As a male with more close female confidants/friends than male, I find it interesting that this article in no way acknowledged the possibility of a platonic male/female friendship.
Except it ... doesn't? Not only it doesn't seem to be a well designed study (the 9 point scale doesn't make much sense, there is no graph with the numbers for each answers, etc), the conclusion they get from it seem strange, since most people don't want to go on a date:
On average: Male: 4.55 Female: 3.90, since it's a 9 point scale[1]: 5 mean "Neutral/Unsure" and below is the "no" range.
[1]https://analysights.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/071210_2340_...
I always hate it when people say "women do this" or "women think this" because I often don't do or think that. Plus within the women I know there is a large range of personalities, actions, thoughts, beliefs, motivations, etc. It reduces women down to a stereotype.
Is there any evidence that friendship, sexual and romantic relations work differently among homosexual people? And to such an extent that the negative tension between sex and friendship exists only with heterosexual people? I don't know of any. Has anyone ever made a comment: "Gay men can't be friends because sex always gets in the way." or "Lesbians can't be friends because sex always gets in the way."?
I'm not implying there's homophobia in this kind of thinking, just very bad, shallow "analysis" of interpersonal relationships (of the kind you tend to get from "women magazines" and "men magazines", no surprise there) and, in some cases, a lot of rationalisation by people who only want infantile sexual relations from persons of desirable sex and don't even try to make friends, although they try to fake it to get sex (i.e. by people for whom friendship was never actually a motivating option).
The point is that the "sex part" does not have to get in the way. In most cases the sex part is very superficial, it's just an idea that comes naturally to peoples minds and it's simply not a big deal at all. People, men and women, think about sex (almost all the time, both sexes) and worthless semi random thoughts about sex with almost any person will be had. It simply is not such a big deal. The funny thing is that we are all aware of the universality and banality of these thoughts, yet act as though it's something special, extraordinary and serious. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating promiscuity (although, again to be clear, I have no moral issue with that as long as it's honest), but simply putting the whole thing to rest, it's not even worth talking about.
And it better not be true that sex stands in the way of friendship because long, commited, beautiful relationships sure involve a lot of sex and deep friendship. Sex can only stand in the way of friendship if all one wants is sex.