I look around at the concentrate, asphalt, stainless steel, iron, rust and aluminum siding at the 7-11 and I see the most unnatural place in time, a place without even a wooden board or real stone, barren even of the manmade false stones known as bricks.
So, is it any surprise that this grossest of materialistic life matrices leaves the reader unable to look past their consumptive conditioning?
This makes writing fiction without engaging in grotesque levels of exposition and have it intelligible to the normal—forget average—reader almost impossible. The ability to read symbolically, metaphorically and to grasp subtext has been relentlessly scrubbed from our collective mind in quest of the perfect malleable voting consumer mind.
Here is one example.
I recently posted an article in which I described a pretty and well-formed young woman, who is a Christian missionary and was dressed like a boy, in a hooded jacket on a sweltering night. After blessing me and the bus driver she fled into the night with her Bible pressed to her breasts.
My editor took me to task for mentioning her breasts, thinking I meant it salaciously, when all I was doing was indicating—without a paragraph of explanation—that she was trying to conceal her body, the fact that she was a woman, and I covered this act with the same brief elegance that life gave it, as it was, without explaining it.
Our perceptive is so warped by our consumption-faded-puritan-neo-Judaic, sex-obsessed society that even a language teacher who is a committed counter culture thinker can't see past the physical form.
Then, another woman who reads my site, emails me and complains that I mention that the Walmart employee—a good, conservative girl, who kept her smock on to conceal her shape even as she sat next to the old white man for protection—had C-cup breasts, and she did.
Why need I notice that and why mention it in an example concerned with rating a woman seeking protection according to her level of risk?
It comes down to knowing what all men like in a woman in terms of physicality. When you are in the presence of that woman you know that men and their idiot ways will e drawn to her like nail to a magnet. Her level of sex appeal is key to her level of risk.
Some men do not like large breasts: Ds, Es, Gs, ect.. Although Big Ron and I do not understand this, we recognize it as a fact.
Some men do not like flat chested women or A-cups.
Some men are not attracted to small-breasted women or B-cups.
But C-cups, or rather suggestively sized to indicate fertility and destined to increase with nursing, is wired into the male brain as universally attractive. You will be hard put to find a heterosexual man from any culture who turns his nose up from a woman because she has young, perky, natural, C-cup sized breasts.
Particularly, the young woman, whose breasts are not small, yet not large, is of particular lizard brain interest to the knuckleheads of the world, from Genghis Khan's troopers to the thug who was ogling, glaring and berating the Walmart clerk for not being receptive to her advances.
But all this female reader could think of was that I was behaving like some sex touring degenerate with breast calipers.
Such is the culturally ingrained blindness engendered by the dualistic consumerist/puritanical society to render us maladaptive to risk and unable to predict outcomes—the perfect bleating sheep.
Under the God of Things
Hey, maybe next we should start another website, the James LaFond women's lifestyle blog: recipes, craft projects, how to style your necklaces and scarves together without clashing, household cleaning tips (my favorite), and repeatedly declaring all women to be exactly equally beautiful.
Seriously, it this Man Gear project breaking records for female objections?
Lynn-
I's said it befo' an' I's say it again -
Men Are Hugely Visual To A Degree That Women Can't Figure Out.
Remember in the first "Bourne" movie how Bourne (before he knew who he was) couldn't figure out HOW he could just glance around the cafe and automatically remember every license plate number in the parking lot, knew that the man at the bar weighed 215 pounds and could handle himself, knew that the waitress was left-handed, and knew the best place to find a gun was the cab of the gray truck outside?
Men are like that about women. My wife today asked me if I remembered the granddaughter of a friend who had just passed away. She said I had last seen her at a wedding last month. I couldn't remember her at all until my wife mentioned the shirt she was wearing. And THEN, I remembered that the girl weighed about 110 pounds, had a nice figure, a 32" inseam, and was about a 34A. My brain had stored all that even though I have absolutely no nefarious designs on anyone's teenager.
It's wired in. You'll only hear it from evil guys with no impulse control, OR from decent guys, in places like this, where we're honestly talking about The Way Things Are rather than The Way Things Should Be ...
Thanks, LaMano, that is more or less what I got out of it. No offense taken here.