> She demanded that I apologize to the women

This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.

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johnnyanmac 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah. This is like geting angry at someone because of a dream you had. I just wouldn't even know how to react to that. Well beyond my qualifications to dissect.

	▲	switchbak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		100% - lots of crazy thoughts come and go, and I can't be expected to apologize for that! And I absolutely don't want to hear from randoms about how they're "sorry that I thought for a second about what you would look like naked" or whatever other random thought popped into their heads. That world would be absolutely insane.

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linsomniac 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of the big rules is you don't expose the unwilling public. Apologizing to the two women who were brushing the author's hair is a double-whammy: you're involving them in the sexualizing of this experience, and you're implicitly expecting them to be ok with it and forgive you.

If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.

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buu700 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To be fair, it's likely that the author's former friend would have a hard time disagreeing with this if presented in exactly the way that you have.

I suspect that what such a person finds offensive isn't OOP's behavior (i.e. receiving a hair treatment without incident), but rather the thought in and of itself. Since they know that they can't credibly assault a person's character purely on the basis of an involuntary or intrusive thought, they have to settle for calling out some behavior as a stand-in for the thought itself. In an alternate timeline where OOP had apologized (which would really just be extremely socially awkward, not harmful), I'd bet on the former friend making the exact opposite stink and chastising OOP for failing to keep it to herself.

Another layer that wouldn't be surprising in this instance would be subconscious homophobia. The friend thinks she's upset at OOP for "victimizing" two poor strangers without their knowledge, but in reality she's disturbed by the sudden realization that she herself may have been or may one day become the unknowing object of such thoughts. Since she can't say as much without implying that she's categorically uncomfortable being around queer women, she reached for any excuse to turn it around on OOP and make herself feel like the good guy.

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nuancebydefault 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My physio therapist is very nice and caring, genuinely interested in conversation and helping with my and other people's physical and sometimes even psychological problems. While she was moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional while doing her work physically and giving psychological support as a bonus. I'm sure she will notice at times that some people get intimate feelings but she seems to be okay with that, knowing she is helping patients while such things can happen as a side effect.

All to say that feelings are only natural and they can induce thoughts. Why apologize.

	▲	tonyarkles an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional This highlights something that I've been chewing on a lot lately. I'm not sure what you specifically meant by the word "intimate" when you said that, but I do think it's really interesting to distinguish between "intimate" and "sexual", even though they often coincide. As an example, years ago I was staying with some out-of-town friends after a break-up and they wanted to introduce me to a couple of lovely single women they knew. I hadn't really been taking great care of myself in the fallout of the breakup, so I went and shaved and got cleaned up. While doing my hair, I realized that my eyebrows were pretty unruly and somewhat sheepishly asked my friend's wife if she'd be comfortable taking some tweezers to them and helping me get them cleaned up. It wasn't, even a little bit, a sexual moment but it ended up being incredibly and unexpectedly intimate. We were both pretty surprised by it and ended up getting closer (as friends) afterwards.

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nuancebydefault 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if the women could read the desire from her face, there was nothing to apologize for. She felt attraction a feeling induced by non-reasoning parts of her brain. She didn't give in to it by for example hugging them without consent.

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easeout 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah that was pretty weird. Minimizing harm means both leaving people alone and not denying yourself random pleasant feelings.

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bbminner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

True! And yet, oddly enough, I'd argue that this obviously bad advice is, in a way, the expected online (corporate?) etiquette, that is being, for some odd reason, applied in the real world.

It is akin to situations that several comics I heard described -in which either a caretaker (or even the relative with a disability themselves) was corrected and schooled for using "non inclusive language" when addressing their relative / a relative referring themselves. To which, anecdotally, the typical reaction of the said relative was along the lines of "oh, i am sorry honey, i wanted to say it is hard for a damn useless cripple like me".

	▲	leptons 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> the expected online (corporate?) etiquette Trust me, HR does not want anyone telling anyone else about their impure thoughts just because they had them.

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fatbird 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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