It is interesting when your own attraction slips to one side of “conventionally attractive” as well.
My exhusband was very slender. I like skinny, I don’t mind average, and I have had two heavy partners ( but I know my shallowness point where the distaste for fat overrides sexual attraction to the human).
I’ve tended to thinner, longer hair, less stereotypically masculine men lifelong.
The comments one hears when with these nonstandard issue men are heartbreaking.
I tend to be drawn to gentle giants. I like a big, big man. Gentle giants are use to unintentionally intimidating folks. The more socially savvy of them learn to shrink and give the impression of invisibility (something my husband has mastered) or smallness, something many exes had mastered.
I remember having a conversation in rapid decline with a man in a restaurant. It was my then-boyfriend's birthday. He was making himself small and approachable, as usual. I had invited a lot of our mutual friends, and one had brought a relative we put in a high chair. The man had been smoking though smoking was prohibited. I complained to a waitress, who asked him to smoke outside. He put the butt out in the tray of food she was carrying, and approached me. Thus, the conversation that was rapidly declining.
My boyfriend had this thing he would do. He would slowly inhale, and as he did he would take up all the vast space his body could occupy, and as he continued to inhale, there would be the illusion that having fully grown, he was beginning to shrink the room, as if breathing in actual space-time. He did this. The man yelling at me next to the flummoxed server stopped, did a double-take, and began apologizing. My dude looked more giant and less gentle than I had ever seen. After the yelling man apologized, claiming to have only just noticed the high chair at our table, and left, the mood instantly reverted. Dude was back to his much smaller seeming, effervescent, effusive, jocular version of himself. It was like a separate entity appeared if one poked my sweet bear.
My husband is jokingly refered to as a ninja by many. He appears out of thin air. He is quiet and subtle. I've seen him take everything out of a person's hands, one by one, and remain next to them for minutes before the person noticed he was there. I have heard stories from officers who said he took their keys, keys he did not have the security clearance to possess, as a prank. (Do not try that at home, kids.) My husband said he just walked up to them and took them. When he realized the officer really didn't know he had the keys, he returned them. When he wants to go unnoticed, he just does. He is nearly 6'6" and 240 pounds of invisible man.
Because my giants are gentle, people snooze on them. Young punks challenged my husband all the time when we lived hood-adjacent. They wanted to test themselves against him. I'd hear them say things like, "Yeah, he is big, but he's not hard." Some people see the truth. The security guards at the gatehouse asked me questions about him, and used to tell people not to mess with us. "That man sees everything, absorbs a lot, and you do not want to be around when he finally has had enough of your shit. Best case scenario, his wife just shoots you."
I vanish too. I can't appear out of nowhere like he does, but I can disappear like I was never there. Unfortunately, it seems to make men all the more determined to speak with me. Fortunately, when the danger is real, and I'm not just dodging unwanted attention, this skill serves well. I have watched men search for me while I hid.
you want to know which women get treated badly by “men as a group?”
Women who aren’t toadying to their attention grabbing.
Be old, heavy, unavailable, indifferent, gay, distracted, too intelligent to fall for false flattery, hard of hearing (or pretending to be), reading in public, listening to anything on earbuds in public, busy with a task, or generally not responding.
I think what "unattractive" women and unavailable women have in common is that men do not want them. It is more accurate to say unwanted women get shit on by some men all day every day.
I remember a dude told me off because I said I had to catch the express bus and couldn't stop to talk. I was so shocked I did stop in my tracks for just a moment. I was dating my husband at that time. I hadn't wanted to stop long enough to explain that. I said nothing, just stood still for a few seconds before resuming my hurry to catch my bus. As I ran, huffing, puffing, and dragging along my heavy suitcase, I thought about how handsome that guy had appeared. I'd noticed him from half a block away. I wondered how a man that good looking could be that bitter over a rejection as polite and practical as, "Hi, I can't talk. I'm about to miss the express bus. Good day!" thrown over the shoulder of an obviously speeding, busy woman. The moment has stuck with me.
I've definitely had men pretend I didn't exist after I rejected them. I have also been treated like I wasn't there when men were interested in my exceptionally beautiful best friend. Um... Hello?! What do you believe she thinks of you if you cannot be polite to one of her favorite people in the world? So funny. I remember men used to tell me I was jealous of her. This one dude walked into a telephone pole because he was staring at her. While she laughed hysterically (I laughed too; it was unbelievably funny) I ran over to see if he was okay. I asked if he needed first aid, and told him he was bleeding. He told me off. The madder he got, the harder we laughed. Couldn't be helped. The harder we laughed, the madder he got.
Another category of unwanted women? Women in front of whom men have been embarrassed.
