This is another post that's hard to write...
Coral Levang was a fellow writer for Associated Content and some other sites that used to pay per post, comment, or view, back when those sites were active. As a US Navy veteran, cancer survivor, and artist she always posted fresh, interesting content and had masses of followers.
When the cheap writing sites broke up, she and I followed each other on Twitter. She was one of the "Tweeps" who showed me when I or someone else had been shadowbanned, by reliably commenting or not commenting on any of our tweets.
She made the mistake of posting a recent photo of herself on Twitter. In real life women often claim that at age fifty or sixty they feel that they've become invisible--they're not being stared at any longer. On Twitter that was not the problem Coral had. She was sixty years old and looked it, but she looked active and cheerful. One day she posted a picture similar to this
Her comment was something like "This seems to be what interests a lot of people here most."
In other words a lot of male Twits (what Twitter users were called), who were also twits (annoying persons), were sending her photos of themselves the way nobody in real life wanted to look at them.
Attention guys of the world: Most women don't really want to look at your faces, either. Nor does looking at your bodies in a normal, clothed condition do anything for us. A face photo may or may not help us keep track of which John, Mike, or Dave out there is which, but even if one of them has a classically handsome face, that doesn't mean much to most women.
Men who are told this often snarl, "So what does mean anything to women? What do women want in a man? Money!"
Then presumably they go home and snarl at their wives that they bring in money, don't they, so somebody else can bleeping well clean up the mess they have left on the bathroom floor. Then their wives disappear. Then they go out to bars and pick up barflies who really are after their wallets. Their stories probably never end very well. This is because we have evolved away from a state of nature where these guys would have gone out hunting and been trampled by the buffalo or eaten by the bears they were trying to kill. Nature did not supply them with survival intelligence.
Anyway, one thing I, personally, look for in a man is survival intelligence. Does he, for example, have enough survival intelligence to skip the whole nasty story above by just cleaning the bathroom floor, or better yet sitting down and not leaving the bathroom floor dirtier than anyone else does? Enough to make a decent living at a job he may not leap out of bed eager to get back to, every single day, but can feel proud of having done? Enough to appreciate the younger generations? Did he once have enough of a "heart" to feel some response to socialist ideals, and has he developed enough intelligence to have lost faith in socialism? Has he noticed that, when his hormones are screaming that he's right, he's generally wrong? And, if he passes that test, do his eyes light up when he looks at me? Or, if he's blind, does he offset that by other unmistakable displays of interest?
If he's just another nice-looking face flattened out on a screen, the world is full of those, and some of the best of them--consider Ronald Reagan well into his first term as President, Alex Trebek, Michael Jackson before all the cosmetic surgery--aren't even living any more. So who cares. A nice face says nothing at all about the niceness of a man's company.
Below the face, well, all men dress pretty much alike except for the ones who, we have learned by experience, should not be outdoors unsupervised. For American men the options are basically a suit, a uniform, a sweater, or a T-shirt. People who really care may pay attention to questions like whether the complete suit, or only the shirt and trousers, are on display. Women who don't know you well probably don't care. Whether a uniform says "U.S. Marine Corps" or "McDonald's" does tell us something about you, but we remind ourselves not to read to much into it. Ditto for whether a T-shirt advertises our favorite sports team, a rival team, a place, a message, or just some tacky commercial product. Visible bare skin does tell us that you need supervision.
"What if I'm at the beach?" some smartypants cackles. Ha ha ha. Smartypants guys are funny, as distinct from being attractive. Men who are at the beach make a better impression by posting photos of seashells and driftwood than by posting photos of their skin. Attractive men do not intentionally annoy other people in any way. The function of little-kid teasing is to signal, "I'm a child, emotionally. I might be your younger brother. It's 'safe' to talk to me when you're completely uninterested in sex because any resemblance between me and a Real Grown-Up Man With Whom You Might Want to Have a Baby is purely superficial and accidental."
The female body, dressed or undressed, is fascinating to most men. Young women who are willing to display their bodies in those pictures that fascinate men are probably thinking that, after all, what's so interesting about a body? The male body, dressed or undressed, is just not that interesting; except perhaps to homosexual men. The male counterpart to measuring 35-22-32 is when someone else tells us a man saved someone else's life at the risk of his own. Men just don't get as many opportunities to be interesting, in their lifetimes, as average-looking 22-year-old women get every day. To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man has long been sore, and long'tis like to be.
Anyway, as a sixty-year-old breast cancer survivor, Coral Levang still had considerable appeal to men, and a lot of them were Navy buddies whose company she enjoyed, and then another lot were pests who annoyed her enough that she changed her Twitter name. She was being stalked and harassed in cyberspace. She dropped her blog, briefly picked it up again, then dropped it again.
I hope that's the only reason why her blog's dormant and I'm not seeing her on X.
I know, too, that when breast cancer has been treated, and then another kind of cancer has been treated, a person is not likely to have much time left in this world.
