Dan Griffin addresses the conflation of sex and intimacy communicated to men in our culture:
If you are a heterosexual man, how many times have you felt close to another man and held back from expressing those feelings? Said differently, how many men feel attraction to or affection for a man and recoil or instinctively distance themselves, if only momentarily, from the man because they are not able to separate the feeling of affection or closeness from sex.
I could do without the stereotyping of male and female attitudes toward sex and love in the first paragraph, but it’s hard to deny that American males typically inherit a stunted concept of intimacy.
Via The Good Men Project.