a useful face

he didn't know about his face. his parents, in order to protect him from something, had sent him to an all-boys school, where his nerdiness, his rulebound nature, & his aesthetic & emotional sensitivity were more salient to his classmates than his face. only when he was bullied so badly that his parents pulled him out of the boys' school & sent him for lack of other options to the local coed public high school did he start to get an inkling. even then he was too innocent, & humbled by past experience to fully absorb the knowledge. but in the coed public high school, it started to matter that he had an exquisite face.

he could have been attractive without it coming in very handy for him. if he'd had broody, bold features, mr rochester/adam driver physiognomy, then the girls, still feeling compelled by him, would have expected behavior that matched that type of face & he simply wouldn't have been up to the challenge. but he had the kind of handsomeness that is sometimes called girlish or nonthreatening, though it's not really either one. so they felt drawn to approach him instead of to challenge him.

suddenly his aesthetic fussiness was artsy. god help him, he played guitar on the grass. his emotional sensitivity wasn't exactly treated with tender human respect, but it was used to manipulate him & draw him in instead of to torment him. he loved suddenly having so many caring friends. & where girls go, boys go. he was actually making male friends for the first time.

he spent a lot of time with girls, & was grateful to them, & naturally somewhat literal-minded as well as inexperienced, & as a result he became an outspoken & somewhat doctrinaire male feminist. he was pretty enough to get away with it &—what a waste—pretty enough not to need the grift.