[The setting: a comfortable suburban home in North Florida, USA, on an August weekend in 2014. She is sitting in the living room, her laptop computer open; He is walking through the living room on some mission or another, in one direction or another.]
She: Oh, these people.
He: Hmm? What people?
[He stops to look over Her shoulder. On-screen is a publicity still from a current television mini-series, based on a hugely popular novel of romance and time travel. The photo depicts an early moment in the romantic relationship between a twentieth-century English woman, Claire, and an eighteenth-century Scotsman named Jamie. Claire is tending Jamie’s battle wounds. Jamie is sitting quietly, looking at Claire, and of course wearing a kilt.]
He: Nice picture of them.
She: Yes. I’m just saying, you should read some of the comments on it.
He: Such as?
She: Like this one. [She points.] “Those knees. *SWOON*” [She laughs.]
He: Er, uh… Wait. Women swoon over men’s knees? They even notice them?
She: You’d be surprised what women notice.
FSD says
Oh, that is funny.
I look at hands, and if I find out that someone has long fingers but doesn’t play an instrument, I go home and gnash my teeth at the injustice of it all (which doesn’t help my teeth).
John says
It’s always mysterious to me. So much attention is paid to the ways men evaluate women, but I do hear rumors from time to time — as described above — about how things work in the other direction. These reports usually have me scratching my head (with not-quite-stubby fingers). :)
In one of the very first short stories I ever tried to write, tried to write “seriously” I mean, the protagonist had an ex-wife who had what he described as something like “the ugliest hands I’ve ever seen on a human being.” That comment was followed by several sentences describing those hands from the wrist to the fingertips, although I think I stopped before hitting the molecular level. I myself had already been married and divorced at the time I wrote that, but it didn’t describe my ex-wife at all — I don’t know where it came from. I think I was pushing hard for some artificial sort of verisimilitude, figuring, y’know, if I load it up with enough details everyone will simply HAVE TO accept it as plausible. And then, of course: hey, look at me! I’m a writer!
Ha.