Tights, the Ultimate Man-Deflector

Put down your pepper spray. And don’t waste time gaining a hundred extra pounds. If you want to keep men away, start wearing colored tights. Yes, those look-at-me opaque cousins of suntan nylons are more effective than bad breath, body odor, or picking your nose.

Tights, my friend Beverly told me today, are what have been keeping half of humanity from talking with me. For 15 years or more, I’ve been asking my friends why men avoid me, even though I’m a tall, good-looking, slender blonde with a happy disposition. Finally, finally, finally, after years of begging my male and female friends to let me in on the secret, Beverly revealed the truth. Men avoid me because of my tights. They are intimidated by them. Men don’t want other men looking at their woman if it’s not for the right reason—she’s hot. If she’s just creative or, god forbid, doing her own thing, that makes men feel insecure and uncomfortable.

I have always loved my tights—pink, yellow, red, gray, maroon, blue, green, black and patterned. I thought of them as an outward expression of the pixie within. Besides, they have a nice “pull” to them—tights are tight. So it’s not just that I’m decorating the world with my legs, I’m giving myself a teeny pleasure with every step I take.

I always thought that the man who is matched to me would love my tights, be attracted to me because I was going my own way. He wouldn’t want just another Nordstrom cardboard cutout, but a woman who was different, special, unique, me.

The man who is matched to me would have an instant sense of knowing that this lady with the long vermillion legs before him would be as “interesting” in bed as she was out and about in the world. For the right man, my tights and my scarves would be secret signs, messages meant for him alone. My guy would think, “Ah, I can just see how she would use those scarves and those tights. I’m so glad my house has rafters and my bed has posts.”

To be told that just the opposite is true, that men are scared of a woman who is unique, is quite disturbing. They don’t want a challenge, they don’t want to get hooked up with a dreamer. That kind of man is only found in the movies.

Men are terribly insecure and their egos are extremely fragile, Beverly says. You can’t let them know you’re someone special from the get-go. That would send them running. (And these are the people we’ve allowed to rule the world for the past several millennia! Girls, let’s rethink the game plan.)

Of course, her theory doesn’t account for the fact that it’s been too hot to wear tights for the past six months. Yet in all that time, no man who has seen my bare, unadorned legs has asked me out. So to hell with Bev’s theory! Let me put on the pumpkin ones. I feel the weather changing.