Three Four Three: Preferences

 I may have mentioned this, but I'll recount the story again.

Once, long ago, I took a test found in (I think) Playboy. The test was something like "What Your Tastes in Women Say About You". I can't recall how old I was, but certainly very early in my teens. I ranked photos of actresses and models, and I chose my favourites out of drawings of body types. At the end, I added up my score and was told that the total meant that I must be gay. 

After all, the women I chose were very much not the body type that was in favor in those days. My choices were clearly all for tall, very slender, very long-legged and small-breasted women. "Buxom" or "curvy" never crossed my mind. No woman that I fancied in adolescence-- or now --would ever evoke something like "va-va-voom!" as a comment. 

I thought even then that the authors of the article were idiots. I stand by that judgment. Even at that age, I was clear about my preferences. For women, yes. And I like to think that society's beauty standards caught up with my own. The age of the "bombshell" was replaced by standards I liked-- tall, leggy, taut-bodied, thin. I'd have always chosen the young Audrey Hepburn over Marilyn Monroe. I'd have always chosen a young Jane Birkin or a young Marisa Berenson over the standard Playmate of those days. Those were my preferences then, and they remain my tastes. Karlie Kloss and Anja Rubik and Aymeline Valade are all examples of what I find to be beautiful. I have no use whatsoever for the Kardashian look.

And yet one of the problems of the current day is that physical preferences are themselves subject to increased and hostile review. Having preferences, let alone talking about them, is becoming a Bad Thing. I do not like the current emphasis on butts. I look at photos of the FMTY Girls at Twitter or of current social media celebrities and just have no use for a look that emphasizes butts. My gaze focuses on long, slender legs and flat, hard stomachs and butts. I do realize that saying that I dislike big butts and fail to grasp why women pay for butt-filler injections puts me on the wrong side of current taste...and leaves me open to accusations of racism and "misogynoir". I do realize that. 

But my tastes remain what they've always been. The Young Companion of my dreams is very tall, very lithe, very leggy. She has never needed to own or wear a bra. (She dislikes underwear, of course). In tailored linen slacks and a very tailored, dangerously unbuttoned silk blouse, she's all legs and erect nipples and has that slouch-down-the-runway look that I've loved since I was a teen and first began charting out beauty and its implications for class and style. 

Well, so many things that I like are becoming unacceptable. That may be inevitable, since I'm a gentleman of a certain advanced age and very much out of step with social rules. And those rules do exist. Make no mistake about that. 

Bodies matter. I take that as a given. Bodies always matter. So do the stories bodies tell. My preferences, whether for lithe and leggy girls or for some s/m games, always suggest stories or films I want to live in. I suppose I do look at girls and see myself as a casting director for the films in my head. I like bodies that suggest certain things about class and settings, and those films are not going away.

It's not just that my particular tastes in female bodies are now seen as obsolete and regressive (or maybe even oppressive). It's that I read these days how having any tastes at all is morally flawed because any preference by definition excludes. And we're not supposed to exclude, these days.

It gets harder to discuss what does attract and excite me, and it gets harder to talk about the why of what I like. I have to say that I do miss the days when matching bodies to stories was something to talk about with lovely young companions.