I’ve put on my tiniest skirt and cowgirl boots, actually used hairspray, and haven’t accidentally told this cute guy that his job is pretend and his football team sucks. I am on a roll. Regardless, I am just barely pulling off sexy and here’s why:

1. You can’t tell, but I’m dressed like a Rugrats character.
That cute little jean skirt I’m wearing? It’s a skort. That’s right, a skort: the combination skirt/shorts that are usually only found on five-year-olds who don’t want to flash their Dora panties on the jungle gym. No, I didn’t intentionally dress like a Kindergartener to go to the bar. I’m just cheap, it was $3 at Goodwill, and I don’t intend to let a strange man put his hand up my skirt anyway, so he’ll never have to know.

2. Victoria’s What?
The sexiest undergarments I own came from the Hanes store during a BOGO sale and I accidentally dyed one of them some not-a-color in the wash. I also just called my bra an “undergarment.” I work two jobs and I’m in graduate school. No matter how much I’d like to, I can’t afford to buy fancy sex clothes that no one is going to see. My cotton underwear came in a pack of six at Wal-Mart for $8 and I probably didn’t throw them away when the elastic popped. Wearing this skort, I’m likely in a $2 neon green thong, but in that tiny pink lace dress? Chances are good I’m wearing high-rises, because they smooth over my lumps better and are more comfortable than tummy tucker panties. That’s right. I said lumps. The logic here is the same. I’m not going home with a guy in a bar, so no one has to know my underwear has a faded zebra print on it and my bra is the color of dirty dishwater. Not even my socks match. You can’t tell, because of the boots, but I’m wearing one teal sock with black birds on it and one rainbow sock, because I couldn’t find their matches.

3. I have no idea what I’m doing.
At any point in the night, I’m lucky if I haven’t just blurted out “How tall are you?” because the apparent truth is “not very.” It’s not that I’m trying to be an ass. It’s just that I’ve been dating for less than a year and I’m not that subtle anyway. I’m not only completely clueless as to what I’m doing in this bar, though; I’m about as experienced in bed as I am at spelunking. I don’t even know what spelunking is if that says anything at all. Yes, I was married for four and half years, but we only had sex for three of them… and rarely. When we did, it was always the exact same thing, in the exact same order, and for a very short period of time. The last time I actually had sex was early 2010 and it was extremely unpleasant. That was almost three years ago. Holy shit, I haven’t had sex in three years… and I’ve never had good sex. Sure, I know how to please myself, but even if we get to the fourteenth or so date it would take for sexual activity to be involved, I’m not so sure I even remember what hole it goes in anymore. I can count the number of people I’ve kissed on one hand and half of those don’t even count. I wouldn’t know what to do with my bits or his bits. In general, I’ve got all the downsides of virginity and none of its untainted perks.

4. I’m kind of afraid of him. 
Gailis perpetually trying to either instill in me a gut-wrenching paranoia about men or get me to give the one-eyed maintenance man a chance so we can double date. This compels me to talk to just about everyone who approaches me while simultaneously thinking “It’s okay. I own guns.” It’s not just an issue of physical safety, though Gail might have me believe “What are you drinking?” really means “Will it cover the taste of the pills in my pocket?” If I don’t just stop speaking to this man, I have to risk actual vulnerability or one day even :gasp: trust. Even on the most basic level, that’s horrifying. So, as I cross my booted legs in front of me, it’s really to keep him from leaning in more closely. It’s also no coincidence that my body is mostly turned away from him during a dance. Nor is it natural to hold my drink by the rim with my palm over the top as I keep backing up to stand by best friend instead of this stranger. I’m not playing hard to get. I just have deep-seated emotional traumas for which I refuse to seek help.. and that is haaaawt.

Fuck, Gail. You’re so paranoid. It’s just lime seasoning.

5. He’s not getting laid anyway.
Hypothetically (because this has never happened), maybe he’s cute and didn’t open with “Hey, there. I’ve never hit a woman” (that has). He’s got a big boy job and he even made me laugh. He wants to hear about my job and doesn’t ask “So, why do you need a master’s degree for that?” He’s got real points where they count… but, for all of the aforementioned reasons and then some, I’m still not going home with him. For one, I’m in a fucking skort and my dishwater bra. It’s also been years since anyone’s seen my breast reduction scars or heard the sounds I make during sex. As a side effect of my marriage, I can’t even sleep alone without my purse next to me and regularly wake up in a panic anyway. Like I’m going to be that exposed with even the nicest stranger ever. I also used to weigh 260 pounds and it takes a lot to go from “that fat chick” to “the girl who gave me head at the cowboy bar.” I really don’t care what people do with their own bodies. It makes no difference to me whether or not your vagina has been broken in if you’re a consenting adult. I, however, am far too inexperienced and insecure because of it to be naked with another person in the room. Gail mentioned that if I went to a movie with Engineer, he’d hold my hand and I freaked the fuck out. So, it’s pretty safe to say that I am doing nothing with a man in a bar that I couldn’t tell my daddy about later.

I could probably theme this entire blog around learning to date at an age when everyone else knows what they’re doing, though I’m not really into the idea of a theme that’s any more specific than That Librarian Who Says Fuck A Lot. The fact remains, that in any given situation where a guy thinks I’m fuckable, all he’s got to do is scratch the surface. At this point, I think I should probably shoot for my social awkwardness to be considered endearing, rather than sexy.