|
|
 |
More than a few male eyes were on me. For the first time in my adult life, I felt like a conventional object of sexual desire in public. In typical social settings, I'm a sexual non-entity to men. Even if they find me alluring or stare at my eye-level chest for a while, men do not picture themselves with a woman who dwarfs them. Tall, broad women are perceived as frighteningly strong, emasculating. For me, nights out are usually a matter of dodging the one creepy guy with the tall fetish while pining for the cute, nerdy six-foot-two guy with the five-five pixie girlfriend who giggles girlishly upward at him.
I was mulling these very thoughts when a six-foot-two, thirty-two-year-old trader sauntered up, having watched my ass for the entire evening while I photographed the pageant. Like many tall men, he was attractive just by function of being large and manly, a bullish, testosterone-filled 250 pounds. He could bench-press me. This was sexy. I went with it.
He started talking. Was I from New York? Him too! Did I like photographs? Him too! He "felt a connection." I was too disoriented from the airplane and the tall people to notice that I was being fed lines.
He wanted to go upstairs. I insisted that we stick around for the Crazy Hat party. He suggested we go upstairs. A short septuagenarian, the wife of a six-foot-five club member, showed me her album of Tall Club photos from over the years. He recommended that we go upstairs. Finally, I checked into my room, then met him at the hotel restaurant where I ate my first meal in twelve hours. Afterward, I agreed to go upstairs.
In the elevator, he put on a closed-lip smile and kissed me. I felt no sparks, but no repulsion either. We made out in my hotel room, arranged diagonally across the queen-size bed, and engaged in standard one-night-stand talk, the usual array of questions that have no good answers: When was the last time you did this? What do you like? Every time I touched him in a way that could be construed as vaguely pleasurable, he shouted, "LOVE IT!"
I tried to delay removing my clothes. As a girl who regularly spends thirty minutes in the lotion aisle debating the merits of "nourishing" versus "softening," I felt rushed.
He announced that he wanted to "climb all over me." |
He got my shirt off, and as his fingers ran up and down my back, he whispered into my ear, "You're so, like, solid."
What did that mean? It sounded more like, "You're broad, like a man." I laughed it off. "Haha. Don't be fooled — I can't lift my own body weight."
"LOVE IT!" he said.
Then he announced that he wanted to "climb all over" me. To this, I had no response. He suggested I remove my panties, a pair of black cotton Victoria Secrets. I declined. He commented that they were nearly the same size as his boxer briefs. I sharply reminded him that some of us were working that evening, and had just spent two hours crawling on a floor with a camera, something best done in sturdy undergarments.
He recommended for a second time that I remove my panties. Sex would be fun, but I needed a game plan. I had a talk with myself, something like, "Arianne, this is a bad idea. He probably does this every weekend and you're going to get an STD from a guy who shrieks LOVE IT!" I announced my decision.
He suggested that I remove my panties anyway. I squeezed my eyes closed and conjured an image of the worse case of genital herpes feasible. I declined and hopped out of bed. He asked me to stay in Charleston for the week, but I had photos to develop and a VD test to schedule. "I'll call you!" he said, as he walked out of my hotel room in only his boxers.
I caught a plane back to New York five hours later. During the flight, I chastised myself for turning down strings-free sex. What was I thinking?
A week later, Tall Guy instant-messaged me. He told me that it turned him on when women "tower over him." I assumed that at worst, he considered me a "type" to be checked off his list. We set up a date.
He requested that I wear heels, so I went with it, and purchased a pair of four-inch pumps at Tall Size Shoes. I was now six-foot-seven. To avoid looking ridiculous, I decided that the local burlesque show, run by a couple of Sarah Lawrence grads, would make a fine venue for our date. The theme that evening turned out to be "white trash," which somehow fit perfectly.
When we returned to my apartment, I stood in the four-inch heels and let him rise up on tippy-toes to kiss me. He spotted a step stool in the corner — a completely pointless gift from my mother — and asked me to stand on it in my heels. I was now six-eleven. I looked down at the scalp peeking through his gelled black hair.
A previous boyfriend once told me that fetishes are representative of psychological hang-ups. I wondered what
I have no idea how to envelope a man. |
this stool thing represented. I had, over the years, asked around about tall fetishes. The best answer came from a photographer who told me that most tall fetishists want to be taken over. They want to be enveloped by all 215 pounds of femaleness, overwhelmed by the excess of womanhood. In theory, I support that. But I have no idea how to envelope, nor do I want to.
Apparently I wasn't active enough while perched on a stool, contemplating the few inches between my head and the ceiling. I didn't know what to do with the man whose eyes were level with my ribs. He sensed my disinterest, slowed down, then stopped. He sat down on my couch. I stepped off the stool, slid off the heels, and sat down next to him. Apparently this took away my charm. We made out a bit, but somehow, everything deflated. I got up and moved the step stool out of sight. He left at four a.m., saying "I'll call you!"
I'll never know what he meant by "solid," because four-and-a-half hours later, at 8:30 a.m., he announced via instant messenger that we were over. "I am not ready for anything . . . I got out of a very serious relationship a few months ago . . . "
I held off on ranting. Is it okay to rant at someone for their fetish? I don't know. The problem with tall fetishes is that they're not about me. They're about the guy, who is inevitably projecting imagined sexuality onto me. I want to write an informational pamphlet, entitled About Dating Arianne, which specifies that I enjoy normal, step-stool-free sex, of the sort I've had with the few men who seem immune to my height. Usually, they've dated a handful of women who all looked sort of like me, in varying sizes. Under these circumstances, my sexuality is awesome. When on a step stool, it's less so.
The next day, I returned the heels.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
 |
Arianne Cohen's work frequently appears in New York, Life, The New York Times, Marie Claire and Popular Mechanics. She is the author of Help, It's Broken!: A Fix-It Bible for the Repair-Impaired. Her latest project, The Tall Book, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2008. |
©2006 Arianne Cohen and Nerve.com
Photograph by Victoria Tomaschko
|
|
|
|
