Livre d'Or

Just processing this a bit, so the comment may not entirely make sense.

how much of the 'not being able to say no to women' isn't directly fear of women but fear of other men's judgment should it get out?

There is also the fear of mockery, and being reduced to nothing but one's sexual organs.

And then there is the direct fear of violence that you mention, that again has a lot to do with other men finding out, as well as the fear of harm.

I think therefore the PR campaign you mention in your ETA2 needs to look at gossip as a wider thing - toxic femininity as much as toxic masculinity.

In one of the comments above there's a mention of the Adonian's - an all male drinking&dining society based at my Cambridge college where older men preyed upon younger men - all over 18, but seldom over 21 while the older men were in their 50s and 60s in some cases. To the younger men involved it was a badge of honour - it was about patronage as the old men had Connections. We were disturbed by it at the time, but male sexual culture shrugged it off. In a college that was 80% male and with a significant number of bi and gay men among that, it would be very difficult to show how wrong this was, and to get across the disservice they were doing.

To the younger men, most of whom had gone through English public school and enjoyeddured things like the biscuit game, and similar, they saw it as their birthright to have this patronage, that they older men should be interested in them.

I went to a Minor English public school - it had gone co-ed about a year before I joined, and they weren't able to cope with me very well - they wanted the girls to be nice femme types, and I wasn't - I learnt the confidence and the assertiveness from them, and gave as good as I got. There were very toxic ideas about what feminism was and wasn't, but the teacher who did the most for dispelling the toxic masculinity was an English teacher named Mr Heaven. He challenged people on consent culture, and what it meant to be truly feminist. (that he constantly had affairs with female teachers was the one blot on his copybook)

In other words, I was at a school where the grooming culture was being undone, and Mr Heaven and others were trying to move the school to being a lot less toxic, and by all reports they seem to have succeeded. getting a new head who created his own senior team also helped.

College was the second to last to go co-ed, but because of its location remained far more male dominated than the last to go co-ed who were at parity by the time I was an undergrad, and had stripped out the more egregrious anti-women sentiments which my college hadn't. My college was a hotbed of Conservatism - it produced Portillo and Michael Howard among other leading lights of the Tory party as well as some American & Australian Neocons - but there was a lot of homophobia that needed unpicking, because the model of relationships that organisations like the Adonians offered was about power and not about love.