I honestly don't think I'm repressing any shame or embarrassment. I'm a sexual freak and I'm quite proud of it. I do feel like men have to walk on egg shells at the moment, somewhat, and it's annoying having to cage myself. Are you male or female? (I'm curious.)
I am male, and overall very happy to be so.
Whether or not you're repressing anything with regards to your own sexual expression, I think by definition, you are experiencing guilt and embarrassment in this instance about having looked, whether or not you actually did anything wrong. Guilt, by definition, is "a feeling of responsibility for some offence, real or imagined" and you clearly do feel
responsible, in that, you feel you have an obligation to control your behaviour (whether this obligation is justified, or not). I will go a little further here and say that you clearly are somewhat embarrassed by it, despite your repeated claims otherwise, as you have not told your wife, and have made this thread. I won't bother going over the definition of embarrassment too, but I will say that the social conditioning men experience from Western culture is different to women, and one of the consequences of this conditioning (just speaking in a general sense here - not saying it applies to you specifically) is that men (again, generally speaking - not saying it applies to you) are less inclined to express certain emotions, and
more inclined to express these emotions as anger. You can draw your own conclusions from this, of course.
So you are annoyed about the fact that you have to control certain urges. On the face of it, fair enough, but remember this responsibility is shared by everyone within our culture. Speaking from the perspective of your wife's friend, perhaps she had a similar internal conflict going on after this, and found herself annoyed at herself for getting nervous about you looking at her breasts. Perhaps she would have liked to say something funny about it or just accept it as an implied compliment without all the negative stuff, but found herself frustratingly unable to do so. Perhaps because of these negative feelings, she found herself questioning whether she should have worn something less revealing, but understandably found this thought frustrating in itself.
This might seem obvious of course, but I mention it because it's a slippery slope to being frustrated that our society is not culturally more evolved so that these kind of non-events are just a total non-issue, and being frustrated specifically with women and feminism (I use the term feminism in the most general sense possible here - not in reference to any specific movement) and starting to think that perhaps you are just
entitled to behave however you want because of basic biology, and that you should be able to look where you want, maybe
touch what you want, regardless of whether it makes other people uncomfortable.
I could elaborate on that slippery slope further although I'm sure I don't need to. Hopefully the point is clear, and I don't mean any offence to you, obviously I don't know you, and I would like to assume that you made this thread out of genuine uncertainty about your feelings and a wish to analyse them, rather than a desire to be given
permission to act like a "creep" - and I'm sure similar threads have been made in the past by others from the latter camp.
Anyway, going back to my point about the slippery slope, this is what I meant when I said that letting this feeling of annoyance go unchecked can lead you down a dark road. If the target of your annoyance is the former - annoyance that our culture is just not more evolved - this is really an annoyance at all the repressive, backwards ideologies of human history that
made sexuality such a taboo subject in the first place, and I would say is quite valid and understandable.
The latter target, annoyance at women specifically, leads you down the dark road of Men's Rights movements, and all the bitterness and negativity associated with them (not that men's rights are not important of course - just that I've never seen any kind of "movement" that didn't make my skin crawl. For the record, I am feeling the need to be very specific about what I am referring to here because I know some gender warrior is going to jump down my throat otherwise - when I reference "feminism" above, I mean "feminism", lower case "F", just the idea women should have a say - "Men's Rights", capital "M" - I am referring to any number of specific movements which from what I've seen often promote some pretty dangerous ideas, the essence of which being that men are entitled
not to control themselves around women).
Again, not saying this is where you are - by focusing on it here I'm just hoping to outline some of the reasons why some people might have a knee jerk reaction (one way or the other - men and women alike) when you start talking about, essentially, being annoyed about having to control yourself around women.