hated that he thought I would ever even desire his advances. Then something much worse occurred to me: he meant that I was getting in his way because I was bitter that nobody wanted me.
I’m not jealous of unwanted attention, but it is precisely witnessing or receiving unwanted attention that makes you yearn the most for attention from someone you actually want. And sometimes doing the thing that makes you a “good friend” can make you an angrier, sadder person—because cock blocking takes up the time you could spend having fun, and because it makes people hate you for robbing them of their fun and sometimes they tell you that, trying their best to be hurtful.
When I’ve told people of my plans to write an article about cock blocking and why I do it, some of my male interlocutors have responded with shocked looks and even indignant remarks—“Cock blocking? Why would you do that?”—as though I had just admitted to deflating bike tires or poking holes in condoms for fun. As though the precautions I and many other women often take out of protectiveness for our friends were actually acts of ill will. I felt all of a sudden like I was straight out of the vernacular of some dude writing Urban Dictionary entries in a fit of drunk frustration: cock blocker, a bitch that gets in the way of people having a good time.
But really, the cock blocker gives her (or, all too rarely, his) friend an out from a situation that she probably, physically, could get herself out of by putting one foot in front of the other. The nature of the inertia that keeps unwanted interactions going is fucked-up and complicated. Even unwanted attention is attention, and we’re conditioned to want attention, conditioned to feel unattractive if we don’t get it, conditioned to feel like we’re being teases or bitches or prudes if we reject it outright. But liking the attention in this Pavlovian sort of way doesn’t equal liking the source of the attention, or acquiescing to its endgame.
The cock blocker is the scapegoat who resolves that tension, who forces the object of the unwanted attention to make the right choice while taking upon herself (maybe himself) the awkwardness of rejecting someone in order to allow her (his) friend to escape gracefully. The cock blocker takes one for the team. Only as a result of deep changes in social norms will this no longer be necessary.
Correction: an earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that University published results from the 2008 survey it conducted on sexual assault. The survey results were first reported by the Daily Princetonian last year.
What, do I think? Anymore?
She does.
Must be nice to have someone to help you say, essentially, no.
She more or less assumes that all male attention in that kind of situation is either predatory or just totally frivolous (“bros scoring”). Cynical, to say the least.
The requirement that one be sober enough to consent-regardless of apparent willingness-never really seems to apply to guys. Speaking loosely and anecdotally, I can recall countless cases in which a male friend has been too drunk to consent to sex while the female partner was not. Technically these were all incidents of rape-which is ridiculous, no one involved views it that way. Do we live in a culture that condones male heterosexual rape? I certainly don’t think so. But then is this a non-problem, is it just not rape in this case? A term like ‘unwanted penetration’ is much more visceral-there is a sense in which I believe this is viewed cultural as ‘real’ rape. Whereas unwanted penetrating on the part of the man is not viewed, culturally, as anywhere near as heinous, even when the same consent requirement isn’t. I’m not making a judgment on whether this view is correct, but let’s be honest- this is the view generally held by society and tacitly endorced by its institutions. We’re forced to ask some very awkward questions: is there something simply worse about receiving unwanted penetration vs. giving penetration unwillingly? Is it possible to give penetration (I realize how awkward this phrase is, but let’s keep the same terminology) unwillingly, is there something inherently ‘active’-volitional-about it? But isn’t this claim deeply sexist and offensive to women? Somehow this brings to mind that ridiculous claim by that republican congressman who claimed that the female body naturally responds in different way to rape than it does to consensual sex. However-are we tacitly acknowledging some male equivalent of this claim, that an erection implies consent? I know this is an almost prohibitively awkward topic, but let’s be clear about what we mean here.
Of course women are more at risk to sexual assault and of course this requirement was created mostly with women in mind. No one is denying or mimizing the seriousness of that situation. This requirement for consent, however, doesn’t seem to be the kind of rule that tolerates approximation or a loose, case-by-case application. If there are two different standards, they should openly be acknowledged as such. Maybe there are inherent differences to be acknowledged-they certainly are tacitly acknowledged societally in the application of this requirement. But the very suggestion of these possible ‘inherent differences’, even to myself, veers toward old-fashioned, chauvinistic gender expectations. In any case this requirement for consent needs to be rethought. I think it’s possible that the design and the manner of implementation of this – nonetheless very well-intentioned- consent requirement may reenforce harmful gender stereotypes (i.e. women as inherently more passive, helpless, vulnerable), and therefore may simultaneously work against its own goals.
While for the most part the attitude of the author seems to be a very reasonable concern for her friend, there are instances where it seems like her language is tinted with this stereotype of women as passive/vulnerable. It’s one thing if your friend expressly asks you to do this and you have this private understanding with her, it’s another matter to publish discuss this private arrangement in a public forum, as if you’re attempting explain why women in general do this-even why they should.
Finally, let’s acknowledge another fact that complicates the discussion even further: there are certainly women who go out who both plan on drinking more than the limit for consent, and know beforehand that are be open to possibility of sex, and may want/plan to pursue it. This is totally obvious and innocuous. But according to this definition of consent shouldn’t this behavior be regarded as irresponsible? Or, alternately, should men avoid drunk women altogether? In any case wouldn’t we be back in the Victorian age? There’s a schizophrenia to this type of consent requirement. While necessary in some form, something about its implementation seems insulting to the very idea of female sexual desire.