I'm in my 50s and tubby and average looking but my husband adores me. I can assure you that this is absolutely not about you or how you look and everything about his own inadequacies.
This morning I was sitting on the train to work and there was a group of 4 blokes chatting VERY LOUDLY about the women they intended sleeping with this evening after the football/ pub. Pictures were passed around and all of the men commented on the women's pictures in various awful degrading ways. It was horrible to hear. They then were clearly watching some porn and passing that around too. It was absolutely vile.
They were nothing to write home about to look at either - to listen to them you'd think that the women would be crawling over broken glass to get at them. But no, just your usual dim, creepy young men in their 20s.
Just before I got off I went over and sat myself down on a seat opposite two of them and said ( very calmly, very conversationally, as I'd been practising in my head for the last few stops)
" Hello lads. Couldn't help overhearing your conversation there. Now I'm old and you probably won't listen to what I'm about to say. But one day some of you will have children and some of those children will be girls. And I don't think that you'd like to think that there were men like yourselves talking about your own daughters 'fucking huge gash' on public transport. So maybe you afford the women you're treating like shit the same respect, eh?"
I'd like to say that I was able to seamlessly finish my speech and glide off the train at my stop without breaking stride, while they sat in stunned and reverential silence, but instead I was left standing at the doors pressing the button helplessly while the train just sat at Denmark Hill for what seemed like an eternity while they called me a fat stupid cunt. Eventually the doors opened and I ran away.
I can only hope that I shamed just one of them even a little bit. I'm continually saddened by the way I see and hear men speak about women.