Queensland Roar 2 Adelaide United 2

So we are in the Pig & Whistle after the game, and I've just about forgotten that I was even at a football match. We are watching West Ham play Wigan, or M is. I am watching Chelsea at a distance on the other screen. We are talking about this and that. I can't really remember what. But I am boring myself, and I know I should shut up.

There is a really nice-looking fat girl. I'm not being unkind but if you prefer plump, then she's plump. If you prefer men not to sexualise women, you've come to the wrong blog, because I don't know how to help that.

I'd fuck the fat chick, I say to M. He demurs.

You're choosy, I say. He doesn't say anything.

She's pretty, he says.

She is more than pretty. I am not saying she is one of those women who would be good to look at if only she lost a few pounds. I don't view women that way because I don't have a target weight I think they should be at. I mean she is fuckable.

I do not mean by that that she is just fuckable. Let's face it, most women who aren't positively unfuckable are fuckable. I mean she is sexy.

I don't mean she is sexy like Natalie Portman is sexy. I watched Closer last night. It features Natalie Portman, and I suppose you could say she is sexy. I dunno. I didn't find her very fuckable because she looked a lot like someone had moulded her from plasticine. Closer, I have to say, is a film I hated in every way it's possible to hate a film. The script was awful, and the praise Marber has had for his writing just bemuses me. The dialogue was clunky, the plot simply unbelievable and the characterisation risible. People just do not say the things they said in that film, and they don't do the things they did either. All of the characters were hateful. It's hard to watch a film in which you don't sympathise with any of the characters. Hard for me, I mean. Maybe you enjoy hating what you're watching. I imagine Marber is a working-class boy made good, and he enjoys making the bourgeoisie look like shits. Which of course they are, just not in the way he writes them.

I would choose the fat chick over Natalie Portman. I know that this disbars me from ever being allowed into the geek club, but you don't choose what makes you drool.

It was a combination of being just the right amount of woman, a pretty face and smelling good. See, it's not about fatness or thinness. You can be too thin; there is just too little of you, and it's hard to imagine rolling around in the hay with you. You can be too fat; it can just not suit you (although, in my view, you are far better off to be a healthy weight than diet down to an ugly angularity).

It was also that she was wearing a nice dress, and you don't see that too often. Women mostly wear horrible clothes here, which do not suit them at all. Most of the women out on Saturday night had gone full out for hooker chic, and, well, given that they were mostly quite young, I had father anxiety. I couldn't help picturing my own girls dressed in the same way.

I know, you are probably thinking, yeah, but you are a lecher, judging women on their fuckability, yet you wouldn't like it if men leer at your girls. How wrong you are though. I would be far more concerned if no men leered at them. Attracting the opposite sex, or the same, whatever, is not actually a bad thing. And in this world, your path is that little bit smoother if you're easy on the eye. (You know, 20 years ago, I would have never said that, because I still thought that conversing in ideals was fitting for an adult. I may not have abandoned the ideals but I've at least grown to have the sense to accept that however the world should be, it is how it is. Prettiness should not matter, true, but you need to convince the rest of the planet of that, because they currently believe that it does.)

And if you are thinking, how awfully misogynist to characterise women purely as sex objects, you've leapt to a conclusion. I don't think of women purely in that way, but it's part of how I view them. If any man tells you he does not do the same, he is a/ lying or b/ gay. (b) is self-explanatory, but (a) is interesting. Why would a man make out he doesn't think about fucking women he meets? I suppose that he would say it because he doesn't want to seem to be supporting the patriarchy and oppressing women.

But the patriarchy did not invent sex, even if it perverts and abuses it. And women are only oppressed if I treat them any differently because they are fuckable.

Sisters, I do not. You'd never even know what I thought. I don't even drool much. I am not insensitive. I know how hurtful it is to feel judged for your looks. If someone does it to me, I feel hurt. (I don't mind that they do it, but the crassness of letting me know is inexcusable.)

Anyway, the fat chick did not even look at me, so far as I know, and she and her friends were scared off by clownish skinheads singing West Ham songs. (Hilariously, the skinheads' ringleader is an Asian guy -- a south Asian, I mean -- who would, were he trapped in a pub with real skinheads in the East End, be keeping very quiet, not chanting and carrying on.) Sometimes I wish I were less shy, and could speak to people I don't know. But I know I am a boring, insubstantial person, and wouldn't know how to interest the fat chick or anyone else. It's a failing of mine that I am entirely reactive. I never begin conversations, or email exchanges, or any type of communication, because I never have the urge, or even if I feel I might like to talk to someone, unless I have a subject in mind, I don't know how to do it. You'd think I'd have learned, at the very least by observation, but like many failings I have, this is not something rational, just how I am.

I wonder sometimes whether a woman whom I look at and think, she is nice, whether she might think the same of me. How would I know? When you are a withdrawn, hardshelled type, it's impossible to know. I assume they don't. I know it is another failing that I never quite grasp that they might find it just as hard to talk to strangers as I do. Being reactive is a terrible thing. You are always waiting for the world to reach out to you, to peer inside your shell. But why would it?

Part of the reason you have a shell in the first place is that you do not believe you are worth looking at or peering into.

The game? It was very poor, although I had fun watching it. I have a season ticket and stand in the home end with M and K, who is Zenella's tennis coach and often chats with me about football on Tuesday evenings when I take Zenella for her coaching. The Roar had a man sent off, which looked harsh (although on TV it was quite clear he deserved it), but Adelaide weren't at all adventurous and a 2-2 draw was a fair result. It would have been better had Reinaldo, the Roar's lazy, slow, clueless Brazilian striker, not skied a sitter from six yards and missed another almost as easy. Best on the pitch was probably Danny Tiatto, who applied himself with his usual vigour.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:58 pm