Great writing!
I don’t think forced relationships would work either. Personally I’ve never cared about wealth or a mans physical build. However, when men complain complain that women are to picky and no one wants them, I don’t think they are talking about me. As a fat women living with lipedema, they probably don’t find me that attractive. Also I have aged quite a bit, a forty year old fat woman is probably not what they want. I get the feeling what they really want is a certain type of woman that meets their preferences. A certain weight and level of beauty they find acceptable. I’ve long noticed that men seem to be entitled to their preferences (no fat women, no old women, no ugly women, no “crazies”) and then get angry if women have the same preferences for men as they do for women. They get upset if a woman wants a tall man, a good looking man, or a rich man, but they sneer and look down on a woman’s body that doesn’t meet their standards. Somehow they have become the judge of women being acceptable. They want the top 20% of women, regardless of where they are.
In the dating world, I don’t want to be rated and rate others by their bodies, income, etc. I just want to live and be loved, and be with people who are good communicators, who are interesting and fun, who reciprocate my feelings for them, who I enjoy spending my time with. Generally I date people who score quite low on this whole dating scale, because I just don’t care. I have my preferences, but they don’t fall in this strange line.
Once I hit puberty, I constantly was bombarded with images of who I was suppose to be as a woman, in order to please men, and how if I didn’t meet these standards, men wouldn’t want me and I’d never be loved. I was never thin enough, pretty enough, and there was this subtext that I therefor had failed as a woman because no man would want me. Why the world revolves around what men want is beyond me.
I stopped caring, and moved on. As a queer woman, I haven’t really run into these issues after I started dating other women. I now know I am way more attracted to women, and it isn’t about some weird linear rating system. I find many women attractive and they don’t fit anywhere on the radar of this linear system.
