Redefining "Sexy" One Man at a Time

nobody@vox.com(Patricia Volonakis Davis) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:49:07 -0700

My last post was directed to younger women. This one is for woman who are no longer so young. But it’s not for every older woman. It’s not for those who are divorced or single and very contentedly plan to stay that way. Kudos to those women who are happy in their single state. You know who you are and you rock, girls.

No, this post is for the over-forty, single woman who says that she wants to get married, or have a partner, but, “there are no nice men out there my age.”

To those women, I say, “You’re right.”

That is, if your definition of ‘nice,’ is, “looks like George Clooney, with a body like Brad Pitt, a sense of humour like Chris Rock, the money of Warren Buffet, the gentility of a Welsh prince, the intelligence of Stephen Hawkins and the fashion sense of Michael Kors. In that case, then, you are indeed right - there are no ‘nice’ men out there your age. In fact, by that standard, there are no men any age with any chance of pleasing you.

What’s going on? I’ve been running into forty to sixty-year-old females who are acting like little girls. They will reject a perfectly wonderful man because he’s bald, or short, or has an odd laugh. One intelligent woman I know even dismissed a man who was interested in her, only because she didn’t like the shirt he was wearing!

And here’s another rather drastic example. I recently met an attractive, 56-year-old woman, beautifully groomed and in great shape. But one thing that struck me as at odds with her obviously devoted beauty regimen was that she had a perpetual look of displeasure, because of two very deep grooves that started at either side of her nose and ran right down to her chin. Lines on a 56-year-old face are normal, but these frown lines were so entrenched, they’d had to be decades in the making. My supposition turned out to be accurate, when one of the first things she said to me was, “I’ve been married thirty-three years and I’ve hated every day of it. I just can’t stand my husband.”

She went on, “But, I can’t get a divorce. There are lots of reasons to stay married.”

That might be true, but she never explained what those reasons were. And she never explained why she couldn’t stand her husband. But later in the conversation I picked up some clues, when I happened to mention that my husband likes to eat peanut butter and graham crackers for lunch, every day.

“Every day?” she asked, already frowning. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Not at all,” I said, “I just buy very big jars of peanut butter and very large boxes of graham crackers.”

I thought she’d laugh, but instead, she frowned some more and those lines on her face got as deep as the Straits of Corinth. “How do you put up with that?” she asked, seriously. “That would really annoy me.”

Then I understood. This woman had spent the last thirty years trying to make her husband over into something he hadn’t been when she’d chosen him. So, naturally she was miserable. And I bet her husband’s life was no picnic, either.

In that one conversation, I learned everything I needed to know about her idea of marriage.

And sadly, she’s not the only one. Many women are expecting some idealised, stylised, made-up version of man to show up at their doors and be a reflection of the make-believe that they’ve been carrying around since they first saw Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty when they were children. And that’s why they’re sad and/or lonely. That man they’re waiting for was invented by romance novelists and Hollywood. The Johnny Depp they’re dreaming of is a phantasm who doesn’t exist.

That’s why, with all due respect, I simply have to say, “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, because you’re missing something very big.”

Johnny Depp might be a perfectly fine human being, for all we’ll ever know, but when he’s working, he’s put together by make-up artists, a team of hair dressers and costume experts. His every move is choreographed by professionals and his every sentence is memorised from a script. If his leading lady is taller than he, they stand him on a box and the camera hides the fact that she’s crouching as she says her lines to him, while desperately trying to ignore the smell of onions on his breath from the sandwich he had at dinner break.

And yet, a real, live, breathing human male hasn’t got a chance against him with a woman who compares him to her sexual fantasies of chocolate-eating Irish gypsies, blind murderers in Mexico and pirates with bad teeth.

But a fantasy can’t hold you at night, talk over breakfast with you in the morning and grow old with you. A fantasy doesn’t listen when you talk about your dreams, your mother, your fears. A fantasy doesn’t trust you with his utmost vulnerabilities, see you as the most beautiful woman in the world.

My husband, the graham-cracker-eater, is not perfect, but he’s perfect for me. He tells me he has wrinkles, but I just can’t see them. I’m too focused on his gorgeous eyes. They reflect his joy of his everyday life with me, our children, his work, his hobbies. They glisten with compassion over the terrible things we read in the news. And at night, when we’re together, they shine like a boy’s, a boy who is unwrapping a gift he’s been waiting for all his life. With no offence to Johnny, because I love his movies, too, but I just don’t think he could pull that off every night in my bed, script or no script. Because Johnny is not in love with me, but my husband is.

Honestly? You know what I really wanted to say to Ms. Furrow-Face when she was so patently annoyed by peanut butter?

I wanted to ask her, “When was the last time you and you husband gave or received oral sex to each other and really relished it? Not just because you were horny, but because you were doing it with the one person in the world who makes you feel that nothing could possibly be better than this?”

But sadly, she’ll never feel that. Instead, she’ll spend the next thirty-three years forcing her poor sap of a mate to have a varying lunch menu every day of the week, because that’s what she thinks he should want.

Gosh, I sure hope she enjoys those lunches. And I guess, I’ll just enjoy the screaming orgasms my husband happily provides me at least four times a week. I hope those last another thirty years, too. But when they stop and it’s time for my life to end, I really, truly hope I die in his arms, with our children around me.

Knowing that he’d be there for me, till the very last, well, that’s what’s sexy to me.

Ladies who are looking for love, please listen to me - sexy, nice men are everywhere. They’re short, they’re bald, they’re old, they’re young, they’re fat, they’re skinny, they’re smart and not-so-smart, well-dressed and badly-dressed, straight and gay. They’re construction workers or business men. They’re even posting on VOX.

To illustrate, I will outline a partial list of men here, in alphabetical order, who, if I were not already in love, or if I were younger, or older, or living in their country, or if they weren’t already attached to some other lucky (and very smart) woman, I’d make a beeline for. And no matter what shirt he’s wearing, or what he eats for lunch, I’d find him sooo attractive, just because he’s HIM:

1. Ancora Impara
2. Baria
3. BlackJavaBean
4. Crowseer
5. Himanshu Gupta
6. IlliasK
7. Jack Yan
8. Jayd
9. Kirk
10. Paxton
11. Petermcc
12. Phillhellene
13. R.G. Ryan
14. Snowy
15. Steve Betz
16. Toe-Knee

Why did I pick these sixteen men? Not because they’re pirates on a dead man’s ship. Just read their blogs and their comments on other people’s blogs, and you’ll know why. They’re compassionate, passionate, family-loving, smart, sincere, insightful. They say kind things, have a world outlook, are productive human beings and caring friends. In short, “SEX BOMBS,” every last one. And there’s more where they came from, if we only look away from our movie screens and novels and out in to the real world.

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DISCLAIMER: Don’t get upset because I’m directing this post to only my sex. I know there are foolish men out there, too, who make the same mistakes when they’re looking for a woman to love. In fact, I divorced one of them.

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Look Harder

nobody@vox.com(Patricia Volonakis Davis) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:42:19 -0800

First day of school foversouls on flickr[1]

“Look harder.”

Gee…did I just hear you say that again? You’re an English teacher. Surely you must know that one can’t look “harder” at written words on a page.

One can look “longer,” delve more deeply into the meaning of those words, if one can read them, that is, but one can’t look “harder.”

Yet, at least once a week, with distaste and fury layered through your voice, you say it to one of your first-year (seventh grade) pupils.

A girl today, I see.

A twelve-year old girl, whose life is already a misery. On the edge of puberty, her breasts feel sore all the time and, much to her constant mortification, one is growing faster than the other. No matter what blouse she wears to school, this is noticeable. The boys in her class often point to her chest, whispering and laughing behind her back. She hears them and wants to die. She feels she has nothing to balance this physical “anomaly” because to her mind, the other girls in her class are so pretty and sophisticated compared to her. The other girls in her class know how to flirt, while she just gets tongue-tied. And while the other girls in her class still maintain that smooth, soft complexion of their baby years, her face is already always breaking out.

Apart from her uneven breasts and pimples, her feelings of social ineptitude, she’s “stupid,” she’s been told.

By her older brother, when she can’t read the ingredients on their box of breakfast cereal, or when, in a rush of shyness, she’s struck mute when his friends come over to visit. “Don’t pay any attention to my sister. She’s stupid,” is his way of explaining her silence to them.

Her mother agrees. Oh, not that her mother actually says the word out loud, she just looks at her daughter pityingly when shown her marks. “Well, honey,” mother sighs, “I guess not everybody can be good at school.”

But, this young girl is not “stupid.” She has dyslexia.

When you, her teacher, place this before her:

“…after he was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared…”

This is what she sees:

“…after he saw ushereb otni this worlp of worros and rtoudle, by the barisp noeqrus, ti remaineb a rettam of consiberadle boubt whether eht chilp pluow survive ot dear yna name ta all; in which esac ti si tahwemos more than bropaple taht these sriomem woulp reven have addearep…”

Yet, all throughout her seven years of schooling so far, not one person in her life has noticed. Her brother, being a child, couldn’t notice. Her mother, not having had much education herself, might not notice. But you - her teacher? Why didn’t you notice?

I know why. You really didn’t want to be a teacher, did you? You wanted to be…hmmm…let me guess…a writer? ...An actor, maybe?

And because the agents didn’t knock down your door in their enthusiasm, because the studios didn’t shower you with movie contracts, you “fell back” on teaching, didn’t you? Someone, some career counsellor somewhere, or even another teacher perhaps, advised you, “You can use your M.A degree. You just need to take a few education courses. It has great benefits and you get your summers off,” didn’t they?

And you thought about it. You thought that the salary wasn’t too bad, especially for the amount of effort you were planning to put into it. Better than being a waiter, anyway. You also realised that the teaching day, ending at 3 p.m., would give you just enough time to play at your real interests. And on a subconscious level, you knew that if you didn’t succeed at them then, you could always blame it on the fact that you, “had no time, you had to teach.”

Then the years went by, faster than you could have believed. You never got that publishing contract and Johnny Depp got all your good roles. So your disgust with Johnny, with Random House and with yourself, grew.

Eventually that disgust manifested itself into an abiding revulsion for your pupils. In particular, this little girl in front of you now, who is flushed through with agonized humiliation because, on top of everything else she thinks she should be and isn’t, she can’t read Charles Dickens and she knows you loathe her for it.

In your loathing, you'll go one step further. You will make sure all her classmates detest her for it, too:

“I can’t believe this. Are you just going to sit there? Read it. We’re all waiting for you to say something.”

I understand you believe you should be able to express what you feel, at the very least. At least, here - in a classroom full of twelve-year-olds, you are in charge. You can say whatever you want and no one can stop you, because you have tenure, another job perk of your insufferable ‘career.’ So the worst that can happen is that you’ll get a lecture from the headmaster if any one of your pupils, or their parents has the temerity to complain. Which they hardly ever do.

Last week, it was a boy. You really outdid yourself there. You managed to make him cry. In a room full of other boys his age, he cried, because of you.

And now his life at school is effectively over. He’d already been having trouble. He’s the smallest male in his class and he can’t hit, pitch, kick or dunk a ball. However, he was managing to get through with his wry sense of humour and his ability to run pretty damn fast. Now he’ll never fit in, thanks to your public, verbal flogging.

There’s good news, though. For you, anyway. You know how you so wanted to make a social impact with your literary and/or theatrical endeavours? You have. Your words and your performances will never be forgotten. You are immortalised in the minds of your pupils.

This little girl today, for instance. She’ll will always remember and be affected by you. The first time she meets someone who calls her “friend,” she’ll be so surprised and grateful, that she’ll probably be misused. Her first job promotion, she’ll feel a clenching in her stomach, as she wonders if she’s really capable of handling it. When a man tells her he loves her, there’ll always be doubt whispering in her mind, that he can’t possible mean it. And if she becomes a mother, she’ll worry far more than most, that she’s making a mess of it.

As for that boy, if he has a supportive family, he’ll make it through the next five years of school, though they’ll be hell for him. The girls will always roll their eyes when they see him coming and sidle away. He might come to hate women because of it and himself, too. And if he doesn’t have a loving family, he might decide life is not worth it and take himself out, along with some of his classmates and teachers, probably. Possibly you.

All because you and so many others like you, couldn’t respect yourself, or your pupils or the job you were hired to do. It’s a job you’ll always despise, yet one from which no one will ever be able to pull you away. And every day you’re in it, you make my job harder for me.

Haven’t you figured out who I am?

Well, maybe you should look harder, too.

I’m the English teacher across the hall. And I hear you every day.

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credits - excerpt from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, photo from 'foversouls' on Flickr- "First Day of School"

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