Women keep saying, "I have a male friend. He is like a brother to me. I never think of having sex with him. It would never happen. Absolutely."
A woman tells her husband or her boyfriend, "Don't be afraid. You don't need to be anxious. I'm going on a trip with my male friend or I'm going to have dinner with my male friend. I'm going to sleep over with my male friend, but there's no risk that I will have sex with him. It's nothing of the sort. He's like a brother. He's like a father. He's like, "I don't know what."
Can we trust these vehement protestations or does the lady protest too much?
This is the topic of today's video.
Can women have male friends or is it all a self-serving, self-interested myth?
Because both men and women want to have extra-diadic, extra-marital affairs, they invented, they came up with the platonic relationship.
Is the platonic relationship an extension of a literary genre known as science fiction? Or is it a reality grounded in research and studies and observations, not to mention daily experiences?
Who is better to help you with this conundrum than moi?
My name is Sam Bagnin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, a Russian Federation, and currently on the faculty of CEAPs, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and the inevitable Lagos, Nigeria. Let us delve right in.
I'm going to review a few studies, not too many, a few studies, and let's see whether we can make sense of this whole story.
But before we do, I found the perfect car for a narcissist.
It's the Cadillac Escalade, Escalade as in military fight. Cadillac as in prestige and status and being superior to everyone else.
So if you're a narcissist out there, and for some oblivious reason, listening to my devastating podcast, please rush out, sell your old car, and get yourself a Cadillac Escalade, the new narcissistic status symbol.
Long-term and long-time fan has written to me a very thoughtful letter about the events in Gaza between Israel and the terror organization Hamas. And she ended it with a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, my favorite work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, actually, notes from the Underground, chapter 9.
And this is what he says, "And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly convinced that only the normal and the positive, in other words, only what is conducive to welfare, is for the advantage of men?
Is not reason in error as regards advantage?
Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being?
Perhaps he's just as fond of suffering. Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being.
Men is sometimes extraordinarily passionately in love with suffering. And that is a fact.
There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that, says the greatest psychologist to have ever lived, Fyodor Dostoyevsky." Now, this is the topic of today's video, errors, mistakes in communication between genders, between men and women, and error management theory, a part of evolutionary psychology.
So W.B. Yeats wrote a poem, "The Stairs Nest by My Window." And he ended it with a very telling refrain, a very telling passage, a paragraph.
He said, "We had fed the heart on fantasies, the hearts grown brutal from the fair, more substance in our enmities than in our love." And I think it's a great encapsulation of modern-day intergender dynamics and relationships.
Here's the breaking news.
Most women are looking for meaningful sex. Most men are looking for casual throwaway sex.
And the result is growing celibacy.
There's been a decline of more than 30% in the frequency of sexual encounters and in the number of partners over the past 40 years.
People are having sex much less, are much less interested in sex, are more atomized and isolated and avoid each other assiduously.
And they do this partly because of miscommunication, rampant, pernicious, dangerous miscommunication between men and women.
Now, it's not that women are looking only for meaningful sex. Actually, the number of sexual partners of women is very close to the average number of sexual partners of men.
Women today are as promiscuous and/or as sexually active as men.
The differences, the distinction between the two is closing fast.
But they do have a preference for meaning in their relationship.
Even in a one-night stand, women are looking for connection. Men are looking for masturbation. That's why one-night stands are very dissatisfied for women. Women hate one-night stands.
And only a tiny minority of women, 10%, actually, organize. And in one-night stands, compared to well over 50% of men.
So there is an abyss of communication between the two sexes.
And I'm going to refer now to a study that is often cited. It was published in 2015 in the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology.
It's from, of all places, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Scientists looked at how men and women signal and display attraction.
They were studying actually a phenomenon known as sexual overperception.
And they came up with a resoundingly clear outcome, which is rare in scientific studies, by the way.
The study discovered is that signals are clearly interpreted differently by men and women, period.
Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. We are from different planets. We do not repeat, do not speak the same language.
But in a way, sexual miscommunication is the only major difference between men and women that has been found, behaviorally speaking, that has been found in multiple studies over decades.
Men interpret words and gestures from the opposite sex as signs of sexual attraction and a "come on", an invitation to have sex.
A woman is nice to you. A woman smiles at you. A woman touches your hand casually. A woman locks eyes with you. A woman brings you coffee.
Obviously, she wants to have sex with you. This is known as sexual overperception.
And yes, I'm referring right now exclusively to heterosexual men and heterosexual women.
Men interpret every word a woman says, every gesture she makes, which happens to be empathic or kind or nice or even neutral, as an invitation to sex.
Sexual overperception is unique to men.
Women don't have this. Women decode signs of sexual attraction as friendly gestures.
So whereas men mistake friendliness for sex, women mistake sexual signaling, even very overt and very clear and unambiguous and unequivocal sexual signaling, as an attempt to become friends, a friendly gesture.
Nobody understands each other. It's a bloody mess.
Now, the Norwegians inevitably believe that the reason is evolution.
They rely on a branch of psychology known as evolutionary psychology.
They say that men must spread his seed among multiple women and get them pregnant. That way, the man secures his genetic legacy, while a woman has much higher costs if she gets pregnant.
Not necessarily only financial costs, but bodily costs. Or the fact that she's unable to go to work. She pays a price.
By the way, pregnancy is seriously, it's seriously harrowing. It's seriously difficult.
When we talk about the body, the impacts on the body are massive.
So women have to be, according to evolutionary psychology, women have to be a lot more careful when they have sex.
While men can go wild, so the wild see, wild sees everywhere, wild odes. I think this used to be true, but hasn't been true in the past century.
Ever since the invention of prophylactics, condoms at first, and then the pill, and then the male pill, coming shortly.
I think this argument from evolutionary psychology is counterfactual. I think this is precisely why women are having many more sexual partners than 40 years ago.
Even though there's a decline of 30%, the sex itself is distributed among a larger number of sexual partners among women, and a smaller number of sexual partners among men.
In short, men are having fewer sexual partners and fewer and less sex.
Women are having less sex as well, but with a higher number of sexual partners.
Consequently, the genders have almost met.
Women today have an average of nine sexual partners, while men have an average of eleven sexual partners, according to more studies.
According to one study, at least, women have more sexual partners than men. They're more promiscuous.
So it seems that women don't care anymore about getting pregnant. They can have an abortion.
The morning after pill, there's abortion, in the vast majority of the civilized world, civilized I said, there's condoms, and there are diaphragms, and there are pills.
I mean, today to get pregnant is a decision. It has to be intentional and premeditated, and very often it's very difficult to get pregnant because of the massive deterioration in the number and quality of male sperm over the past 50 years.
Many couples find it extremely difficult to get pregnant, never mind how hard they try.
So I don't think that's the reason why women are more reluctant or more choosy than men.
And I don't think that's the reason why they misinterpret men's sexual signaling as friendliness.
I can easily come up with other theories.
For example, maybe women are intimidated by men. Maybe they're afraid of men.
So they lie to themselves. They deceive themselves into saying, oh, don't worry, he's just being friendly. Maybe women are much more selective when it comes to the ideal partner, even for a single night, because women are much more into fantasy and imagination and a narrative.
While men don't need all this, all they need is an available vagina and breasts, of course.
So I could come up with 10 theories which I think are better suited to the current conditionality and situation than evolutionary psychology.
Today the consideration, the constraint of pregnancy is no longer relevant, in my view.
And people don't form families. Families are becoming rare. Most people don't have children and don't want children until a very late age. About 40% of them end up being childless.
So I don't think this whole thing about having children, pregnancy, this is very primitive, very atavistic, very 19th century.
It is, I don't think there's anything to do with the typical urban woman in a city, with a city, with sex in the city. I don't think there's anything to do with sex in the city.
So I dispute strongly the interpretation of the Norwegian scientists who have discovered or have substantiated the discrepancy in communication between genders but came up, in my view, with the wrong explanation.
That men are looking to procreate with multiple women and women are very terrified of the consequences of pregnancy and so on and so forth. And that's why they are less inclined to perceive sexual signaling.
So another argument against this interpretation is the fact that millennials have deviated from this. Millennials are much more likely to interpret signals correctly.
Within millennials, millennials and Gen Z, it is possible, much more possible, to have a male-female friendship, which is really platonic and really normal. But it's limited to these two latest generations, not before.
And still, it defies the error management theory of evolutionary psychology because if it's possible within two generations, it's possible in principle. And evolution has nothing to do with it.
A more relevant factor is that men are more attracted to women than women are attracted to men.
Now, again, there can be an argument why.
Again, I think, for example, that we should not neglect to overlook the impact of pornography.
Pornography objectifies and dehumanizes women, renders them commodities, consumables.
So men begin to relate to women as they would to smartphones or to cars, something to be consumed, digested, enjoyed, discarded.
While women are not exposed to pornography, they're exposed to romantic literature, chick lit and rom lit and so on.
So women are much more into romantic narratives.
And even in a one-night stand, studies show that women fall in their heads, a romantic fantasy.
They tell themselves that this partner for the night may be there only for sex and maybe she is there only for sex.
But it's somehow a connection. It's somehow romantic. And it may lead to something.
Women hope for a continuation or a conversion of the one-night stand into multiple one-night stands, which will then evolve into a relationship.
And 67% of women keep hoping for a relationship compared to 34% of men.
So women spin movies in their heads, even in casual sex, where men don't.
I think this is the impact of pornography.
I actually think the consumption of pornography is like a thousand times more relevant than evolutionary psychology.
No offense to the Norwegian authors.
And be that as it may, both genders report frequent miscommunication. Sometimes it's labeled sexual harassment or even sexual assault.
But when these cases are studied, we discover that it's actually there was no aggression there. It was just misinterpretation of signaling friendliness was misconstrued as let's have sex and let's have sex was misperceived of I'm just going to we're just going to be friends.
Of course, this leads to frustration and to bad blood and bad emotions.
And this is true in all cultures, it seems, because we have studies from Norway, we have studies from the United States, we have studies from Malaysia, from Mozambique, I mean, we started from all over, Israel, from all over.
They all keep and I'll mention a few of these, and they all keep coming with the same story.
They all keep coming with the same story.
Men behave as if all women find them irresistible.
And this I think has to do a lot with male narcissism.
Don't forget that narcissism used to be a masculine pathology.
Until the late 1970s, 75% of all people diagnosed with pathological narcissism were men.
Women of logical narcissism includes very strong masculine attributes and elements such as competitiveness, superiority, and so on conquest.
So men are more narcissistic, and they would attribute to themselves, irresistability, at least if they're not insulted.
Men on the other hand are much more empathic, they network, they are consensus builders, they are much more into narratives and fantasies.
So men and women get to sex from two diametrically opposed positions.
One would tend to be a people pleaser, and one would tend to be narcissist or narcissistic, one would tend to be dominating and dominant and demanding and indecisive, while the other party would be submissive even if she dislikes the situation and finds the men disgusting or repulsive, just to go along with it, just not to rock the boat, just to keep the peace, just to please the men.
And this psychological background is very important because we need to introduce objective, neutral communication between men and women, and consent, and enthusiastic consent, and outstanding, outlandish, extraterrestrial consent, that's not the issue here.
Because people give consent for many reasons, sometimes they're coerced into giving consent, sometimes they just want to avoid conflict, sometimes they want to please, sometimes they feel pity, consent is a seriously bad communication strategy.
We need to focus not on consent, but we need to focus on the way men and women perceive sex and they perceive it so radically differently that they might as well belong to two different species.
We need to establish dictionaries, we need to agree in short on new sexual scripts.
Up until the 1950s, we had sexual scripts that encouraged the men to initiate and to flirt and so on. And the woman was the gatekeeper. She made sure to have sex only with potential partner and so on.
This was a very clear, unequivocal sexual script that everyone could follow and remain safe.
Today, everything is in flux. Some women are more promiscuous than their male partners. Some men are more romantic. Some women misinterpret friendliness as sex. Some men, I mean, it's a bloody mess. There is no clear, there are no clear guidelines as to how to be a man and how to be a woman and how to communicate our inevitable wish to copulate, even if it's only for one night.
And so this creates a lot of mayhem and chaos and ultimately drives the genders apart and we are embedded in a gender war because of it, because we didn't bother to define a language the way I did for pathological narcissism in the 90s, a language that all of you are still using.
We need language to mold consciousness. Consciousness then shapes reality, a reality that is consensual, mutually acceptable to both parties. Both of them know where they stand and what they mean and what it is that they are signaling and how the signal is perceived and likely to be acted on.
So all these studies expose a dramatic break or schism between men and women.
For example, women in the aforementioned study, they acted friendly towards men because women are friendly in most cases.
But this was misinterpreted, a sexual interest, three and a half times on average each year. So women have been exposed to essentially sexual harassment three and a half times a year. So if you're 40 years old, you've been exposed to sexual harassment 70 to 100 times. This is an unacceptable situation.
Similarly, men have misinterpreted friendly gestures by women and they felt rejected and humiliated. And finally, they gave up and they avoided women altogether. That's also an unacceptable situation.
Women have their needs, men have their needs. They often need each other. And it's a pity that we are driven apart by a lack of common language innocence.
The irony is even deeper.
When women actually signal sexual interest, men don't perceive it as sexual, as a signal. It's not only that men misinterpret friendliness as sexual invitation, they misinterpret sexual signaling as friendliness. And this is independent of whether people are in a relationship or not.
So years of communication within a relationship don't make this situation better.
Now, another study, but before I go to another study, I would like to read to you the abstract of the Norwegian study.
The Norwegian study is titled Evidence of systematic bias in sexual over and under perception of naturally occurring events: a direct replication of Heselton in a more gender equal culture, which is Norway.
In their summary, the abstract relies heavily on evolutionary psychology, which I think I have just refuted to some extent, it can be refuted to a much deeper extent.
So the abstract says error management theory, Heselton and Bass, 2000, Heselton and Nettle, 2006.
Error management theory maintains that natural selection has engineered adaptations for judgment under uncertainty. So natural selection created adaptations for conditions of uncertainty when you have to make judgments in order to minimize the overall cost of making errors, leading to universal biases in judgments of sexual interest in men and women.
The results strongly supported the main hypotheses in the original study, Heselton, showing that women reported being subjected, being subject to opposite sex sexual over perception, far more often relative to under perception, and that this difference was small for men.
In support of error management theory, and in contrast to social role structure theory expectations, the pattern of misperception for women and men was largely invariant across studies and across demographic groups within a culture.
The findings suggest that cross national differences in the level of gender inequality do not influence reports of sexual over and under perception in women and men.
Beyond sex, factors associated with more sexual over perception relative to under perception were being single, young and having attitudes condoning casual sex.
I would urge scholars to focus on mate selection rather than evolutionary considerations, error management theories, and so on and so forth. I think mate selection has been transformed by the technologies of prophylaxis, by the ability to not have children. This is especially dominant and prevalent in younger people.
There's another small study or obscure study, not small. It was published in Human Communication. It's a publication of the Pacific and Asian Communication Association, volume 12, etc.
Look, there are references in the literature.
The abstract of this study says, "Research has shown men perceive more sexual interests from female targets than do women in cross-sex interactions." And there's a reference to a very early study by Abbe, 1982.
Results indicate sex of participant and cue usage interact to predict perceptions of sexual interests.
The results are discussed with regards to sex differences in cue preferences and cue explicitness.
And this is China, Asia. It's a universal phenomenon.
But you can't say necessarily that it's because of evolutionary psychology because we have a global culture.
Everywhere there are the same processes and the same trends.
So we don't have a control group.
Maybe if these people bothered to study interactions in the Amazon forest, we would have had a control group.
But China is not a control group for Norway. And Norway is not a control group for the United States because they are all pretty identical despite what the Norwegian scholars would like to believe.
Now another study by Blesa Kretjak and Somers and Ericsson and others is titled "Benefit or Burden? Attraction in Cross-Sex Friendship?" Was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Volume 29.
It says essentially that men and women cannot be just friends. It's a myth. It's nonsense.
If your wife tells you that she has a male friend, you should be very, very worried. Sooner or later, it's going to initiate sex. Sooner or later, sex might happen.
Friends of the family? Poach. Spouses and girlfriends.
The most.
So friendship is a veneer. It's a thin cover. It's camouflage. It's deception.
The men in the friendship want to have sex with the women, period. All of them? All of them. Some of them are very good at hiding it. Some of them are very good at sublimating. Some of them are willing to wait years and decades, but they're looking for sex. They may pretend to be friends, but the moment comes, the woman is vulnerable, broken, whatever, they will initiate sex. They will attempt to have sex.
So in this study of Bliszczyk, researchers asked women and men friends what they really think and they got very different answers.
So it seems that in daily experience, non-romatic friendships between males and females seem to be possible. They seem to be common.
Men and women after all spend time together. They live, they work together, they play side by side.
So not all of them end up sleeping together.
So it seems to defy the thesis of these studies.
That's nonsense.
Of course, I anticipate the comments on this video by hundreds of women or dozens of women. Of course, I've had a male friend all my life. I've had a male friend for 20 years and never tried anything. He never attempted to have sex with me. We're like brother and sister.
Yeah, I know this. I know these stories.
Rest assured, he's fantasizing about you sexually. He's waiting. He's biding his time. He's waiting for the moment.
Electronic coexistence is 50% deception and 50% make-belief of facade and elaborate dance.
On this surface, countless sexual impulses bubble all the time. It's a seething cauldron. The more you're in contact, the worse it becomes.
There's no desensitization and no habituation. On the very contrary, the physical presence provokes, arouses the male even more.
So this research, it says that the opportunity or the perceived opportunity for romance is always around the corner in the male mind. The male is waiting to pounce, pounce like a predator on the female.
At the moment, the male perceives an opening for sex.
Since sex, platonic relationships have been analyzed and dissected. It's not easy to study because there are issues there, ethical and other issues.
One of the main reasons men don't communicate their sexual attraction to female so-called platonic friends is because they are afraid to alienate them. They are afraid to destroy the friendship or access, not friendship.
A male platonic friend is your friend because it guarantees him access. So he's afraid to compromise the access by confessing his sexual attraction to you, the female.
So these romantic feelings, these sexual attraction remains hidden and unspoken. We need to elicit them in studies.
The study found that there are large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite sex friendships.
Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite sex friends were attracted to them, which is a misguided belief that sexual overperception.
In fact, men's estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt.
Basically males projected. They assumed that any romantic attraction that they experienced was mutual. They attributed it, their own attraction, they attributed it to the female and they were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends.
Women too were blind to the mindset of their opposite sex friends.
Females generally were not attracted to their male friends. They were not lying.
When a woman says, "He's like a brother to me. I'm not attracted to him. I will never have sex with him." The woman usually doesn't lie. She is not attracted.
But similarly she's projecting. The woman in this kind of pair, friendly pair, is projecting. She's not attracted. She assumes her male friend is not attracted.
Both assumptions are wrong. The female is not attracted. The male is always attracted.
Consequently men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women. Women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends.
I'm quoting from Scientific America.
Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction, which is where we entered dangerous territory.
Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite sex partners and those who were single. Hot friends were hot and not friends were not, regardless of their relationship status.
However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners.
Although men were equally as likely to desire romantic dates with taken friends as with single ones, in other words, to poach someone else's partner, women were sensitive to their male friends' relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.
These results suggest that men relative to women have a particularly hard time being just friends.
What makes these results particularly interesting is that they were found within particular friendships.
This is not just a bit of confirmation for stereotypes about sex-hungry males and naive females. It is direct truth that two people can experience the exact same relationship in radically different ways.
Men seem to see myriad opportunities for romance and sex in their supposedly platonic opposite sex friendships.
The women in these friendships, however, seem to have a completely different orientation, one that is actually platonic.
To the outside observer, continuous scientific American, it seems clear that these vastly different views about the potential for romance in opposite sex friendships could cause serious complications and people with opposite sex relationships agree to this.
There is often sexual harassment and even sexual assault, owing to this mutual misperception and miscommunication.
There was a follow-up study and many of these people were married.
These people were asked to make lists of positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex.
So they asked them, "Can you list positive and negative things about your relationship with your so-called mainframe?"
They were asked to relate or refer to romantic attraction.
There was a sentence, "Our relationship could lead to romantic feelings."
It seems that romantic attraction was five times more likely to be listed by women as a negative aspect of the friendship than as a positive one.
Women were terrified of men converting the platonic friendship into some kind of sexual harassment, sexual advance or sexual assault, which would ruin the relationship.
The differences between men and women are very clear. Descriptions were significantly more likely than females to list romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite sex friendships.
This discrepancy increased as men aged.
Males on the younger end of the spectrum were four times more likely than females to report romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite sex friendships, whereas those on the older end of the spectrum were ten times more likely to do the same.
Can you perceive, can you grasp how extreme the gap, the abyss, is between men and women?
Men think that sex in a platonic relationship is a benefit. Women think it's a threat.
These studies suggest, continuous scientific Americans, that men and women have vastly different views of what it means to be just friends, and that these differing views have the potential to lead to trouble.
Although women seem to be genuine in their belief that opposite sex friendships are platonic, men seem unable to turn off their desire for something more.
Even though most genders agree overall that attraction between platonic friends is more negative than positive, males are less likely than females to hold these views and more likely to act.
So can men and women be just friends?
Sam Vaknin, can you finally answer?
It's a simple answer.
If you're a woman, yeah. If you're men, no.
It's simply.
Sexual obsession means that only women can be platonic friends of men.
Men can never be platonic friends of women.
And this is why we stand.
And this is why the fiction that men and women can be just friends, this fiction leads to really, really bad outcomes.
Cheating, adultery, infidelity, extramarital affairs, extra dyadic affairs, sexual assault, sexual harassment, breakdowns in friendships, breakdowns in relationships, divorces, all because we are denying nature. We are lying to ourselves.
Men see women as sexual objects, period. Women can see men as mere friends. Men cannot see women as mere friends.
End of story. End of story.
And this has been true for decades now.
There's a study from 2009 where males observed women to be more seductive, more promiscuous and more flirtatious than women observed men to be.
So there's a 2012 study that men are actually more likely to be sexually attracted to their female friends than their female friends were to be attracted to them.
And they are also more likely to think that their female friends were sexually attracted to them when they actually were not.
Scientific American says women too were blind to the mindset of their opposite sex friends because females generally were not attracted to their male friends.
They assume that this lack of attraction was mutual.
It's not.
It never is.
No man is safe.
Remember that.
No such thing as a safe man. That even includes family relatives.
No man is safe.
There is a good reason for the insistent and why it is enforced so strictly and harshly in many jurisdictions.
When straight men and women don't have an accurate read on how one feels about the other, things can get really weird, risky and dangerous.
So is friendship between men and women possible?
Maybe.
When the discrepancy or incompatibility is so overwhelming, so evident that the man cannot deceive himself into believing that the woman finds him attractive or irresistible.
We misread intentions all the time.
A woman loves at your jokes, stands close to you. She is not sexually interested. She just finds you funny or wishes to comfort you and to soothe you.
When a woman is sexually interested, she signals, but very often you don't read the signals as a man.
Why is that?
Misreading a friend's sexual interests can compromise a platonic relationship.
This is the biggest loss. What could have been a beautiful friendship has become a battleground.
Cross-sex friendships do exist, but I think they are limited to millennials and Gen Z.
In older generations, there must be again such a difference between the men and the women that even they would not consider to have sex.
Studies have shown that having more male friends helps straight women to have more sex.
This shows that women are deceiving themselves when they are telling themselves that the relationship is platonic.
It seems that having a male friend is sexually arousing. The sex is directed at other men.
A woman has a male friend, she spends time with him, she goes home and has sex with her boyfriend or casual sex with someone.
But this is a direct outcome of being exposed to a male presence.
You can't inhabit the same space with the opposite sex with zero sexual outcomes.
This is an absolute piece of nonsense propagated by politically correct gender studies, work movement garbage.
This is never true and never will be true. It is possible to sublimate the sex, it is possible to redirect it, it is possible to avoid sex, of course.
But the chances for a miscalculation or a misunderstanding are huge.
And the pretension that there is no sex between platonic friends, no sexual tension, no sexual arousal is counterfactual. It is not true.
Simple.
So think very well before you allow your intimate partner, female intimate partner, to have male friends with whom she crosses boundaries, has no clear rules of conduct and so on and so forth.
Something should be a no-no.
No sleepovers, no dinners, no intimate time together in his apartment.
No.
And don't let yourself be blackmailed. Don't let yourself be labeled as being jealous or whatever. This is not jealousy. This is science.