The Rumours series tells the victim’s side of the story. It attempts to offset a smear campaign carried out be a feminist network. The campaign is designed to demonize the victim to justify the abuses he suffers, which includes sexual assault and systematic drugging in a flat set up for that purpose. The Rumours series thus far has completely rejected the fabricated stories. There is, however, one rumour that stems from an incident which I regret. Essentially, I betrayed a friends trust by hitting on her in bed. For about a decade after the incident we remained close friends. I have also shared a bed with her, and mutual friends, numerous times since then. Yet, over a decade later, it seems that the activist network in Berlin have turned these friends against me. I want to put things back in context.
It might seem surprising that I would share a bed with women who were ‘just’ friends. For the sex-positive promiscuous feminists in Berlin, this was obscene. For them, it is a matter of dogma that men and women cannot be friends without sex getting in the way. Some complain about men who pretend to be friends in order to covertly get sex out of them. Others are more forgiving of moments of weakness without any guile, moments that can still spoil a friendship for a time. Having heard all these complaints in my early twenties, I was determined to keep some friendships sacred. Women are not without these moments of weakness either, and both sexes need to perform their negative rituals to protect what is sacred.
However, I have woken up after a house party to find a woman performing fellatio, which I did not appreciate. No one would know, because a gentleman never tells. I have also woken up lying across a bed with my host pulling the bed covers over us, as she starting to take off my jeans. No one would know about this because a gentleman never tells. It is worth sharing some similar experiences I have had with friends to set my own actions in context. There is a great hypocrisy in the way women treat men, because the same behaviour could now place a man on ‘the spectrum of toxicity’. Men must abide by discretion, or face reprisals, which allows women to pass a lot under the cover of playfulness between friends. The care, ambiguity and playfulness of friendships should be cherished as a source of life. However, the feminist networks that smear male victims online and build a discourse of toxic masculinity threaten to undermine trust based relationships between the sexes. In this cultural impasse we all have a role to play in building and protecting our friendships.
My best friend has gone to similar efforts as those women I mentioned above. Only she had her older sister to prep me first. We were all old friends, so her sister gave me some drunken advice about not getting involved in relationships. I should be having more casual sex. I totally agreed in silence. More drunken chat led to her divulging her sister’s kinks in bed, and how long it had been since she got laid. My friend chided her older sister for being too obvious. Only for the sister to go through the scenes from The Secretary because it was her sister’s favourite film. They had clearly been plotting with solicitous minds and the older sister was putting the plan into action.
Sadly for my pal, this was the first friendship that I decided to make sacred. That night I made my excuses and crawled into bed, leaving her to booze on. Later on, she opted to climb into my bed for the night. I pretended to be asleep, even while she tried to give me a drunken hand job, but when she headed down to give me a blow job, I had to stop her. She could not understand why I would stop her. Friendship is not a good reason for men to say no, but men are chastised for trying it on with their friends.
Many people will think there is something wrong with a man not performing sex when demanded. I am sure the MGTOW and different feminists have their own terms for me, but I am content that men can say no to women for whatever reason, at whatever stage of life, at whatever stage of the night. I accept that rejection generally means something different for women than men. Men should take that into account, but men are no more responsible for this prejudice than women. Considering the ubiquitous discourse on toxic masculinity, a woman who is ignored or rejected by men might question whether she is a woman at all. Men must fear the consequences of this sense of rejection. However, it is hard to avoid. Men are so often obsequious before attractive women, that just rejecting a woman’s opinions and politics betrays a disregard for her affections.
The consequences for rejecting a woman will usually come in the form of relational aggression. That is, destructive rumours and humiliation. This has reached new heights with the whisper networks that the interpocula Substack is exposing. However, the consequences can also be physical abuse. After a night carousing in Dundee one of my friends came back to my place. When we got to the stage of undressing each other, I realised that I was drunk and I was not going to get an erection. A few weeks later I was talking to her and her sister, Norma, at a party. Norma claimed I didn’t have sex with her sister because men with small dicks are too insecure to have sex with voluptuous women. Norma then my grabbed crotch, keeping a grip of my dick in front of everyone for a while to confirm her theory. My friend was genuinely shocked at her sister’s behaviour. Others enjoyed my humiliation.
When my old flatmate and I returned to Dundee for a night out, we crashed at a friend’s place. When my old flatmate wanted to sleep with me, our guest made it clear her flatmate would not like us in her bed. My old flatmate jumped in bed with me regardless. She nestled her backside into my crotch and casually took my arm and placed my hands up onto her copious tits. I knew her well, and I knew what she was after, but pretended it was just friendly gesture. I did not move for a while before turning over and falling asleep. A gentleman never tells, but I told our host that nothing had happened in her flatmate’s bed. I don’t think she believed me.
I have been on the receiving end of a couple of drunken rants from friends I would not sleep with. One was engaged to be married. She crashed at mine in Berlin after we had been dancing and boozing all night together. It was a surreal rant about my bed covers, after I insisted on sleeping on the couch, the bed covers were a sleazy red she said. I said they were just an old set I had taken from home, my mum chose them. This was like a red rag to a bull. She started screaming at me, “So fucking what? I don’t give a fuck! They’re fucking horrible”. This rant when on for about ten minutes.
A friend of a friend who was up for Hogmanay took a shinning to me. She put her arms around me to sing along to the traditional songs and asked me outside for a cigarette. My friend made it absolutely clear it wasn’t a cigarette she was wanting, and that she didn’t mind if I hooked up with her friend. I didn’t go out to her and later this friend would shout across the bar at me when I spoke to women from my Village: “Oh look! He does not like us anymore. He’s found someone else”. This happened a few times. They were from London and didn’t seem to understand how a wee village works. Later that night, I told her that she could sleep with me on the sofa if she wanted, but I was wrecked. In the end I just turned the lights off and went to sleep with her still sitting in the room. The next night was the same, until the woman started tugging at my arm and shouting to get my attention. She was aggressively pulling me away from the woman I was talking to. My friend told her she had already been warned about this. In the end, my friend had to drag her home and lock her in the house for the night.
The next day, instead of apologising, she used quotes from Hollywood film actresses. The first was Jennifer Anniston, “Some men think every woman wants to sleep with them”. The second was, “The good-looking ones are always the worst”, from Anatomy of a Scandal. What was worse, her friend played along. Even though she had to drag her off me, take her home and lock her up. So, even when women become abusive because a man has rejected them, they can regurgitate quotes from films and transform themselves into Hollywood film actresses. Other women just play along with the fantasy. This seems to be what happens when rumours spread about a man. Many woman play the role of a film actress, claiming that they know exactly what the other women is talking about. This appears to be a supportive sisterhood, but it is sometimes just an ego trip at the expense of an innocent man. The situation is easily taken advantage of by more extreme activists. So, a sad side effect of the #MeToo movement is that some of the most vulnerable and abusive women can live out a lie. The feminist networks that that abuse and drug men are the most extreme case of this.
There have been a couple of cases where I have been harassed by women with whom I have refused to sleep with a second time. Within the space of a year, two women living 5 minutes walk from my flat, banged on the door, and when they were refused entry, they burst past my flatmates, knocking them aside, and ran up the stairs into my bedroom. One of them sat down with the fumes of alcohol and vinegar rising from her. She ate her chips and cheese quietly. She demanded sex, but she was too drunk to make much of a protest. I got a call from my flatmates to tell me about the other women. This was a friend who I had not seen for a few years. My flatmates followed her into my room to discover she had already stripped down to her underwear and was lying on my bed, and so my flatmate had to leave her there. She was refusing to leave until I fucked her. I sat in a flatmates room until she left unceremoniously. She would then wait for me outside the library in the morning. This whole episode was really unpleasant.
It was unclear how long this would last or if it would escalate. I wondered what she would say to my friends if she seen me with women outside the library. I think most older men have been in the situation of sensing there might be consequences for saying either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the same a woman. Even trying to avoid a situation in which you might need to reject a woman can still be experienced as a rejection by a perceptive woman. This takes a time to learn. The whisper networks online that take revenge on men is a nightmare scenario that I could not have imagined in my twenties. I only took the threat of male violence seriously through my twenties. It was women who understood the threat that certain types of women pose to men. Indeed, there used to be an unspoken pact between men and women, that each would look out for the other.
Feminists claim they have rescinded this pact because men have failed them. Men are to blame. Now Everyman is to blame for sexual harassment, assaults, and spiking, and they too should get their just desserts. Whereas 15 years ago, men would have been protected by friends from such women. Even back then, I was not confident about telling friends about my bad experiences with women. They might sympathize with the woman being talked about, knowing that women suffer worst for a tarnished reputation. Maybe they would tell me that the woman clearly has issues, and it is unfair of me to be ‘spreading’ my story about her. A gentlemen never tells.
I wanted to share these stories to point out something that seemed obvious 15 years ago. That the ambiguity of two drunken friends sharing a bed, cuts both ways. Women are just as likely to make mistaken advances once they are in bed with a man. Although you would not think this reading the complaints online about men wrangling for sex with friends. You would think that only men long for intimacy, a warm embrace, and to be found attracted and wanted, or to be pleasured. Women long for fathers, for husbands and for boyfriends. Women long for sex as well, and most take their chances with the men they know. Meanwhile, many feminists depict friendship with men as a lie, as a cynical and surreptitious ploy of men to get sex by any means necessary. Our friendships are real and significant, and we should not allow women who are incapable of maintaining such relationship undermine them, and forever stigmatize them. The ambiguity, the trust and the play involved in these relationships are part of their significance. That’s why I regret breaking someone’s trust, but it was not intentional.
I was surprised to learn that Margot was in a relationship. We had been steamers through university and enjoyed carousing in pubs, and talking about literature and cinema. Part of me was a bit sad to find out she was with someone, because I thought it must be serious. This was not because I was jealous, but because I might lose her as the friend she was back then. She had not bothered with men all the years I knew her. I was not living in Glasgow and by the time I got talking to her, the relationship was over. So we talked about sex for almost the first time. She really liked sex and she would miss it. She would like to have more sex, but she can’t have sex with someone without really knowing them. When she told me this, I did not think she was sewing any seeds in my mind. Yet, weeks later, when we were both drunk and hungover in her bed, I thought she might have. It is easy to consider this a stupid idea now, but many of mutual friends had flown from Glasgow, so we were the only two left and we had become closer.
Between waking and snoozing, we had both been restless in turns. I cuddled up to her for a while, and then my hand on her stomach. When I started to stroke her stomach, she moved and made a short ‘mm’ sound. It took this as acknowledgment. I made the stroke longer with a couple of strokes. I was looking for some sign that I should proceed. She moved again and then she turned her right shoulder back on to me and opened her body up to me, and then rocked back a bit. I felt she had opened her body up to guide me. So, I gradually extended my stroke so that it got closer to her crotch, but as I got to her crotch she turned sharply over and lifted her right leg up and rebuked me by name. I was confused in the moment but, at the same time, I snapped back into reality- I should have known what the answer would be. She was one of those friends that I should have kept sacred, and I felt ashamed of not holding our friendship to the idea I had of it. I never did anything like that again.
Some time later, there was a group of us in a pub, and I explained that I had slept with someone but that we had sex in the morning. I seen Margot turn to a friend, with a look as if to say, some women must like that then. I realised it must still bother her, or at least, the idea of me doing it intentionally, and doing it more than once. The thing was, it had been the woman who had started something with me that morning. This happens more than women will know. I doubt whether women would share that dirty detail with their friends, I think it could be humiliating for them. That’s not to say they think it is beyond the bounds of play, rather they do not want their friends to think they craven and desperate. The men will either take back some agency by affirming the situation, or they will leave, either way, they will tell no one.
I should have found the time to talk to Margot about it. The next time I slept in the same bed as mutual friend, she warned me, “no funny business”. I thought this was probably a fair reaction to me trying it on with Margot years earlier. Besides that though, I would share a bed with Margot and other friends over the next decade and more. Whatever trust I might have lost, I had won back. However, a few years into the campaign against me in Berlin something happened which made me think something had changed.
To cut a long story short, I was baited into coming back to a party. I sensed something cold and hostile about her. She had a cold grin on her face. So I left her and danced and continued carousing elsewhere. After not speaking to me all night, she came to me to say she was having a party at her place. Then there was awkward silence.
She wanted me to ask her if I could come with her, but I asked her if she wanted me to come. She tried to palm me off, but I insisted that I would only come if she wanted me to come. This is significant, because the activists think it is important to get the victim to ask for things, so that when he retells the story, back to himself or to others, it seems like he has not been coaxed into a trap because he was the one who asked (e.g. for a drink), not them. This happens a lot and you can make the situation awkward by forcing them to make the move they are trying to avoid. Then you know who they are. I had been doing this for years at this point.
In this case, making me ask to come back to her house, helps the activist to paint a picture of a toxic man being proactive and predatory. So, I made sure she said wanted me there, but I was steaming by the time we arrived at hers. I made sure I asked permission for everything and made sure she verbalised everything. I asked where her bedroom was and I asked, if he asks if he can crash in her bed. I did the same in the morning, I made her verbalise everything, that she wanted me in her bed, and I tried to call her out on her game of cat and mouse. It was a test. She was hoping I would make a move on her like I did with Margot. In the end she resorted to teasing me and laughing at me. I wanted to know if that was her game, and I called her out on it.
You might ask why bother. The answer is that this is all the agency you have left if you are constantly being targeted by a feminist network. You are basically trying to prove them wrong by not doing what they hope you will do, and you can take pleasure in frustrating them. However, nothing will prove to them that they are wrong, you cannot stop them. You can occasionally prevent them from drugging you and otherwise foil their plans. Also, once you have been drugged, robbed, sexually assaulted, you need to know if someone is part of the network. You feel safer if you think you can always tell when someone is out ‘to get you’, in some way. So, you like to prove your instincts right. So, you take it as far as you can and push their buttons to get a reaction from them. It’s obvious in the moment because they are not good actors, but you also want to provoke a reaction that is conspicuous to anyone, so you can convince other people.
In this case, I also wanted to know if my friend had been turned against me. If she had reinterpreted what had happened in her bed because of the smear campaign by the activist group in Berlin, over a decade later. The smear campaign does not refer to one incident or two, it wants to paint me as a toxic type. Someone who capable of worse than their false rumours. They want to imply something sinister in waiting by fabricating stories about me repeatedly cheating on women in Berlin. They imply that there always was something sinister in waiting, and compel my friend’s to reassess their estimation of me in the context of their campaign. I cannot otherwise rationalize my friend’s decision to turn on me after 20 years of friendship, over a decade after I tried it on with her in bed one morning. I have not made any other mistake like that with a woman. The incident in my village, Rumour 3, was a joke and the woman knew that. I suspect that Rumour 4 is that I intentionally caught my friend off guard and that I do this regularly. It was a one off, I read the signs wrong. I have suffered a lot worse myself from female friends, many times in fact, but I would not wish them any harm.