Ogling

And no, it was not a good analogy sozobe. My analogy was about reality while yours is about fiction. A good analogy would be for me to use a movie or some staged event.

This picture pretty well sums up my extreme guilt at being male. I believe most women are upset/disturbed/annoyed and sometimes frightened/intimidated by such ogling. It must be a horror.

Yet, male instinct would have me ogle women. I don't WANT to cause women distress, but that evil Y chromosome is insistent. As a man, I am visually smitten by a passably-attractive woman.

I believe I go out of my way to avoid ogling behavior- maybe to an extreme- I would rather step off a sidewalk into a busy intersection without looking for oncoming traffic, than to have a woman standing in that direction think I was looking at her instead. If a woman at a party or a sports bar walks through my line of sight to the television, I have to look briefly somewhere else, so as not to upset her by accidentally looking at her body.

I'm aware that SOME women at SOME times enjoy/encourage ogling and dress and/or pose to encourage it. But I don't trust myself to know for sure when such times are. I experience guilt at enjoying a woman's visual beauty even when invited.

So, probably a lot of women think I must be gay because I don't stare at their bodies. I WANT to look, but I just don't know where the line is between flattery and oppression; so I usually don't.

Equus reminded me of something else.

Soz, remember how I told you that I am uncomfortable when women breastfeed in public? You said some of my actions were unecessary but I'd rather be the idiot looking at the ceiling than have the mother suspect I am looking at her breast.

Equus,

I have found that my strict rule that if a women notices I'm looking it's untoward has meant that some women are surprised and I have actually gotten dates that way (e.g. beautiful friends absolutely mystified that I do not appreciate their beauty).

Of course some might think I'm gay too!

Thanks a lot for your responses so far, fellas. I'm going to have to take notes and come back to this as the sozlet is in NO mood for me to be at the computer right now. (Typed as someone is grabbing at my arm...)

As we all know Sozlets rule. Take your time and give her the expected/required time.

Women want to be ogled (i.e. appreciated for their beauty), but on their own terms. Expections of reprimands for not being politically correct are forcing the feminization of men today. Yet, women still want 'real men'. Bottom line: Let nature take it's course, and stop trying to politicize natural instinct. It's no wonder the terrorists laugh at us....I am being flippant here, but hopefully pointed. My own liberal upbringing has led to queries about my being gay as well, back in my dating life. And Sozlets of all sorts do indeed take precedence....

cav,

You make two interesting points. One is the desire to have beauty appreciated (but on their terms) and the other is that despite all our attempts to be sensitive to women's wishes this is sometimes construed as unmanly and sometimes the more untoward bahavior is rewarded.

In my group of friends it was always the more agressive that "scored" the most.

The Alpha male is not a myth, despite what women want us to believe...

I look at women I find attractive.

IMO there is nothing to apologize for, or to flagellate oneself over.

It is natural and normal.

It doesn't have to be sureptitious and it doesn't have to be boorish or excessive.

The sozlet is momentarily distracted by "DragonTales" (yes, I am a terrible mother) so wanted to get something in there quickly:

THIS IS NOT A TRAP. My intention is not to set you guys up to say "Hey, she's HOT!" or "Oh, you know she loves the attention," or "Well, if she's walking around by herself in a strange town with those kinds of clothes, what does she expect?" so I can leap upon you in a feminist fury. Merely, I wanted to gather more participants for what I thought was an interesting discussion. This is how I chose to do so. (I'm pleased with the results so far, and maintain that the controversial image gets things going better than asking "so, what do you guys think about ogling?".)

Well, i don't know about this here Olga, she looks alright, in a 50's kinda way . . .

Geeze, talk about a stacked deck. The Italians are notorious among other "Latin" people for the aggressive stares, remarks and pinching in which they indulge. Try walking out into a neighborhood plaza in Monterey sometime (the one in northern Mexico) in the evening. Husbands and their wives, young ladies and their beaux will all be there, strolling, to see and to be seen. In some cultures, there are mechanisms for such things, and the display behavior serves a purpose. How a culture reacts says a lot about that culture. I frankly found Craven's remarks about breast-feeding women to be hilarious. I spent many years among francophone people, both white and black, and in their shared culture, that is a normal activity. If you stare, the woman is likely to smile and say: "Il est beau, n'est-ce pas?" He's beautiful, isn't he?" -- meaning the baby. A frank admission of the cultural difference came in a conversational french class which a friend of mine from Africa taught. The young American girls in the class said they would be comfortable topless at a beach in Europe but never in the U.S. When they asked Yaboo about it, he just laughed--telling them he grew up in a tribal area, and when the kids wanted to go swimming, one of the grown men would check the river for crocodiles, and if it was declared safe, the kids would strip down to the skin, and jump in.

And then consider the women in Muslim countries in their chador. If a woman lives in a sexually repressive society, she has ever reason to be apprehensive about the possible reaction of a man. We live in a society in transition from the world of Hester Pryne to the world of Helen Brown. Anyway, who told y'all life would be easy?

A few things:

Just now I left the buiding to smoke. A beautiful woman walked past and before any of the guys who were smoking had a chance to ogle she tossed her head up defiantly as a defense mechanism against non-existant ogles.

That action on her part is insulting, if understandable. In Brazil I started doing the following for fun. When a woman was walking by and obviously steeling herself for an ogle or cat call or some such I'd cartoonishly toss my head the other way, often with surprisingly good results.

The thing is, even if you do your best to be respectful and polite, some women will treat you like a pervert, simply because they expect ALl men to be. And IMO, men who do their best to be sensitive to the uncomforable situations males put women under are often deeply insulted at the connotation that they are perverted.

Another story:

Bus rides in Brazil are horrible for all involved, both men and women. But it's particularly horrible for women.

First of all the buses are crowded, this makes everyone uncomfortable. But especially so for women, who often suffer at the hands (or other body parts) of men who use a crowded bus as a pretext for unwelcome contact.

Anywho, I hate buses but even so I have a greater hatred of being or being perceived as a perv.

One day, while getting on a bus I was following behind a woman who was just getting on. I wasn't paying any attention to her until she turned around and gave me one of the dirtiest looks I have seen. From the look you'd think I'd fondled her or something.

I was mortified until an old lady who was right behind me and saw it all yelled out (saving my embarassment) "Don't worry, kid, some women are stuck up. She wanted us to think you were ogling her but you weren't".

I was relieved, but something I'd liek to point out is that when men who avoid being untoward are treated as perverts it's frustrating. When they are subject to generalizations about all men being dogs and assumed to be a pervert at every corner it's insulting.

This really happened. Two couples me and my then wife Solveig and our friends Richie and Nancy went to a Red Sox game. After the game we tried to all scramble onto a green line trolley. Mob city. I was the last of the group and just made it on to the bottom step. Just before the doors closed a young woman got on the same step which was also occupied by another guy. We were right up against each other and facing each other. The car was oddly quiet. As the car started the humor of the situation struck me and I blurted out so the whole car could hear "The last time I was this close to a woman I had to marry her". The crowd cracked up. No, she didn't hit me. She laughed too. See God still protects the fool.

Humour is great, not only as an icebreaker, but as an attraction as well, provided it is well put and tasteful.

Just for the record, I am not an ogler, I am an observer.

First, I've thought about it and won't defend the use of this picture to start the discussion, after all. My thinking was roughly: I've had these discussions with guys, hmm, how did they start? Oh, right, the one with E.G. started when I saw that postcard. So I'll post that postcard and see if it starts a similar discussion.

However, it's not really a fair starting point, I grant that.

What made me realize this was coming up with a closer analogy to the Palestinian situation -- my analogy was that a group of Palestinians had privately expressed their satisfaction that Americans had gotten their just desserts, and a film crew goes and finds that group, toting a TV and a video of 9/11, then puts in the video and turns the camera on the Palestinians' reaction.

My point was going to be that while the circumstances were manipulated, the Palestinians really did react that way -- their reaction was expected but not scripted, and the reaction really was to the footage, rather than outright subterfuge on the level of taking footage of a crowd celebrating after a soccer victory and splicing it in.

But I realized that if someone posted that to start a discussion about the Palestinian situation/ Arab views of the U.S., I definitely would be all over it right away as being inaccurate. The resultant discussion might still be good, but...

So, let me say that when I first had this discussion, I thought the picture was completely real -- I only learned today that it's not. I did and do have a very strong visceral reaction to it. My stomach clenches, my shoulders tighten, my heartbeat increases. I have been in variations of that situation many times. I traveled alone in Europe, and got into some situations that could have been much worse -- nothing terrible happened, but the very real fear I felt in those situations are immediately brought to mind by the photo.

What I reacted most strongly to when E.G. and I talked about this -- he had the postcard on display somewhere in his room -- was the dismissive "oh, don't take it so seriously" reaction I got from him. The discussion we had was about how difficult it is for some men to put themselves in that picture -- if they imagine a bunch of women lined up, making catcalls, it just doesn't carry the same sort of threat. In fact, he made some sort of "that'd be great!" crack. I'll just cut and paste here what I said in the previous discussion:



Then I went into what was behind that a bit more:



Random thoughts before I re-read posts and respond to them --

- I agree that the "look at me/ don't look at me" dance is complicated.

- Without more info, I can't say whether the "just looking at her boobs" case was justified or not. I can see where it would be -- if he did it in a particularly overt manner, and was talked to about it, and persisted. That said, the thing where the guy talked about the "Seinfeld" episode was DUMB.

- As a gross generalization, the ogling that bothers me most is from people who have no intention of actually making a romantic overture. I remember one time in L.A. I was in a really bad mood and some guys were lined up waiting for something and being rude (staring) and it was just pissing me off so I went up to one of the guys, a centimeter or two closer than warranted, asked him something innocuous -- directions, maybe -- all the while staring him in the eye. He got bashful, apologetic, scuffed his feet a bit. We ended up having a decent conversation -- there were opportunities for him to make a move that he did not take. That was not the point. There is an element of woman as object rather as person which I cannot type without groaning at the cliche but how else to put it? that I am getting at.

Something I find interesting is that the postcard looks obviously staged to me and less obvious to you. Prolly because of the difference between seeing it and experiencing it.

Travel + culture shock + ogling is a scarey mix. Many peoples think that other peoples are "a bunch of perverts who undress you with their eyes". While there are cultures with more ogling than others an important factor is that tourist men and women get much more attention than normal, and are usually less inclined to interpret the attention as innocuous.

In short -- I highly doubt that any of you guys ogle in the sense I am using.

Craven, I think that's interesting, too. I hope (?) that it helps convey that this really does happen, even if this picture was posed. Not just in foreign countries, either... has happened to me much, much more in the U.S. than elsewhere, though carriage and confidence has a lot to do with it. That is again about romantic overtures vs. purposely making someone feel uncomfortable, though, I think.

edit: added "to me" -- not saying that there is more ogling in the U.S. than elsewhere. Definitely a cultural/ regional thing, though. L.A. sucked, but only in certain parts.

To be more specific (I've decided to write in short bursts rather than trying for one coherent post -- hope it's not too irritating) -- there are really only 3 people in the picture that bother me. The guy leaning forward, the guy standing right in her path with no intention of moving, and the guy on the motorbike, laughing. They are purposely making her feel uncomfortable, and enjoying their success. The other guys are just looking on.

"Let nature take it's course"? C'mon, Cav. "Nature" dictates that you impregnate as many women as possible. How would Mrs. Cav like that?

Again, appreciation of beauty and ogling are separate, in my book. I remember once waiting for a bus (buses come up a lot when I think about this -- thank god I no longer have to depend on public transportation), and there was an older gentleman (65?) waiting for a bus going the opposite direction, across the street. He was gazing at me steadily, so I was a little unnerved when he crossed all the way over to me (West, South) and approached me. When he got within about 10 feet, he put his hands out as you would to calm an anxious dog, and said something like, "Please forgive me, I do not wish to alarm you, I just wanted to tell you that I think you are a very, very beautiful woman." Then he sort of bowed, barely, and re-crossed the street.

Made my day. Nothing wrong with that.