I agree wholeheartedly! It shows what a tremendous loss we experience by being subjected to gender-based bias and culturally-imposed constraints on behavior that are arbitrarily based on that gender bias.

BTW, I also believe that that sense of loss, whether or not we are consciously aware of it stimulates a form of grief that may adversely color all of our interactions with other men, and mutually reinforces a certain sense of social isolation that is needless.

It is one of the reasons I first created this Forum over a decade ago - to help dissolve those arbitrarily inappropriate social sanctions.

This all gets heavily amped by a strong dose of homophobia, and the resultant counterphobic abuses imho serve to reinforce authoritarian militarism in our culture.

I sincerely applaud your courage in giving voice to the loss of greater potential intimacy you suffer as a result.

And I personally feel compelled as a result of those same constraints to clarify here that when I used the term intimacy I did not mean sexual intimacy, but (as I assume did you) simply a more authentic, warmer, and more supportive interpersonal intimacy quite appropriate among male friends who have no sexual relationship or agenda with each other.

In general, I agree with you, and at the same time I urge you to seek out or even create safe situations where by mutual negotiation and agreement with other men you will become more free to be more expressive in the ways you describe.

Although due to the constraints of this web-based medium we are denied physical contact, I nevertheless hope that in this Forum you will feel safer in reaching out in a more intimate way to other men.

I consider your statements here to be just such a reaching out, and I hope that you will consider this venue to be a safer place for exploring greater emotional intimacy here.

As you continue to read the dialogues between men here, as well as between men and women here, I hope you will feel encouraged by our commitment to that very kind of openness, and our intolerance of teasing, bullying etc. as being inappropriate and not permitted.

I agree, and that is very sad.

At the same time, it's important to remember that men as well as women may suffer from the effects of past abuse, both physical and emotional, so it's important for us to be sensitive to negotiating those kinds of relationships in an honest and open way.

I recommend you use this Forum's search tool to search on the keywords boundary boundaries and the keyphrase: "share check share" for more detailed discussions on these issues.

ALSO: Please check out Chat 0038 - not only for a detailed description of how I discovered the Key Sound™ and developed the Multiple Orgasm Trigger Protocol™...

but also......For an in-depth discussion of this very issue of the social and personal costs of gender biased cultural sanctions against appropriate expressions of intimacy.

Please note that this chat was held in the very early days of this Forum, so I hope you will appreciate just how deeply aware of this issue I have been from the beginning, and how committed I am to using this Forum, and the teaching of the Multiple Orgasm Trigger Protocol™ as at least a partial remedy.

I agree, and in fact I am very sure that that is not the case!

Some do, but others may not... for reasons due to an abusive past history, or just by personal preference. I believe that that too is important to keep in mind.

Thanks again for your openness and I hope you feel welcome here!

Forum Users Tip: Bredelly, I found the answer to your question about where did the original post come from by doing the following:

• I scanned the text of lionheart's quoted post for a phrase that would have a high probability of being fairly rare.
• Upon scanning like that, I found a what I thought was a pretty good candidate, when lionheart said: we lack benchmarks for what
• Next, I selected and then copied that text string to my clipboard, using Control+C.
• Then I clicked on the Search link on the blue horizontal menu bar,
• I pasted the clipboard contents of that string into the Search form field, surrounded by quotes like this:
  
  
  "we lack benchmarks for what"
  
  
• And clicked the button labeled Search using Google™ Site Search.
• I got a list with only two entries on it - confirming that I'd picked phrase from lionheart's quoted post that seemed to be rare, if not unique.
• I recognized that the first link on the list was to the post I was already reading - from which I grabbed that quoted phrase, so I...
• ...Clicked the second link on the list and VOILA! There was lionheart's original post!

Wishing you all the very best of your heart's desire...
Jack