u/endlessicbs

A couple years back, a dog that I (m37) had raised and lived with for fifteen years passed away. She had a good and long life, I’d had her since she was two, but it was still a really hard time. I’m gay which would normally not be relevant to my pets or my grief but is relevant to this story so saying it now.

Anyway, Layla (my dog) had been a whippet and beagle mix and maybe a week after she died I was out in a public park and I saw a young woman walking a whippet, who looked similar to Layla but skinnier and taller. Without thinking I said (to the dog), “Hello there beautiful” at which point the woman walking the dog started walking away, a very reasonable response to a complete stranger with blue hair saying this.

But this is where I fucked up, because I tried to explain myself in a moment of panic, as catcalling is a thing a lot of my friends who are women have told me is really unpleasant to experience and I didn’t want to make someone uncomfortable in public in that way. So in my panic I tried to say “I would never catcall” and “I meant your dog was beautiful” at the same time. And what came out was “Oh, I would never call you beautiful.” At which point this young woman walked away more quickly and I realized I just had to let this one go.

I’ve seen this woman around the neighborhood since and have not approached her, for obvious reasons. I think I’m just gonna have to live with this person thinking I’m a creepy straight dude who’s also kind of a dick.

TL;DR: When I saw a dog who looked similar to the dog I had, had who just passed away, I tried talking to said dog and instead was super creepy to the poor woman just trying to walk her pet.

Tagging as not safe for work, although I don’t know if it counts no one was having sex in this story but it is a story about a sex scene in a book. But just to be safe.

I (m35), am the youngest of three siblings by over a decade and as a result have always had a really close relationship with my nieces and nephews, which has for most of their lives been very tied to books. I read to them before they could read and gave them all my favorite books as they were growing up. This is most pronounced with my oldest niece who I’ll call S (f15), who is like me is the most avid reader of her generation and also very much loves fantasy, and sci-fi. So a couple years back, S was having a time where she wasn’t super comfortable with explicit sexuality in media. I had read a book that I really loved called “All the Birds in the Sky” by Charlie Jane Anders, which was I think the only romance novel I have ever really loved in large part because most of the book is sort of a love letter between the genres of science fiction and fantasy. However this book had one sex scene which took up like half of a page, and wasn’t all that relevant to the plot. So I decided I would give this book to S, but let her know about that scene, mark where it was in the book and let her know that she could skip that page if she didn’t want to engage with it and it didn’t really matter for actual plot and structure of the novel.

But where I seriously fucked up, is unthinkingly I had this conversation with S in front of her little sister who was 12 at this point in time. I didn’t say it was about sex in front of the 12 year old I said it was “adult content” but S knew what I meant as we had talked about this previously. Little sister, I’ll call E, didn’t say anything during this exchange. I didn’t think anything of it.

The next day they went to see my sister’s in laws who are from a very large upper middle class Chinese American family in the suburbs. Apparently during this visit when a bunch of the family was over E went into S’s bag and grabbed this book, apparently curious as what “adult content” might be, and brought the book to her grandmother to ask her if she would read it to her, starting at the exact page I had marked in advance.

Cut to me getting a call from my older sister that started with “Can you PLEASE explain to me why I just had to witness my mother in-law describe someone’s cock to a room full of Chinese Americans?”

S has never read this novel and told me she never will, which is very much fair.

TL;DR: I tried to give my niece the option about whether or not she read a single sex scene in an otherwise not very sexy novel. But I didn’t account for her younger sister’s curiosity and inadvertently forced more than a dozen people to hear this scene read aloud.