This comes from “Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping,” by Elisabeth Eaves.
Listen to what she says about how it might feel like to get picked up… from a woman’s point of view.
…occasionally strangers started to talk to me for no apparent reason… my usual reaction was embarrassment for having drawn attention and annoyance that my daydreaming or reading had been interrupted…
…I didn’t understand his attention. I still thought myself invisible to the world of strangers and adults…
The next year… I started to put things together…
…I broke into a jog because I was running late and wanted to get to the school where my friends would be.
A carful of boys suddenly came careening around the bend… As it passed a young man with shaggy hair bellowed out the window: “Fabulous set of tah-tahs, baby!”
I slowed to a walk and looked behind me, trying to fathom whom he was talking to, but there was no one else around. I realized, slowly, that it must have been me. I kept walking up toward the school, thinking about what he had said. I had never heard the term “tah-tahs” before. It sounded like a stupid, babyish word… But I knew instinctively what he was talking about…
Before then I had thought that effort or at least some sort of consciousness on my part might lead to sexual attention. Now I realized that I–my head, that is, my brain, my thoughts–had nothing to do with it. I looked down at my white turtleneck and pink jeans and saw my body in a new light. It was an object of interest to others that was entirely independent from who I was. And now my body became a new kind of object of interest to me. I had done nothing to achieve it. I couldn’t escape it. Yet it had clearly made those boys–or were they grown men?–behave the way they had. I felt like a child who had been handed a heavy sword and told to learn how to use it before she cut off her foot. Some time after the car had gone by, when I had put this all together, I laughed with a mixture of flattered pride and disbelief.
The incident… united my internal and external sexual worlds. I was familiar, after all, with sex, in the sense you can be familiar with anything you read about in a book… I thought about sex frequently… and I masturbated often. But up until the day at the bus stop I had not connected what went on in my head with tangible experience. Having sex was a goal, but in the abstract, in the same way I thought I might someday be a lawyer. I had assumed there were many hurdles between me and it. I had not yet discerned the link between my private thoughts and the way others saw me. And then suddenly it became clear that there were no hurdles at all. Sex was there for the taking. It was up to me.
It was a revelation… boys were now sexually available to me… I started to become dimly aware of an unwritten sexual rule book. I was stunned when I discovered that boys and girls were expected to behave differently. It violated my sense of fair play.
Here’s some things I took away from this.
1. Beauty is superficial. Don’t be interested in a woman just because she was dealt a good pair of cards. Be interested in her person. Let her earn your interest. Ways to do this: Qualify her. Neg/Banter with her.
2. This woman was shocked to learn that she didn’t have to work to get sex. All she had to do was look good. Be different. Desire her if she has a brain or a positive outlook, not just because she looks good.
3. Women are as sexual and horny (if not more) than us. She wants sex. There’s outdated, unwritten rules that makes it more difficult for women to be as sexually free as us. Don’t play by those unwritten rules. Let the sexual animal in her come out to play.
4. Oh, and it probably does feel like an interruption when we talk to her. That’s okay. Have an interesting topic of conversation prepared. You could also call this “DHV.” If she seems cool, let your interest be known based on that, and invite her out.