I think ladies are nice

I came across (Easy Tiger) an old Facebook post just now... Originally posted by me on the 2nd November 2015. It struck me as odd that I'd published it as a Facebook post rather than a blog post - And I'm sure I must have had my reasons at the time... I'm buggered if I remember why it was - Maybe I did post it as a blog and I just can't find it. Maybe someone called me a Misogynist?

Seems unlikely though.

It's about ladies, and lovely they are - It's only short, but in my defence, it is currently quite cold, weather-wise

As ever, let me know if you have 'Views'

-oOo-

You know what I've never understood? I've never understood why a heterosexual male finding women attractive is in some way wrong. (I'm going to take a second to apologise to all the non heterosexuals, and non males out there... Usually I'm all about inclusion and suchlike, but I'm sure you have your own struggles that are equally valid and confusing - but it's just not what I'm talking about here)

What I'm talking about is how, on those occasions where a female person presents themselves objectively, (i.e. as an object of sublime beauty, perhaps in a provocative photograph or similar) the observer can be labelled as perverse for reacting in exactly the way it was intended for them to react.

Maybe I'm too old-fashioned, maybe I've taken my affected anachronism too far... Maybe I'm just missing something that is glaringly obvious to a more educated person but... Why is acknowledging something as beautiful as the female human form as actually being beautiful, wrong?

I'm not talking about pornographic images... They service a specific 'need' I suppose. I don't mean naked pictures either. Nor do I mean the 'lowest common denominator' amateur glamour shot as you'd see in lads mags (boobs and teeth sweetie, boobs and teeth - make love to the camera... Knees apart so we can catch a glimpse of your 2 for 1 Primark panties - no... leave the tags on, it'll be fine)

I mean a staged shot, of a beautiful woman, perhaps in an exotic setting, perhaps astride a powerful motorcycle - designed specifically to be attractive to heterosexual men...

Am I somehow less of a person because of my knee-jerk reaction? (finding my chosen complementary sex attractive) am I a misogynist proto-rapist for not acknowledging the struggle behind the scenes, the tears of the young lady in question as she brought up a young child on her own after being abandoned by her parents due to some imagined slight on their part?

I like women, women are great, there are women I find physically attractive, there are women I find psychologically attractive, there are women I find emotionally attractive (if I know you, and you tick two of those boxes, we have probably had some kind of relationship in the past... If you tick all three, I'm probably married to you as we speak) but why-oh-why am I considered to be a sad old pervert for finding someone attractive?

I know that I'd never have a physical relationship with these women, I'm fat and bald and almost 50 and to be honest, I'm not sure I could stand the drama anymore, but that's not the point... I know that none of these people would never even pick me out of a lineup if the question was 'if you had to be intimate with a man or be shot in the face by a terrorist which would you pick'. It's an entirely one-way, meaningless in the grand scheme of things, thing - so why is it so terrible? Does the interest have to be reciprocated to validate it?

If it is, then that's a really high bar... And I'm not sure anyone could clear it.

If I'm missing something, let me know... I'd love for this mystery to be solved

Let loose The Kraken Th'Noo

Long time readers will know that I sometimes make and wear kilts, both in the classic Tartan pattern, and in the more specialist PVC, for the discerning wearer attending special events.  They're very liberating, especially when worn 'traditionally' and can be a source of boundless hilarity at the higher end of the Beaufort Scale.

It all started about ten years ago, when a good friend of mine decided, for one reason or another, to get married in full Scottish dress, I looked at the prices at the wedding suit hire place and thought 'Bugger that' and decided to make my own.  It's not hugely difficult, you just need 8 or 9 yards of material, put a few pleats in it, bang on a waistband, hack a couple of belts apart for the fastenings and One Eyed Murdo that lives in the croft up the road's your Uncle.

You have to be pretty confident to get away with it though, certainly in England.  I get abuse shouted at me occasionally by the odd white-van man as they drive past at speed, cleverly forgetting about that time that they dressed as Ginger Spice, edible thong and all, for 'Our Chardonnay's 13th Birthday party.'

But the positive responses far outweigh the negative.  You have to be carefull of course, I mean, there's the whole 'crossing your legs' minefield (Am I right ladies?) and if you're sitting on a low seat, knees akimbo, and there's someone directly opposite you... Well, watch their eyeline to see if you're accidentally doing your 'Last turkey in the shop' impression. You also need to be aware of a little something that I like to call 'Unsolicited female attention'.

Now, being:

a) An average bloke

b) Not a male model by any stretch of the imagination

c) Not rich

d) Not young

e) Not famous

I don't normally tend to get followed around by clouds of adoring females trying to let loose the Dandy Kraken, but when I'm all kilted-up... Well, that's a different kettle of HRT therapy,  I've lost track of the number of times that I've been ruthlessly assaulted by hordes of (presumably Kraken-Starved) middle aged women, or hen parties, in pubs - And it pretty much always plays out the same way.

• I'll walk into a bar (I've been told that I tend to throw the double doors open and strut into bars like Frank 'n' Furter facing into a wind machine, or Michael Jackson in the video for 'Bad' , when I'm in the kilt - thinking about it, It's possible that I bring some of this attention on myself) and heads will turn.

• Men wearing football shirts will shake their heads, mutter 'F'kin homo inna skirt' under their breath and try not to make eye contact from that point on, because they'll immediately turn gay, obviously. (Ignoring for a second that I'm a heterosexual as a Grizzly Bear with a Chainsaw, jumping out of a burning Lancaster Bomber eating a dinosaur drumstick with mushroom gravy.)

• Women, usually groups of women with between 5 and 8 members will nudge each other and point as I walk to the bar, there may be the occasional quiet 'Och Aye th'noo' Which I can quite happily ignore, with me not being particularly Scottish.

• The people I am with will shake their heads in a 'Not a-bloody-gain' way get their drinks and wander off to find a table.

• There'll be an 'Excuse me' or 'Are you Scottish?' from behind me, they mostly come at you from behind you see... Mostly...  So I turn around and see a female person, who has probably had a few more Bacardi Breezers or WKDs than is strictly good for them, and is slightly red around the cheeks, and has been styled by Vivienne at Primark.

• I turn around and say 'Aye?' - Meaning 'What can I do for you, lady who would probably be quite pretty if you weren't wearing the entire Boots No.7 display counter and if you had drawn your eyebrows on when you were still sober?'

• They then invariably ask, 'Are you... you know?' and stare at my Gentlemans' Area - It doesn't help that I don't wear a sporran either.  Because I invariably wear a jacket with pockets, and Scotsmen will tell you that that's what it's for, it acts like a medieval man-bag - That's not it's main use - It's mainly there to disguise any physical evidence that you find someone particularly attractive.

(It's the old question... The one that always gets asked... Do I wear a kilt in the 'Traditional Style?' - Let me put this one to bed right now... You're effectively asking if I, with malice aforethought, go out into the public space, with only a thin scrap of loose fitting material covering my genitalia, knowing full well that I'm only one inquisitive toddler away from a conviction for indecent exposure?  Is that what you're asking?

Well the answer is yes, that's exactly what I do...)

• So I stand there, look them straight in the face, and say 'Why don't you find out?'

(Yes, I'm also a Man-whore, get over it...)

To date, only one person has taken me up on my kind offer, she was less than gentle... Not only did she look like Quasimodo, but she had his Sally-pulling expertise as well - I was quite traumatised, not to mention strained, twisted and bruised, for some time afterwards. I still get flashbacks, it's like my own personal Vietnam.

You'd think that would stop me saying it wouldn't you? No? Well obviously you've been reading this blog for too long then.

I also tend to get adopted by groups of drunken Scots, and have to start using my fake Billy Connolly accent and pretend to be from Kirkaldy (pron. Kayrcoddy) to avoid being torn to pieces after someone mentions the Battle of Bannockburn and I forget which side I should be cheering for.

Everyone should wear a kilt at least once in their lives, I'm probably going to end up wearing mine HERE on Saturday what with it being hot and everything.  You could come along too if you wanted - Come up and say hello, you should be able to tell if I'm pleased to see you.

A discussion of pornography, do not read

Today's Blog might end up being a bit NSFW, if a page of text can be regarded as Not Safe For Work that is, I mean, I can understand someone sat at the desk next to you being offended by being suddenly confronted with a picture of an oiled, pneumatic, professional female model, wearing just a natural suntan and a length of knotted string appearing on your screen, but not a page of barely legible writing.

Actually, hang on a second, thinking about that, I can't really understand. It might not be professional, it might not be what you're being paid to do, but the human body is a wonderful, beautiful thing... Well,I know mine is, I can't vouch for more than about fifteen other people's though.

I've worked in a lot of offices in my life and one thing I can say with surety is that I have seen many, many, more posters, calenders and desktop wallpapers that feature topless, oiled, zero body fat, elegantly coiffed, seductively posed, perfectly airbrushed, staring straight into the camera as if they are looking directly into your soul so that it makes you think they're in a relationship with you, MEN, than I ever have bikini clad WOMEN.

(OK, I've worked in a lot of factories and building sites where it was pretty much wall to wall boobage pictures, but that doesn't help my argument, so forget I said it, OK?)

I overheard a heated discussion between a pair of workmates once, in an office that we were upgrading. I think it was the guys birthday, and one of his mates had bought him an A2 sized poster of a Page 3 Girl, not a topless picture, she was dressed in swimwear, when a tweed clad harridan came storming across the office,

'Don't think you're putting that up in here!'

'Well, no, I was going t...'

'It's pornography, degrading to women, It's disgusting, it's against the code of conduct!'

The guy dutifully rolled up his poster and put it back in the tube, then looked at her and said, 'But what about the topless Fireman calender you have next to your desk?'

'Obviously that's different, it's just a bit of fun, you're just jealous that you don't look like that!'

OK, so she was obviously a cow, and I know that all women aren't like that, not by a long way, because I wish to remain in possession of my external sexual characteristics. Women are great... Oh yes, definately, I love me some women... Hoo yes... But, there seems to be a bit of a dichotomy where the old sexualisation is concerned, where the lines between erotica and pornography exactly are - Time for some definitions I think, via the OED:

Definition of pornography

noun



[mass noun]
printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement.
　
Definition of erotica

noun



[mass noun]
erotic literature or art.
Hmm... That last one wasn't a great deal of help was it? Let's see what erotic actually means then:

Definition of erotic

adjective
relating to or tending to arouse sexual desire or excitement:
Now, it might just be me, but it doesn't sound like there's any real difference between the two terms. I guess you could argue (If you were a twunt) that Pornography is actually intended to provoke a physical, sexual response by explicit, graphic, depiction, where Erotica just 'arouses the desire' as it were. Although I think that that might just be splitting hairs.

I think that a more reasonable, and easy to understand, division for the vanilla masses would be, if it's targeted at Men, it's pornography. Because men are base animals who like looking at pictures of glistening ladyparts. However, if it's targeted at women then it's erotica, because women are beautiful, cerebral, floaty creatures full of imagination, romanticism and passion.

I don't like to bring up this example because it's lazy, but it's the elephant in the room as far as this subject is concerned. E.L. James' Fifty Shades or Grey. Described by Amazon as 'An Erotic Romance', Strangely not described as 'A BDSM porno primer for the Twilight generation' The book that did more for the average birthrate of the English speaking world than anything since Kim Basinger got herself covered in Trifle in 9 1/2 Weeks.

Shouldn't it really be regarded as porn? I mean, you can't tell me that all of it's 65,000,000 copies have been purely read by people in stable relationships who have become heated whilst considering its adult themes and shown their love for each other physically after putting an interesting Guatamalan knitted bookmark carefully in the page and letting the cat out? Surely some have been read in ten minute sections by a young secretary in the disabled toilet cubicle at work with her Primark skirt up around her waist, some by students on the 08:34 from Ongar, where only one of their hands is visible above the table and the rythmic to-ing and fro-ing of the train masks any other hand movement that's being made? And still more, curled up on the sofa, with a box of chocolates, a glass of crisp chardonnay and no underwear?

But still, whaddo I know? Maybe they've all been bought by fifty-something unfulfilled people who get a kick out of thinking how naughty they're being, who am I to judge? As long as it makes you happy, and you don't do it in the crisps and snacks aisle of Sainsburys whilst there are kiddies about, more power to your elbow...

Actually, I suppose I could have put that better... Nevermind

But if you really want to read some porn that's directed at women, get yourself some Anais Nin. It'll put hairs on your palms AND it's well written, and that makes all the difference, trust me.