Catachresis d'escalier -- she said "mode de..." instead of "esprit d'escalier".
We'll have to start using the term "rom-com"
Pretty annoying whinge. Try living in Japan for 15 years. Maybe she should examine:
1. Is this really true?
2. What, exactly, is happening?
3. Why does it happen?
Yeah, I hate it how women, particularly young women, are rude to me and act like I don't exist. Do they think that saying "good morning" means they've agreed to some sexual encounter or something? Sometimes they're also "excessively nice" -- but by what standard? There are all kinds of sexually charged rules at work, most of which make me horribly uncomfortable, either by imposing unwelcome distance or unwelcome proximity. Unsolicited, unwelcome comments from women of all ages (directly) related to my gender -- don't get me started.
Better "l'ésprit de l'éscalier"
The more I think on it the more it bothers me.
Does the authoress understand the meaning of the word "attractive"?
I think it means that one attracts people, usually of the opposite gender. It's one of those 1940s euphemisms for "sexually-compatible other people disproportionately wanting to fuck you is a normative component of your existence"
If people, often tragically, but it's a statistical inevitablility (unless you are a completely undiscriminating whore and/or blind and olfactorially impaired), whom you don't fancy, approach you with monotonous regularity, then you are, ipso facto, an attractive person.
If they don't, then you are unattractive.
Don't let's agonize overmuch about this -- it's just what the bloody words mean.
If you are tall, then you hit your head on low-hanging stuff unless you duck.
Having a sense of humor probably helps in both cases, and radical surgery is perhaps the only, if not very good, long-term solution.
Perhaps I should write a parody piece about how I'm regularly and systematically objectified because of my stature and treated as though everyone else is entitled to my height. "Could you reach that for me? You're tall". "can you have a look...?" "can you change this lightbulb?" in a half-request, half-ordering tone. I'm oblidged to "rise" to the occasion, somehow.
Mercifully, "how's the weather up there?" seems to have gone out with the 70s, but "you must play basketball" will never die. "you must have really tall kids" and other such prosaic and overly-personal comments crowd in on my serenity from all sides whenever I go out in public, my head bobbing along above the sea of the heads of my fellows.
On top of it all, to kick the tragi-comedy up a notch, I lived half my life in the legendarily vertically-challenged Japan, where they have even less restraint than in the US about personal comments, and even more reason to make them. Then I get it from both sides since the Americans, their mills freshly supplied with grist such as "oh you must have really stood out there" grind away.
Of course, no one asks things like "how did you buy clothing over there (or here for that matter)?" which would suggest genuine concern for and interest in me as a person, which I tend to suspect for the most part, is absent.
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