@filmfann But doesn’t your experience speak volumes about what some people take “treating women with respect” to be? If your girlfriend wanted sex, but you thought having sex with her would be disrespectful, then we have gone beyond respecting her and her boundaries and into paternalism (“tut, tut… I know what’s good for you better than you do, and it isn’t sex”). It winds up being disrespect masked as respect. I find it very interesting how difficult it can be to teach young boys boundaries without making them think that all women are frigid.
Just to be clear: I’m not trying to say anything bad about you or your parents here. I think this can just be a genuinely difficult thing to teach young boys no matter what. It may even be that we—the (once) young boys—are the ones who misinterpreted what our parents were saying, interpreting it as more dire than they intend because we lacked a context through which we could relate to what was being said (if we were taught very young) or because we had already formulated our own ideas based on media impressions and peers (if we were taught later in life).
@Blackberry But when she says “it’s okay to disrespect me,” surely what she means is “you’re being overly prudish for my tastes and need to break through some of your misconceptions about women.” She doesn’t want to be disrespected—not genuinely, at least, though perhaps she might want you to act as if you do as part of some fantasy—but rather wants you to stop acting on certain ideas of what it takes to respect women.