Everyone knows good friendships are based on sex, except for a mere 50 percent of us. As a gentleman and a scholar, I was flabbergasted when I heard the news: I am not entitled to sex from my female friends. I always assumed the term “friend zone” was to be used ironically, but apparently, a state of platonic mutuality between most heterosexual men and women really does exist. Who would’ve thunk it?

A recent study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships on attraction in cross-sex friendship claims emerging adult males (ages 18-29) are more likely to be sexually attracted to their female friends. In addition, a majority of men believe their female friends are also attracted to them. However, a majority of women who took part in the study did not return those feelings. 

So, while men define friendship (or the “friend zone”) as an eternal sex-purgatory, women have a much more horrifying definition: “just friends.”

Though “friend zone” sounds nice — as if it’s a magical place where friends laugh and enjoy one another’s company — it’s more common connotation implies that men are entitled to sex from their female friends. As one Chicago Tribune writer put it, “[The male] does everything a boyfriend would do — without the benefits.”

Exactly. 

You see, readers, time is money, and I don’t spend time with someone without expecting payment. Essentially, I see myself not as Ahmed Amer, but as AmerCo. — a firm that bills its clients for time spent with them. And I don’t just apply that business model to my cross-sex friendships. Considering how much time I’ve been putting in at Technician, I think it’s safe to say I am entitled to one kind of raise or another. 

Who would want to spend time having dinner and a conversation with “just a friend?” If anything, the friend zone is a gap between me and the title of “lady killer.”

For those of you not familiar with the term, a lady killer is a man who is exceptionally attractive to women, even though, to a five-year-old or someone who does not speak English as a first language, the term might sound a bit aggressive — and one of a hunter’s mentality. 

Perhaps aggression is the name of the game. After all, we do “hit and quit,” “bang,” “slay,” “beat,” “drill,” “pound,” “smash,” “bag,” and “tag” – common terms to describe the everyday life of a true lady killer.

But what happens when a lady killer is banished to the friend zone? You have someone who is aggressive about sex and feels entitled to it.

Last August, two high-school athletes — Trent Mays, 16, and Ma’lik Richmond, 16 — in Steubenville, Ohio, were arrested and charged with allegedly raping a 16-year-old girl, who was unconscious while being assaulted by the two footballers and several others at a party.

Hacktivist group Anonymous leaked a video recorded by one of the students at the party, showing a former baseball player, who Anonymous and many media outlets identified as Michael Nodianos, laughing and making jokes about what had happened to the girl. 

In the video, the male identified as Nodianos says, “She’s dead … they peed on her, that’s how you know she’s dead, because someone pissed on her … They raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team … She’s deader than Trayvon Martin.” The nightmarish smile on his face only grows as his friends laugh and encourage him.

When asked by another student, “What if it was your daughter?” the boy offhandedly replies, “But it isn’t … If that was my daughter, I wouldn’t care, I’d just let her be dead.”

But the fact remains that she is someone’s daughter.

When we mix superficially simple but inherently insolent and aggressive language with interpersonal interactions, the result is the tolerated rape culture that too often results in harmful actions, even death. The all-too-common attitude is literally killing our daughters, sisters and mothers. So before you “hit it and quit it,” “bag it and tag it,” or “hump it and dump it,” think before you say it, Lady Killer.