I think that night be sadly true for a lot of men. I'm very sorry your ex read out your letters to mates - that seems pretty unkind and I can't think of my friends doing sonething similar. Except the poem from my stalker that started "Eyes so black and full of evil" but that's wasn't very romantic, really, so I considered it fair game.Martin Y wrote: ↑Sun Mar 14, 2021 4:23 pmI feel I have hopelessly little of value to add to this thread but this one thing struck a chord.Squeak wrote: ↑Sun Mar 14, 2021 1:23 pm... I'm pretty sure you've been present when similar sh.t happened to your female friends, though you may not have noticed. I'm pretty sure you've heard men joking about these sorts of things and maybe you're such an innocent that you thought they were only jokes. Or maybe you've spent your life keeping your female friends safe and reining in the men around you who make them unsafe. If you have, and you have wisdom to share, please do so.
Men don't talk about sex.
All necessarily in my experience, and I'm talking about decades past and to be honest the men I know don't talk about football either. Anyway, IME men did not talk about sex in any way that was not completely abstracted from personal experience, and it was a genuine shock to me to learn that women did. (In a minor argument when things were starting to go wrong with a relationship, she bolstered her argument with the reactions of her fellow nurses when she had read my letter out to them. (Yeah, that's how long ago it was. A letter.) I was flabbergasted. I can't now remember the contents, only that I would never in a million years have imagined sharing the similar stuff she had written with anyone, let alone using it to entertain work friends in their coffee break.)
Maybe a bigger surprise was that I had a girlfriend. A theme of my younger life was having no idea how to approach women* and a dread of saying or doing the wrong thing that left me frozen and doing nothing. I believe I'm quoting Billy Connolly: I'm not even going to tell you how old I was when I lost my virginity because you'll all just laugh. So the idea that I might admonish my younger self to pull my friends up when they brag about their inappropriate misbehaviour would probably be met with a request to explain WTF I was talking about.
*I don't mean in work or study. Absolutely no problem at all with friendships. Just anything-more-than-friends.
But my women friends do all talk about things like contraception and other aspects of our romantic lives in ways that shock our make friends when they see it. I've had far too many conversations with new partners about contraception where it's clear they have absolutely no knowledge or opinions to share because they've never registered that it's their business to know any details.
I've had conversations with male work colleagues and volunteers about how to behave so as not to freak out women, where it's so obvious that nobody ever mentioned to them that, for example, propositioning women in places where they can't really escape (e.g. in their workplace where they need to spend all day every day with you) is not something to do unless you have very clear signals of interest. Just yesterday, a friend told us something her husband did that, while maybe ok, had five women now on high alert for more signs of controlling behaviour. I foresee a likely awkward conversation between me and him about freedom for the women we love. I don't think any of his male friends will know he needs the conversation or act on it.
"Gossip" has always played a crucial role in human society for teaching people the finer details of social acceptability. If men never gossip and chat about sex and romance or only ever hear jokes about those things, then not only will some of them accidentally get things wrong in catastrophic ways but the real predators will be very effectively hidden.