note: this is dedicated to BainsBane of Skins’s island, with the hope that she might like it better than my previous offering. However, before going any further, I need to remind her that a man judges a woman not by looks alone; her character, her values, and her conduct count for a great deal, overshadowing what the eyes see.franksolich discusses aesthetics. The neighbor’s wife was here this morning, with her infant 10-month-old daughter. The neighbor himself had taken the other kids--the 12-year-old twin girls, the 11-year-old eager young lad, and the 4-year-old second son--way down to Grand Island, for one event or another this morning. I was told what the event was, but didn’t catch it, and let it go.
The neighbor’s wife is 41 years old, about a head shorter than I am. She was born and raised in suburban Kansas City, and went to college to become a dental hygienist. She did in fact become one, but then met the neighbor, married him, and moved up here to the roof of Nebraska.
Surprisingly for a city girl, she took to this place like a duck to water, over the years having become an accomplished horsewoman. Horses bore her husband (“the neighborâ€), and as I’m rarely doing anything important, I instead of him go with her when she’s involved with riding.
Despite having borne five infants, she remains a very slender woman. The only “minus†is her reddish-blonde hair; I dunno why, but I never liked red-heads, and in fact can be fearful of them at times--probably some long-ago forgotten trauma from childhood or something.
When riding a horse across the meadows on a rainy autumn afternoon--myself sitting in the cab of a pick-up truck watching, in case she falls off and gets hurt--she reminds one very much of the young Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth I of England, enchanting her spectator awed and speechless.
She’s a very nice, gentle person with a pleasing smile and merry chortle, but that’s not why I favor her as much as I do, which is a lot. She’s also a person whose face and body-language is easy to read, no small matter for a deaf person.
When I truly need to understand what’s going on, I immediately go to her to get illuminated.
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“Why is it that
some women think men are turned on by big jugs?†I asked her, even before she sat down.
“Oh no,†she said; “it’s that woman on the internet, and you’re going to write about it.â€
“Don’t worry,†I replied, knowing what her concern was. “Just tell me what you know, and if you don’t want me to write about it, tell me, and I’ll leave out those details.
“So…..why is it that
some women think men are turned on by big jugs?â€
She told me, but didn’t want me to write about it, and so I won’t.
“That’s ridiculous,†I said; “at least to
some of we men, jugs way out of proportion to one’s size make a woman not an object of lust, but a circus sideshow freak.
“Aesthetics is in some sort of proper proportion.â€
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“Well, I suppose it might have something to do with one’s orientation and experiences with one’s mother,†she offered, insight with which I heartily agreed.
“I never paid attention to that aspect of my mother,†I told her; “after I was about three months old, or whenever it is an infant’s broken of breast-feeding, such things became of no interest to me.
“But you’ve seen photographs of her--she’s been dead for so long that while I of course think of her all the time, I no longer remember
exactly what she looked like--and as those pictures show, she was properly proportioned, everything exactly the right size. Not too big, not too small, just exactly the right size.â€
“Well then,†the neighbor’s wife said, “perhaps if you examined why you’re attracted to a certain sort of woman--â€
“[the
femme]â€--who’s about the same size as the neighbor’s wife--“is exactly, precisely, to the last little detail, perfect in proportion in all things,†I interrupted.
“But don’t go thinking I’m attracted to her simply because she’s aesthetic,†I added.
- - - - - - - - - -
The neighbor’s wife offered some other illumination, but didn’t want to be quoted, so I’ll leave it alone.
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“It’s weird,†I said, “that
some people are actually turned on by grotesque distortions.
“Okay, let me look at something,†I added, after which I went and found my senior-year high school annual, flipping over to the pages showing my class.
“We had 101 students in my graduating class; it was the largest class, ever and since.
“The peculiar oddity about it was that there were 68 boys and 33 girls; I dunno why it ended up that way, but that’s the way it was.
“My guess is that about a third of the class was
originally from one-room country grade-schools, and rural areas, it seems, tend to breed more males than females.
“If one wanted a date, one swiped a girl from one or two classes below, as they seemed better ratio’d in the matter of genders, although it was a pretty hard-and-fast rule that one didn’t date a girl more than two years younger than oneself.
“My date for proms and parties and somesuch was a girl a year younger than myself, a petite brown-haired brown-eyed pale-skinned aquiline-nosed
femme with long, slender fingers.
“I used to have a ’system’ for rating the aesthetics of women, and she was a 9.203 on a scale from 1 to 10.
“Don’t make too much of that, though,†I reminded the neighbor’s wife, flipping through the pages of the annual. “The Sandhills tend to breed good-looking women, and rarely did I rate a woman below 8.517.
“What kept her from being ranked higher was that in height, she barely came up to halfway up my upper arm; she wasn’t
real short, but she was short.
“She always went out with me because her cousin was my best friend. She later married a big cattleman out there, and prospered and flourished. He was twenty-seven years older than her, and left her a rich widow before she was even forty.
“I suppose she could’ve done better than having to settle for either of us, if she’d just been taller.
“But look,†I said, pointing to the full-page photographs of the library club, the cheerleaders, the home economics club, the yearbook staff, the National Honor Society, &c., &c., &c., “see how all these girls, my age, a year younger, two years younger, were well-proportioned, everything on them exactly the right size, nothing too big, nothing too little.
“We had one fat girl in my class--after which one had to dip down into the eighth grade to find a second fat girl--but even though elephantine (and masculine-looking), everything on her was the right size for her heft, nothing too big, nothing too little, nothing out of whack.
“See?--even her jugs were
exactly right for her weight.â€
- - - - - - - - - -
The neighbor’s wife, who’s a decade younger than me, took the annual and flipped through it, commenting, “People were really small back then--and this wasn’t
that long ago.â€
“Right,†I said; “I grew up during the end of an era; food stamps, fast food, and promiscuously-prescribed pharmaceuticals had been around for a while, but hadn’t yet gotten a stranglehold on daily life and popular culture, fattening people up.â€
I showed her an old
National Geographic book, published in the mid-1970s and with lots and lots of color photographs, which featured the Ozarks of southern Missouri; Springfield, Joplin, &c., &c., &c.
“Look at these people, how they looked in the early and mid-1970s--how many fat people do you see?â€
I went through the photographs, and pointed my finger. “See? There’s one single solitary sole old woman who’s fat. A white woman. There’s no black people who were fat back then. These pictures show a large number of people…..and only one fat person.
“I’ve never been down to Joplin--it’s too far south for me--but I suspect nowadays, there’s more than one fat person in Joplin. There’s probably scads of them, their bodies bloated and distorted because of all of the drugs they take.â€
She looked, and agreed with me.
“Teenagers these days are more bloated than we ever were,†I continued; “I was one of the larger kids in my class, a little under 6’3†and with a 32†waistline. I felt fat; there were lots of boys in my class, usually from out in the country, who wore jeans with big labels advertising 28†waistlines, and a girl less than two feet in circumference wasn’t all that rare.
“One time, my mother commented how easy it was to buy clothes for my younger brother and me, as compared with for the older brothers and sisters, who’d been born and raised in New York, and who were shorter and chunkier than her two youngest Nebraska-born-and-bred sons.
“What’d prompted the comment was that she’d had to get 30-30 pants for my younger brother, having previously gotten 28-28s and 26-26s--leg-length and waist. And I’d worn 32-32s since the eighth grade, and was to continue wearing 32-32s for decades to come.
“Talk about the right proportions, everything being exactly the right size.â€