What turns you on?

If there is one thing I can’t stand on men, it’s small feet. Just in case you were wondering, this has nothing to do with the apparent correlation between the size of a foot and the size of a penis.
True, I’d be less than impressed with an itsey witsey teeny weenie, if you’ll excuse the word, but never having bedded a man with size six feet, I have no idea if there is any truth in the rumour.
My dislike of small feet came about because of a boy named Tony. He was attractive, intelligent, sang in a band, had long brown hair and some rather beautiful tattoos. All in all, just the kind of guy my 19-year old self liked best. On our first proper date, I noticed that his feet, delicately shod in Converse trainers were no bigger than my own size fours. Why this bothered me, I have no idea, but from that moment on, I knew Tony could never be my lover. Even keeping him as a friend was tricky. Every time I saw him, my eyes were compulsively drawn to his petite feet and those tiny tootsies just freaked me out.
The things that turn us on and turn us off can be entirely unpredictable and in some cases downright weird. Skinny wrists, bony knees, blond hair, glasses and crooked smiles are just some of the many features I find attractive – whereas small feet and bad spelling will send me running for cover. Sometimes no matter how lovely someone is, if they have just one fatal flaw, it is impossible to see them as a potential sexual partner.
Very few of us – with the exception of the very drunk or very desperate – will have sex with someone we don’t fancy, at least a little bit.
But what exactly makes someone unattractive? I decided to do a survey of my nearest and dearest to find out what they thought. Here are the results.
Some of the answers were predictable enough. Bad teeth and breath and the kind of body odour that suggests somebody hasn’t washed for weeks were universally panned.
Shauna wouldn’t look twice at a man with a saggy ass; Mary wouldn’t consider anyone shorter than herself and Leigh had a particular horror of webbed feet.
However, I was genuinely taken aback by some of the answers. My friend John doesn’t like short or curly hair; Greg loathes redheads, despite being ginger himself (something to think about there, methinks), and Amber has a phobia about large nostrils.
My friend Anthony listed a litany of sins, which included “yellow toe nails, more gums than teeth, knees that have the appearance of a cabbage, crusty elbows, a very pointy chin and a large fleshy clit.” The boy has problems.
As might be expected, most men are not fond of extraneous body hair, especially if it occurs in strange places. Almost all of the blokes I surveyed were decidedly against leaving female body hair as nature intended.
Good news for the manufacturers of hair removal products I suppose, but bad news for lazy girls, who hope that guys will be blind or horny enough not to notice the downy fuzz accumulating under their armpits.
Thomas told me he was unable to consummate his relationship with a sexy exchange student once she removed her top to reveal armpits hairier than his own. Gareth can’t stand what he called “an unkempt and untamed minge.”
John shuddered at the thought of the spare hairs that sometimes sprout on the female chin. Almost all of them felt that hairy lips were nasty, hairy nipples worse and a hairy ass the ultimate crime.
So whatever happened to the idea that variety is the spice of life? What happened to our ability to find the beauty in the other person’s uniqueness? It’s worth thinking about.
Anyhow, while some guys felt that excessive hair would stop them doing the deed, others took a more realistic approach – Greg reckoned that hairiness wouldn’t stop him having sex with a girl, but it would stop him having sex with her again. Girls, you have been warned.
Big breasts are supposedly the male ideal, but not every man likes them. Having spent hundreds of euros on clever bras to make the most of my average assets, I was pleased when a guy I was dating told me he preferred smaller boobs. I was less pleased though when he informed me that my breasts were larger than he had originally thought and suggested I invest in minimizer underwear. The cheek of him! My suddenly too large breasts may have been a turn-off for him, but his find faulting was a major turn-off for me and that was the end of that.
One of the strangest turn-offs has got to belong to my friend Aaron. The thing he can’t stand is minty fresh breath. Any girl wanting to get intimate with the boy would do well to approach him with a mouth that smells like a week old ashtray. Aaron doesn’t smoke himself, so it’s not for practical reasons. He tells me it’s because the first girl he ever kissed was a smoker and he’s become fixated.
Despite all these weird phobias and turn-offs, most of manage to do okay when it comes to scoring with the opposite sex. Perhaps it’s because what one person finds a turn-off, another will find endearing. My ex, Chris, thought hairy legs were cute and asked me not to shave mine; John loves crooked teeth; Tanya loves big noses; Humphrey prefers girls with curly or short hair to those sporting silky straight manes and Thomas loves redheads.
As for me, well, my needs are simple. I could find someone attractive whatever the colour of his eyes or hair. If he is clean-shaven or bearded, has chest hair or none, it’s all the same to me. I place no restrictions on height, nationality, religion – or lack of it – or star sign. All I ask for is a decent pair of at least size 10 feet poking out of the end of my bed. On that there can be no compromise.b