Time magazine once featured phobias. Some are unbelievable (including fear of wax statues, laughter, and peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth) while others seem laughable, such as ablutophobia – the fear of bathing. Someone out there is going to say that I am very insensitive to laugh at those who are afraid to shower or bathe. I wonder who has more to fear: the one who suffers the phobia, or those who must suffer the phobe.
As absurd as many of the 530-some phobias compiled by Fredd Culbertson on the http://www.phobialist.com/ website (which Time referenced) may sound, I think caligynephobia, the fear of beautiful women, is the one to which most of us ordinary women can relate. Disclaimer: I do realize that this phobia refers to men who are afraid of beautiful women, but I just wanted to have a little fun with it.
When you are finally seated somewhere in a nice restaurant, the last thing you want is to be stuck next to some slinky gorgeous woman with hair that belongs in a shampoo commercial, if not on the heads of about three other women, if the world were a just and equitable place. Of course, we have these fears. They are very reasonable.
We are not usually evil-minded, we caligynephobics, but we can’t help but hope that Slinky’s next smile will be flashed with broccoli peppering her perfect teeth (of course she would be eating broccoli!), or that she somehow ends up laughing so hard that a noodle shoots out of her dainty little nostrils. (Flaw in this thinking: noodles = carbs = cannot be touched. Secondly, laughing might produce wrinkles, so it is not to be practiced too liberally by the Gorgeous Elite.)
These evil thoughts aren’t quite the same thing as skating up to Slinky and bashing her in the knee, but actions do get their start in thoughts, so one must be careful. It’s a sinful thought, just the same. And why waste your sinful thoughts on unlikely scenarios? Do you think these women even eat? They just go to restaurants to show off, ordering the most expensive, skimpiest-portioned plates. The real reason they are there is to torture the rest of us who order things according to price and net weight, seeking out that lowest per-unit price combo we are accustomed to finding under the barcodes in the grocery store.
I think restaurants should restrict the number of beautiful women allowed in at any one meal. Well, maybe that wouldn’t be fair. Even beautiful women have to pretend to eat, don’t they?
Or maybe they should separate patrons for maximum comfort – like in the old days of the smoking section. When you walk in, they might ask you, “Beautiful or Non-Beautiful?” Of course, the business-minded restaurateur will be too tactful to make a recommendation. Can you imagine, as you start lumbering into the Beautiful Section, you get a casual redirection of the elbow, “May we suggest you would feel more comfortable in the Non-Beautiful Section?”
Someone once told me that restaurants like to save their window seating to showcase the most attractive of their patrons to other would-be customers who may be ambling along the sidewalk. Somehow, I think the Subway (as much as we love that place!) storefront doesn’t count here. I’m not sure I’ve been to a restaurant fancy enough to have this strategic seating.
Does Faang Thai restaurant count? There’s plenty of window space there, but we are usually put into a long booth in the back, buffeted by an extra table and chairs. I have always consoled myself that it was due to our large family size for those special occasions when we do go out to eat. We love that place too. (Somebody, please, send me some freebie coupons!)
For me, or any other woman who has caligynephobia, this sort of window seating has an adverse effect. For example, you are happily strolling with your significant other (I don’t want to be narrow-minded here), dusting the last of the caramel corn crumbs off yourself from the latest festivity you just enjoyed. Coming across a restaurant, the aroma beckons, even though you aren’t hungry. (Remember all that junk food you just polished off at the last outdoor attraction? By the way, when food is free, I don’t count the calories, but it still does suppress the appetite all the same.) You check your watch, and discover – lo, and behold, it’s lunchtime! Of course, you must eat, because we live in America, and let it not be said that you had to skip a meal.
The aroma has practically embraced you and is enticing you in, when suddenly, to your horror, you discover a gorgeous woman, for all the world to see, laughing, posing with a platter of insubstantial, expensive food, and pretending not to be the focus of everyone’s attention. Your blood runs cold. How many other gorgeous women might be in there?
Then your significant other, checking out the menu prices (which are also in the window) is nervously calculating the damages to his wallet with all the other expenses incurred today. He’s hoping that you will remember those leftovers in the fridge, which can be consumed for free, but of course, he doesn’t dare suggest it. If you say it, that’s another matter.
It’s like when a parent bemoans the state of his or her child – that’s fine and perfectly acceptable. But let someone else add an opinion against the same loathsome child, and the very same suffering parent is guaranteed to give a self-righteous Look of Death. Was it Patrick Henry who said, “Give me Leftovers, but do not give me the Look of Death?” Your companion does not want that look from you.
In the meantime, he may or may not have even noticed this stunning creature, whose dress and shoe size you have already estimated, in addition to whether she uses depilatories, and whether the hair that is allowed to remain has been colored. “You want to eat in here?” he may innocently suggest.
Sure. You are fuming. He’s just checking out the babes. You are highly offended. You give him The Look. You suggest that there are leftovers back home anyway. He’s going to pay for this - boy, is he ever going to pay. Remember that this makes you a martyr, because it was you who bravely decided to forgo eating in a posh restaurant and suggested going home to eat microwaved leftovers of brown rice and yesterday’s stir-fry.
You are now officially entitled to have an Attitude, which means that he will have to make things up, and it’s going to cost a whole lot more than lunch. Hopefully, wherever you plan to go to compensate for this particular episode of martyrdom, there will not be any other gorgeous women to frighten (or enrage) you. And perhaps, by the time you get home, you’ll actually be hungry enough to eat those leftovers.
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