Flutterby™! : talk about sex 2007-06-20 15:18:58.841201+00

talk about sex

2007-06-20 15:18:58.841201+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Over at Oysters and Chocolate there's a little essay entitled Between Friends: Let's Talk about Sex that posits that there's a tipping point in female friendships where women can talk about sex in an open way.

And then it happens. She says something real, something that you can connect with and relate to on an honest level. It makes you laugh.

Something like, "I hate our new claw-footed bathtub, we can't get proper leverage."

And that got me wondering about how the analog for that occurs in male friendships...

*Does* it occur in male friendships? I mean, mainstream would have you believe that male bonding consists of belching, farting and watching football, not actually talking.

I've certainly had discussions about some deep aspects of relationships with a few friends (who also happen to be Flutterby readers), and... well... there was a hike discussion a few weeks ago about inverse relationships between various bird species[1], but I tend to think that the former discussions, which are the ones that I'd put on the same plane, are had mainly because I hang out with outliers, not because that's a mainstream phenomenon.

And even there, I don't think of those discussions as about sex as much as they were about the relationships which may or may not have been impacting sex.

See, women don't just talk about relationships. We do that *too*, in depth and detail, and with a great deal of analysis, when speaking with "girlfriends."* We also discuss sex in GREAT detail. It is entirely within the realm of "normal" for two women discussing sex to give a full description using hand gestures, exactly what direction the man's penis curves and at what angle, how well or poorly he understood directions, etc etc. Every man I've ever known that caught snippets of such (because men can listen in, depending on the man...) has been stunned, saying it was far more detailed than the boys ever got.

So, I've gotten the impression that men's friendships are more often based on shared interests and personalities where they can discuss things like philosophy, birds, plant species, etc, but they stop short of details about their own relationships and very short of in depth discussion about what they feel about those relationships. Of course, I could be wrong.

*girlfriend indicates a female with whom you can get real, not necessarily only the girls you hang out with regularly that you may not be able to get real with