Sorry if it's not the right circle for this, I'll remove if needed.

So a friend's boyfriend starts telling a story. It was really funny, according to him, and everyone was going to laugh themselves silly.

He says he's walking home after dark and stopped to light up a cigarette. A girl (he specifically said girl, so I'm assuming she was young, maybe even a teen) walked past him with her dog. He resumed his walking right after, and the girl looked back at him with a suspicious expression. She turned left and coincidentally he also turned left. She starts looking back more often, looking scared. This is an empty, dark street, so he got a brilliant idea for a prank.

He started following her. The girl slowed down to see if he would pass her, and he says he slowed down too, just to "fuck with her". Then the girl started walking faster and he kept pace with her. He says he even went out of his way home just to keep following her, and followed her all the way home. The girl kept looking back more and more scared. Then when she went inside he says he stood outside her door "for good measure" until someone opened the window (he didn't say, but I'm assuming it was an adult, possibly the girl's father) and only then did he leave.

Everyone, even the other men, just stared at him while he laughed at this story. He found it hilarious how scared she was of him. Me and the other women told him it wasn't funny at all, that the girl had a legitimate reason to be scared.

He got offended and repeated it was just a joke, and that he only did it because she got suspicious of him for no reason. He went on a tirade about how women are always expecting the worst of men, and that she was scared of him when he didn't even do anything. We pointed out that he actively started following her and not only did he do nothing to show he wasn't a threat (like passing her and leaving her alone) he escalated his threatening presence.

That's when the other men started taking his side. While most of them agreed that what he did was stupid, they said it wasn't a man's fault if a woman gets scared if he didn't actually do anything. We pointed out that she was only being cautious at first, like every woman on the planet is taught to be, but the first guy just kept being offended that she thought she has to be cautious in the first place because he didn't do anything threatening to her, he just happened to be going the same way.

Also, even the men who told him he did a stupid thing were more concerned about him and his safety, telling him he could have gotten the cops called on him or her dad could have to beat his ass, and didn't seem to care at all that the poor girl was terrified. They were also visibly uncomfortable when the women continued to point out that any woman would react the same way, and that she was right to be suspicious.

I don't know, I decided to post here because the absolute ignorance this man displayed was just shocking to me. Not to mention the fact that they dare to be offended that a girl was scared of a man following her. The discussion at the table only ended when one of the guys asked the first guy how he'd feel if a group of gangbangers followed him down a dark alley. The guy said it's not the same, because he doesn't look like a thug, and the conversation took some racist turns then but he finally conceded that "maybe" he scared the girl.