I know a double-edged sword cuts both ways but this is ridiculous. Recently, I breezed into a sushi restaurant in the Australian Gold Coast resort of Surfers Paradise when I heard the young Amazonian girl I walked past exclaim, “Fit!… Sorry!”
I didn’t look up and thought nothing of it, but when I started eating her blonde cohort leant over to my Chinese housemate, interrupted our convo and told him, not exactly quietly, “Your mate’s really fit. Is he straight? My mate loves English guys. She’s from Switzerland.”
When she didn’t get the answer she was quite hoping for, I decided to be charitable and strike up some small talk. She lives in Sydney and prefers the fast metropolis action to the more relaxed beach bum vibe of Gold Coast.
“Ah, Sydney’s great,” said I, “but I do love it here. It’s like every day’s a holiday here. I’m showing my age though.”
“Yeah, but you’re like, what? 30?”
When I finished picking myself up from the floor she told me that she was here to party before she starts uni, because “once I get in my twenties I guess I’ll have to settle down and all that shit.”
I know the attention is lovely for the old ego, and I guess I coulda exploited it further, but after dinner I ventured into a Chinese medicine establishment where I had some acupuncture on a slightly worse for wear limb or two. At the end, the nice old lady Down Under felt some other parts of my being and asked me if I get pains in the lower back area.
When I told her I did now and then, she asked my friend in Mandarin, “Do you know if he’s had a lot of girlfriends? Because he has weak kidneys, brought on by too much sex… mainly from thrusting, and if he wants to carry on I suggest he is laying on his back when doing it.”
So there you go. The moral of this story is it’s absolutely fine to be mistaken for a hetero, and even nicer when you’re presumed to be 15 years younger than you are. But, lots of sex? Oh, come on, I’m practically a virgin. Just one with one or two slightly failing body parts.
The horror, the horror.
Steve Pafford
First published: Facebook, November 2014
