Quote: (07-13-2014 03:19 PM)speakeasy Wrote:
...Why's she being attacked? She's not coming off as a raging entitled feminist. She's almost 60. She's aging. It's nobody's fault that they get old and are less attractive than they were at their prime. No point in berating people for something they have no choice about. I'm sure it's no revelation to her or her female readers that men crave younger bodies. I didn't see her lambasting men for that preference....
She did, though. She calls his words "vicious" and says that he inflicted "hurt and horror" on her. She treats his lack of attraction for a wrinkled, short-haired 59-year-old woman as just an idiosyncratic "idea of what female sexual perfection should be." She calls her body "beautiful" and claims to feel "sickly sorry" for the "sad man" who said otherwise. (Btw, where is the evidence that Dave, an interesting, intelligent, gentlemanly man of 55 with sexual access to younger women, is sad?)
She's firmly in the camp of those who claim that every body is beautiful, that it is wrong for men to express any preference for women with the signs of youth and fertility evolution designed us to pursue. When she gets sexually rejected by a man, she attacks him. Come to think of it, she's the female version of a "creepy nice guy." She feels entitled to sex from Dave because they went on some bike rides together.
At the end of the piece she has learned nothing. She hasn't decided to refocus on being a grandmother or on dating men closer to 70 (to whom she might be a catch.) She shows no understanding that this is the tradeoff for the years when she could have any man she wanted. No, it is Dave who is sad, Dave who fails to see her beauty, Dave who needs to change. Classic hamsterism.