[QUOTE=tdn]
olivesmarch4th addressed the first part of your post, so I’ll address the second part.
Yeah. Seriously. What the fuck?
What does a rapist even look like?
What was the context in which that was said?
[/QUOTE]
Which time? :rolleyes:
The first time I was told that was when I was in high school. I had just asked a girl out (a big occasion for me, as I tended to, um, not do that). She looked at me with a deer-in-the-headlights expression for a minute, then said, “I can’t go out with you! You look like a rapist!”
And that was pretty much the extent of my high school dating career, right there. Luckily for me, I guess, she didn’t spread the story around.
Second time was when I was going to visit a former coworker (a friend to this day) who had moved across the country and was back in town for a few days. He and I have been friends for years, but I was always clean-shaven. In the two years he’d been gone we’d stayed in touch but had never seen each other, and I’d grown a mustache and goatee. I keep it well trimmed, and a lot of people have said I look better with it. I certainly look a bit older, which was a good thing at the time (not so much, these days :)).
At any rate, he opens the door and the very first words out of his mouth: “Dude! You look like a rapist!”
He’d never heard the story about the high school incident, and as far as I know, doesn’t know the girl.
The third time it happened was very similar to the first, except it was at a bar. I don’t do the bar scene much, but I was there and she was hot and we’d been flirting mildly all night and I figured, what the hell? Why not. So I asked if she wanted to go out for coffee sometime (I’m smooth, lemme tell ya). She hesitated, and then her friend (who had been mostly quiet but neutral all night) piped up. “She doesn’t want to go out with you. You look like a rapist.”
The hot one just shrugged at me and her friend led her away to the pool tables while I stood there with a gape-mouthed blank look on my face.
So. Apparently, I look like a rapist. Yay me.
Y’know, in high school – my senior year, at any rate – I could maybe see this. I drove a beat up Dodge van, with a wood-panel interior and deep-pile blue shag carpeting – with no seats! – in the back. IIRC the paint scheme was faded blue with several artistic splotches of primer, with a rust trim. And yes, I had an 8-track player that worked in the damn thing, just because. It was part of the dash, with my CD player velcro’d to the dash above it. 
So, if I’d been a senior at the time, I could’ve seen how the first incident might have come about. But at the time, I was a clean-cut junior who drove dad’s nice Ford Taurus, not the 70’s Babemobile (as my friends christened my van). And what little fuzz I managed to grow, wasn’t on my face. Heh.
Next time the Doper picture thread springs to life again I’ll have to see about getting all your opinions. 