the older i get the creepier it seems to me when men make a big deal of how young a woman is. when i was young it seemed normal for men to mention she’s nineteen with that certain type of eyebrow move, that knowing look passed between them. it seemed normal because i felt mature; i was mature in all accounts - twenty-five year olds who called me attractive were just stating the obvious. i remember the summer of my eighteenth year being drunk by a river - and having a man tell me i was the perfect age.
it is frightening to me that twenty-five is when women stop being considered attractive, that thirty is “old”. it is frightening. a girl at nineteen is still a teenager. i think often of the men in movies who have kissed women literally half their age and i wonder - how can that be enjoyable? you have her entire lifetime, doubled. she could be your daughter.
the most telling i think is the way they act when they find out my face - so close to that of me at eighteen - is a lie. that i’m older than they think. they recoil as if i struck them. they find another fish to hunt.
maybe it’s me and how sensitive i am about everything. but i see eighteen year olds and at twenty-three i am already wondering how i didn’t notice that older men are predatory. how i didn’t notice that there’s a time stamp on my beauty. how i didn’t notice how incredibly creepy the fascination with eighteen is; how odd it is that the fixation on skinny lends itself to looking that same underdeveloped age, innocent and fresh. how did i not see this.
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