Thank you for your kind words Fiona. A lot happened in this thread while I was away, so bear with me while I get caught up. From a couple of pages ago.
The second experience you relate was wrong and you were wronged. Sadly earlier situation may have led you to doubt yourself and your motivation. Such shame is a killer and it is not specific to your gender: it is a part of the price people pay for childhood sexual molestation I think: so you were probably vulnerable long before this arose.
One of the weirdest things is how her friends and family treated me. Now, her family doesn't even know, except for her sister, that we slept together, yet they still apparently ask her whatever happened with me, why she doesn't talk about me anymore, etc. Her friends were very upset when they found out we had gone that far. Not that we had slept together, but that she went back to her boyfriend after. This might all have something to do with her man being universally recognized as an asshat.
Your third experience puzzles me, I confess. I am inclined to set this down to a cultural difference because we Scots are not a demonstrative people and we just don't do "hugging" at work: at least I have never seen it, except where colleagues were really in a relationship; or at the xmas party when all bets are off. But I believe that Americans are more likely to hug and so I cannot comment: perhaps others here can understand this better than me. In my culture a person who behaved as you described this woman behaving would be a very big red flag: but that is unlikely to be universal. And as I have said before; we have employment protection. People just don't get sacked on the strength of one person's accusation alone so far as I have seen: this too seems to be very different in America and so I have some trouble sorting out myth from reality in that context.
It confused me too. At this point in my life I hadn't so much as held hands with a woman, besides the unpleasantness of my childhood, and had very little social experience with women besides being the nice guy friend. People didn't generally hug people that much, so I was very confused. Looking back it was a red flag, but a red flag of what I wasn't sure at the time.
That job they were doing had a very high turnover rate in general, and like I said, I don't know if the two men fired were done so rightly or not, but they were fired immediately after her accusation. She was fired soon after getting a female supervisor.
Your last case is odd I confess: I can see how the situation arose very easily. And I can see how the social situation you were in made it very hard to deal with. I assume you did not tell the others what was happening and perhaps this was because you were uncomfortable with the expectation that you would be seen as strange: perhaps you thought others would perceive you "got lucky" and be amused you did not see it that way: if that is the case then I believe you are the victim of another myth: because I do not think men are always up for sex and I know for a fact some are monogamous. Pity that is not often acknowledged but there it is: these myths put strait-jackets on us all
They were my closest female friends and I still didn't tell them for several reasons. The biggest one is that I highly doubted that they would believe me. The girl could have just said I put my hand down her pants. As for the other two thinking that I just "got lucky," one of them is the 'no sex or sexual acts until marriage type and the other self identifies as 'whore'. So that would have a split decision. However, my girlfriend and I at the time were having trouble, and one of those troubles I had talked with my friends about was sexual. She liked to tease me, but didn't want any sex acts. Now, I'm not talking about just cuddling and kissing type escalation, I'm talking about, 'laying on top of me naked after taking a shower even though my back was out and I couldn't have done much even if I wanted to' type of teasing. There were a couple of other things that got me going that I asked her to stop that she would not. Oddly my female friends assumed that I wanted her to just have sex with me, while my male friends made the correct assumption that I wanted the teasing to stop. This belief was so ingrained with my female friends that when the later wrote a letter to my girlfriend with a list of reasons she should dump me, one of the reasons they cited was my complaining that my girlfriend was not willing to be more sexual with me. I had said the opposite. They refuse to believe me still.
The entire situation is even more confusing than that, but it still illustrates a point. These girls who were my friends in part because I was a 'nice guy' who is respectful of women and doesn't make everything sexual still could not believe that I wanted less sexual activity. I went from being, "the nicest guy" they knew to being, "a ****ing psycho." All because I was having relationship problems. Hell, she was my first girlfriend at the tender age of 22, you'd think they would be more understanding of my inexperience regarding relationships.
I am oversimplifying, and I by no means claim to have been perfect. I made some really messed up mistakes. But should I not be afraid of what women do with sexual matters? Is my fear unjustified? Just because it has been confirmed with just about every woman I've ever trusted, am I still being unreasonable?
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Without reason, might I add -- you have no idea what the hell kind of "agenda" I could possibly have.
