When I was in college, a lot of girls talked about the problem of having male heterosexual friends – just friends, I mean. For the problem was that you could never feel relaxed with them, because they always might want something móre – if not tonight, then sooner or later. Many girls said they even preferred gay friends for that reason, for those never wanted something more (which often wasn’t even true, but that’s another story).

This is really a textbook example of a problem that is, as such, legitimate, but only considered from a gynocentric viewpoint. If you took this 100% serious as a boy, you should turn into a tight rope walker and worse. There was no chance you could get anything romantic or sexual with a girl. What were you supposed to do? Go out and pick up a girl in a bar? These same girls complaining about heterosexual male friends not only didn’t want that to happen to themselves, but despised that behavior in general. And personally, I also would have preferred a good friendship turning into something more when you really got to know each other.

It wasn’t really even about shaming male sexuality; the point was not that men shouldn’t be sexual, just that it was ‘far too often’ their aim to get sex when they had contact with a girl. But that made it also so hard to argue against this complaint.

The tragedy is: if this had resulted in open talks – we men have this issue, you women have that, what can we do about it and what should we tolerate from each other – it would have benefited both sexes. But the narrative, unfortunately already fashionable then, was that boys should listen to girls and could learn a lot from that, even to their benefit. But all it brought to both sexes was a nasty stalemate.