A lot of it has to do with socialization. I was socialized with a pretty broadly mixed-sex peer group as a young child. I had friends who were boys, and friends who were girls, though admittedly a lot more of the former than the latter. I attended elementary school (and high school, and college, and now the workplace) with a roughly equal number of young men and women. And today, I can count on almost as many female friends as male friends. I can assure you that there's little to no underlying sexual tension in 99% of those friendships.
All of this would have been unthinkable in my grandfather's day. As the article points out, previous generations had far stricter boundaries on the man's place in society, and the woman's. Young men rarely socialized with young women until the teenage years, which coincided precisely with the most raging period of hormonal upswing, and the result was a potent cocktail of mystery and awkwardness surrounding the opposite sex. Then they went off into separate workplaces, or at best, mixed workplaces with very strict boundaries of separation. Quite simply, they were never given the chance to develop normative standards of mixed-sex friendship.
The premise that men and women are ineluctibly attracted to one another, and thus, a male friend and a female friend secretly want to fuck, is a broad generalization hammered on top of a specific, interpersonal dynamic. It doesn't hold up, except in those very rare cases where it does. "When Harry Met Sally" inverts the rule and the exception, taking a specific case -- this particular guy and this particular woman want to bang -- and applying it more universally. We encounter the same problem when trying to apply Ross and Rachel archetypes. Ross and Rachel are secretly attracted to one another because the writers of the show created them that way. It's not "inevitable" that any given Ross and any given Rachel are destined to pine for one another. (Likewise, nobody ever takes note of the fact that Ross and Phoebe were friends, and no sexual tension existed there. In a parallel universe, it's entirely possible that the creators of "Friends" never made anybody attracted to anyone else on the show, although I suspect that version of the show is a lot more boring). Art can imitate life, and life can imitate art, but we should be very careful to note the differences between the two.
All of this would have been unthinkable in my grandfather's day. As the article points out, previous generations had far stricter boundaries on the man's place in society, and the woman's. Young men rarely socialized with young women until the teenage years, which coincided precisely with the most raging period of hormonal upswing, and the result was a potent cocktail of mystery and awkwardness surrounding the opposite sex. Then they went off into separate workplaces, or at best, mixed workplaces with very strict boundaries of separation. Quite simply, they were never given the chance to develop normative standards of mixed-sex friendship.
The premise that men and women are ineluctibly attracted to one another, and thus, a male friend and a female friend secretly want to fuck, is a broad generalization hammered on top of a specific, interpersonal dynamic. It doesn't hold up, except in those very rare cases where it does. "When Harry Met Sally" inverts the rule and the exception, taking a specific case -- this particular guy and this particular woman want to bang -- and applying it more universally. We encounter the same problem when trying to apply Ross and Rachel archetypes. Ross and Rachel are secretly attracted to one another because the writers of the show created them that way. It's not "inevitable" that any given Ross and any given Rachel are destined to pine for one another. (Likewise, nobody ever takes note of the fact that Ross and Phoebe were friends, and no sexual tension existed there. In a parallel universe, it's entirely possible that the creators of "Friends" never made anybody attracted to anyone else on the show, although I suspect that version of the show is a lot more boring). Art can imitate life, and life can imitate art, but we should be very careful to note the differences between the two.