December 06, 2024

Source: Bigstock

Do women need to start speaking out about what they are witnessing their girlfriends doing to men? Is it time for some honesty and realism in the sex misconduct debate so that we can separate one thing from another, in terms of seriousness?

Watching all the celebrity sexual misconduct allegations, you do wonder…

In the latest case to grip the public imagination in the U.K., Greg Wallace, a TV foodie, has hit out at “middle-class women of a certain age” making allegations about him, including his habit of walking around naked on set with a sock on his private parts—classy. I’m not surprised he’s got himself into a shitstorm if that’s what he thinks is appealing or funny.

But still, has he got a point when he infers that some middle-aged, middle-class women are a bit, well, keen to make trouble for men? Could that be a thing?

Let’s face it, if you want to, there’s always something disgusting you can point to that most men do. It depends if you want to highlight it. Mine licks his knife when he’s eating. It distresses me more than I can say. I tell him he’s revolting and has no manners, but he never changes. He’s a man. He does things that men do.

“I do feel that I am sometimes witnessing my unhappy, single women friends setting a trap for men, whether consciously or not, and I don’t like it.”

Sometimes the allegations don’t even refer to something disgusting. In another case in Britain, a female fire brigade worker has sued for harassment after her male boss made a remark about his wife having a Mulberry handbag just like hers. Yeah, righto. Handbag, that well-known euphemism.

If admiring a woman’s handbag is now sexual harassment, it won’t be long before a man saying “Good morning” to a woman is evidence of attempted rape.

Personally, I’m a bit tired of watching female friends who are absolutely happy to pursue men, grab them, slap their arses, and pick them up when they feel like it—but these same women I know are very readily taking offense and claiming harassment by men when men say something even vaguely sexual.

Women can be sexually aggressive, not men, is the inference. Women can push it as far as they want, including laying hands on, but a man may not even admire their handbag. This, of course, is laying down impossible terms, and ones that will necessarily and obviously force men to fall foul of them.

All women must have stories to tell about what they full well know is happening since the #MeToo madness took off and men were deemed fair game to have war waged on them.

I do feel that I am sometimes witnessing my unhappy, single women friends setting a trap for men, whether consciously or not, and I don’t like it.

On one girls’ holiday that springs to mind, I was either listening to a girlfriend in her 50s complaining about men being vile rapists, or I was watching her get blind drunk, grabbing the backside of a man she had just met, and screaming, “A girl’s gotta have sex!”

Sober, she had standards of moral behavior she wanted imposing that were downright impossible.

The drunker she got, the more she moved seamlessly to a position of looking at the men around her as fair game for a one-night stand, and got cross if they didn’t cooperate with that position.

When a North African waiter served us at lunch and said, “Hello, blondies!” for example, she, stone-cold sober, said: “That’s sexist and racist!” I ordered a tuna salad and apologized to him.

But by night it was a different story. One evening, I watched her drink herself silly, then try to pick up a poor unsuspecting guy who was on a stag do.

There were about fifteen of these men, all having a great time at the table next to us. As some live music started, they started horsing around on the dance floor. She hitched up her skirt to show off her tanned legs while sitting at the table watching and said she was going to score that night. “A girl’s gotta have sex!” was her way of putting me in my place when I said, “Please don’t, let’s just have an early night and go back to the hotel.”

Then one of the men very politely asked us to dance with them. She was deliriously happy to join in. Good, harmless fun was had by all, and when the music ended I said we’d be off. The guys said goodbye and were perfect gentlemen.

But as I walked away, my friend had other ideas. She was by now barely able to walk in a straight line.

I don’t drink, so she’d drunk a bottle of good wine to herself plus four martinis. She wouldn’t leave. When I tried to pull her away she started telling me she wanted one of the men to come back to her room.

If I’m not meant to think that’s wrong, and risky behavior on her part, what am I supposed to think?

I suppose the #MeToo moo cows would say: “It’s her right, sister, to grab as many men as she wants, to own her power, so don’t you dare insinuate she should not do that for her own safety, much less theirs—what are you, a fascist?!”

I walked off and hid a little way away, watching her carry on talking to the men in case she got into trouble and needed me. But she didn’t because the men had worked her out and were having nothing to do with following her back.

Eventually she caught up with me. She launched into an attack about how by leaving I had forced her to leave too, and stopped her getting the man she liked to come back with her.

In the morning, she didn’t remember much, but I told her: “That man you wanted wasn’t coming with you, he was ignoring you. But you were flirting with all of them at the end. Any one of them could have said yes. I pulled you away from those men for your safety, but also for their safety.

“I don’t want to wake up the next day and you come out of a blackout and tell me you’ve been with a man you didn’t want to. None of those men deserved that.”

Sober and hungover, she agreed, thanked me for looking after her, and said: “I think I grabbed that bloke’s arse while I was dancing with him…”

There’s two ways of looking at this: Either you believe that woman has some kind of drink problem, is maybe traumatized by something in her childhood or something she suffered when younger that is a man’s fault, so that she is hitting on strange men and wanting one-night stands through some sort of dysfunctionality and trauma. Or you think, “Dear me, those poor men she meets. They don’t know what’s about to hit them…”

It’s not for me to decide. I’m not a shrink. But irrespective of that, I do feel that whatever has happened to you in your past, you should not then project your trauma onto other innocent people later in life when they have done nothing to you. Deal with your fucking issues.

I’m sure there must be more women out there who could bear witness to things that have happened in this vein, who know the truth behind some of the worst excesses of female behavior.

We’re getting to the point where men will have to ask women to sign contracts making clear they have asked for and desire the sex that is about to happen, and then sign another piece of paper after to confirm the sexual encounter has now concluded consensually, has gone as planned, and they still concur in the having of it (and perhaps another signature a day or a week after that, just to be sure). If I was a man, that is what I would do.

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