So I'm shaving my head for St. Baldrick's this week. Thursday, to be exact. For those of you who don't know what St. Baldrick's is, it's a foundation with events held worldwide where volunteers have their heads shaved in solidarity with kids fighting cancer and to raise funds for childhood cancer research. Quick plug: This year's event is Thursday night! Boylan Heights! Starts at 6 p.m.! Come out! Anyway, if you see a lot of bald girls walking across Grounds during the rest of the semester, don't be alarmed.
To raise money, I set up a Facebook group and a Facebook event to advertise what I would be doing and why. I left the settings on both set to "Public," so anyone in the Facebook community could read up about what exactly St. Baldrick's is and potentially donate money. Because of this small detail, I started receiving a startling amount of friend requests from guys who had browsed through my groups. Confused, I clicked on their profiles ... only to see that all of the pages they were fans of were things like "Guys who love bald girls" and "Girls with no hair" and on and on. So weird. Friend requests ignored.
That got me thinking about people with very strange things that they find attractive. I hesitate to use the term "fetish" because I think that word often implies sick and twisted, which it doesn't always have to be - although still, I'd be hard pressed to consider dating anyone who was attracted to me because of the lack of hair on my head. There just seem to be a lot of more ... let's say, unique characteristics that certain people are drawn to.
For example, one of my favorite episodes of "Sex and the City" is when Charlotte goes to the shoe store and the shoe salesman has a particular fascination with her feet. It works out well for Charlotte because he gives her all the free pairs of expensive shoes she could want, as long as she models them for him first. In the end, though, she finds his fascination with feet too creepy and has to give up the free shoes.
I think feet are considered a pretty common, weird turn-on, although I've never actually heard of anyone in real life who is into that sort of thing. Another so-called turn-on is found in people known as "chubby-chasers" or people who have a penchant for men or women of the larger variety. These chubby-chasers just happen to have a thing for more overweight people. Still, this is another strange turn-on that I haven't really seen played out, despite its widespread reputation.
Accents, though, I have found are something that every single girl will swoon over. It doesn't matter if it's an Australian accent, a British accent, a Southern accent, a French accent ... Guys with accents are immediately 10 times hotter once they open their mouths. It's a weird turn-on, and I don't quite understand why it works that way. Doubtful that American accents in other countries have the same effect.
As for other real-life turn-ons, I have a friend who is surprisingly attracted to red heads with freckles. Guys can have just red hair, and she doesn't bat an eyelash, or they can have just freckles, and she doesn't care at all, but any man with red hair and freckles just makes her go crazy.
I've heard some others among my friends ... a guy who likes it when girls wear overalls, a girl who likes when her dates have hairy legs, another who likes short guys. Regardless of the attraction, take my advice. Don't request people on Facebook or go after them in real life just because they have the quality that secretly turns you on because it comes across as very, very creepy. Get to know them first and act like it was their personality that won you, when all along you were just waiting for a chance to be with that short and chubby, hairy-legged, freckly redhead.
Jordan's column runs biweekly Mondays. She can be reached at j.hart@cavalierdaily.com.
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