Becoming “Presentable”
As a very young woman, I was a “hot mess.” I mean, high school was very stressful for me. My parents were in the middle of a very acrimonious divorce, I had worn braces for four years by then (headgear and all). I was a hulking five foot ten inches tall, and the boys hadn’t really developed all that much yet. I was a reader, and in high school, that’s the definition of “nerd.” It was so bad that I didn’t even get asked to prom. Not like when you impress everyone by having a junior ask out a sophomore girl. Two years—no offers. At the time, it didn’t matter to me too much because my family didn’t have extra money for prom dresses, and it was just easier this way. I did what any self-respecting nerd would do: I acted like I was so mature that I wasn’t interested in banal high school stuff. But that wasn’t really it. And that, my friend, took me way too long to admit to myself.
By the time I was a junior in college, I had lost some weight, learned how to wear a little makeup, and figured out my hair (as best as a curly-haired girl can). I became what I consider to be “presentable.” I had gone from maybe a three or four in high school to a good solid six. I’ve never considered myself beautiful or good-looking, but I was just what would reasonably be considered to be “presentable.” You know, no longer repulsive. I could fit in with a group of friendly, optimistic, popular girls pretty easily. And when it happened, I could have never imagined the reaction from men—not in a million years. Men began to act in very strange ways toward me. Suddenly, men were watching me everywhere I went. I’ve gotta be honest, incognito is more fun. They would pick things up for me if I dropped them. If I missed class, I got at least three copies of the notes from male classmates. I always used my girlfriends’ notes—women just take better notes. What can I tell you? I found that it was becoming very easy to get what I wanted from men with little more than a bright smile and a certain particular angle of the head.
So, this is where I think things began to go awry for me. When I discovered this, I was very intrigued, to say the least. I mean, this was real power in every sense of the word. I wanted to see how far this thing would go. Some people would call this being a manipulative bitch. I never thought of it that way. I always thought of it as more of a science experiment. I mean, we’ve all seen that video where a guy smacks himself on a light pole because he’s being controlled by a young woman. What would men actually do for me—or any woman, for that matter? That’s when I began to make demands. I once had a group of five 50-60-year-old overweight men move approximately fourteen sets of tables and chairs from a dance floor—just because they wanted to sit down in a few moments and watch a group of 20-ish women writhe. They were even eager to move them once I asked! I thought one of them was going to have a heart attack. I mean, they’re so easy! I once ran a cart into a guy at the grocery store. I noticed he had been kind of creeping on me, so I watched back, then snuck around and rammed him. It wasn’t enough to knock him down—I’m not an animal! But it had to hurt. At the end of that encounter, he apologized to me for being in the way. I did have to give him a fake phone number (you could do that before cell phones). He actually apologized to me when it was, in every sense, my fault. That’s when it happened, I began to lose respect for mankind. I mean that in the literal sense, mankind, as opposed to womankind. I hate it when people use that word otherwise. I began ordering men about like so many monkey pawns. I know now that is wrong, but in my defense, it was never mean-spirited on my part—it was gathering data. And I was always astonished! I mean it was absolutely astounding! But it is wrong and I have endeavored to become the kind of person who does not do this in the future, because it is very, very wrong. I know this because I’ve had people explain it to me. More than once. But seriously, I don’t know why my response wasn’t expected. When you combine an underdeveloped young mind with an easy route to vast powers like that. How could it not become a bit of an obsession? This is exactly what happens when a young girl becomes “presentable.”
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