"...rape culture."
"what?"I'm a bit spacey today. I think it's the meds. No, I think it's the company. Sometimes I don't know what to think.
I've been staring at the bright oil cloth for a while, willfully distracted.
He had just got done saying that he couldn't imagine ever finding himself attracted to ("to physically love") a larger ("fat") woman and, thoroughly disgusted, I was too exhausted to pick yet another fight on the subject. The topic comes up perennially with him, perhaps as a very thinly veiled threat. At least, that's how it seems to me as he says these things and then looks at me out of the corner of his eye. Preemptive, tentative, accusatory periphery. I hate that. How could I not hate that?
"You should write about rape culture on your blog."
"What about it?"
"That we live in it."
"What do you know about rape culture?"
"I read an article about it."He's Lassie, trying to tell me something, bark bark rape culture bark, but I don't want to hear it right now. I'm stuck on the other thing.
I've known from the start that Igor is of the extremely vain sort, but really... Do all men feel that way, somewhere in them?
If I'm thin, am I more lovable?
(If I am physically desirable am I more lovable?)
((or... maybe, because I'm superficially valued, am I less lovable...?))
This is the pervasive mental dominance in our culture that has the potential to reach every girl and woman, an act of violence he commits without blinking while congratulating himself for somberly noting buzzword phrases such as "rape culture" -- as if, at this point, I could be impressed by him or what he has to say to me about women's issues.
These are things, I think, that are failing to compute.