“Ugh… that guy is so your type” my sister said with the same repulsed tone that she would, were she commenting that I’d just spat in her coffee. “He is not!” I retorted, failing to think of anything better, in that whiny voice usually only reserved for siblings.
“Yes he is, you love that anorexic look. If he’s not on a drip, he’s too fat for you.” She stabbed with one raised brow. It was true though; I couldn’t deny the validity of her words. Or the fact that the whole time I was slyly checking out the denim wearing bag of bones in the corner of my chauvinistic eye. When did I become such a pig?
This isn’t a new craze for me. To sound somewhat similar to the hip, skinny types themselves – I was into it way before it was cool. I began to think about the roots of this attraction, a bud that had never been nipped.
The year was 1994. I sat cross-legged on the lounge room floor, a pose that is now considered an exercise but at the time was just a comfortable way of laying my seemingly rubbery bones. Moments before I’d popped my favorite VHS into the player and the opening credits started to roll in.
“The Wizard of OZ” graced the screen in its bold typeface, artificially colored and wobbly from the well-worn tape. Not too far into the film and there he was… my first love. Okay, love is going too far (that’s an equally strange tale for another time) but I would certainly dub him my first “crush”.
Enter: Scarecrow. Not the actor who played him, but the straw-filled, brainless sack himself. I don’t know what exactly it was I just have this resounding memory of thinking that that was “it”, what it felt like to have a crush on someone. I was a heterosexual human after all!
Is it possible that Scarecrow somehow curbed my future taste in men, nay, guys… double nay… boys? There do seem to be a few similarities between the trail of wreckage I refer to as my exes and the king of the cornfields. Dumb, skinny and blonde – just the recipe I’d roll my eyes at if I were to hear it from a male.
Fear not friends, it looks like my tastes are changing, be it with age or wisdom, and I have started to look for guys with a little more meat on their bones and hair on their chests. They do seem to be less courageous though, now that I think about it…
