Here's Looking at You

"You're trying to look up her skirt."

"What did you say?"

"I said, you're trying to look up Susan's skirt."

"I am not! I most certainly am not!"

This exchange took place when I was in first grade. As I remember it, we were putting up Halloween decorations, with Susan Sharp standing on a chair and Betty Umberger and me handing crepe paper and thumbtacks up to her, when Betty made the accusation. I was acutely embarrassed. I was outraged by the injustice of Betty's remark; I didn't think I had been trying to look up Susan's skirt. My memory is still so bruised by the event that it insists I wanted to say something like, "Don't you know I'm a nice boy, and I haven't even begun thinking thoughts like that?"

Forty years later, I have to confess that I possess this distinct memory of Susan Sharp's legs in a plaid dress that I liked a lot. And as I recall Betty Umberger, she was a sensible and amiable girl, not a finger-pointing sort of person. It now seems likely that I was guilty as charged. The accuracy of the accusation was probably what made it sting so much.

That episode marks the beginning of my awareness of an inclination to look at women "that way." It doesn't have to be looking up skirts or looking down blouses to be looking with an erotic content, to be, in short, ogling.

But the past few years, I've had some disturbing insights into my ogling inclination. It suddenly came to me one day that if a young woman smiled at me, it did not necessarily mean she might be willing to go to bed with me. I don't even remember the occasion of that lightning bolt, but when it struck, it was a disillusionment of a high order. And with that flash of truth came the understanding that for years I had assumed that if a woman presented me with a pleasant expression, it meant that sexual negotiation with her was possible. So at least some of what was involved in my ogling was a shopping process, a sorting out of the ones who would from the ones who wouldn't. This had little to do with anybody's actually going to bed with anybody else; gathering the data was usually rewarding for its own sake--that one wouldn't, that one would, that one wouldn't and, ah, yes, that one would. But that I held such an assumption and behaved in such a way, even if in the privacy of my own brain, seems to me both comical and shameful; it also seems to me simply a characteristic of the species; male and female Homo sapiens are constructed to begin exploring mating suitability through eye contact and facial expression. So although I may disapprove of my ogling inclination and term it primitive, its origins are the ordinary working out of biological destiny.

Another insight that came to me along this line of inquiry was that my recognizing beauty in a woman drew me toward wanting to possess her--and by that I mean possess. The impulse seems connected to my earliest sexual fantasies, which had to do with having individual females the way I had my toys--holding them exclusively for myself, playing with them, controlling their every action and doing with them as I pleased.

Still more disturbing was my realization that merely witnessing a woman's beauty made me feel that I had some actual claim to possessing her. Just to see a pretty woman was, to some extent, to feel that she belonged to me. Yes, I know that versions of this feeling can lead to kidnaping, murderous jealousy, obsession, fixation. But my guess is that at least the shadow of that impulse is present in the psyches of most heterosexual males. It is the license claimed by those men who pinch a girl's ass on the street or who lean out of a car window to shout at her, "Hey, baby, want to fuck?" How else can we account for such overwhelmingly negative sexual strategies? If a man, even a crude man, really meant to initiate a sexual relationship, would he do it with a pinch or a shout from a car window? So why does he act that way? He acts out of the powerful illusion of possession; he behaves that way because a circuit of his brain tells him he has a right to do it. And interestingly enough, he acts that way because he knows it won't work, because he can be sexually aggressive without having to risk sexual performance.

A final late-arriving insight about my ogling is that when I see a woman's breast or see up her skirt, I am pulled toward an even deeper and more irrational illusion, the fancy that something intimate has been exchanged, that carnal knowledge has passed between the woman and me. Maybe an exchange has taken place if the woman has willingly offered the view, but it's more often the case that I've stolen the sight. I can't really say that I know what to make of this phenomenon, except that it has immense potential for misunderstanding between the seer and the seen. Such a misunderstanding might provoke a violent response from some men, though in my own case, I must say that I find the experience oddly pacifying: If I see a woman's breast, I'm likely to feel tender toward her, possessively tender, yes, but at least not violently inclined toward her.

Once, coming up a set of subway steps in midtown Manhattan, I looked up to see a woman standing with her back to the staircase railing, a woman a couple of yards from me wearing a miniskirt and no underpants. I didn't stop in my tracks to continue looking, but I did slow my pace considerably, and when I got to the street, I examined the woman with some care, a bottle blonde, around 30, with a hard, heavily made-up face. Her buttocks had expressed a greater innocence and deeper humanity than her face. For almost 20 years, I've remembered her as a stranger toward whose backside I felt a baffling surge of tenderness.

In a published essay, I once confessed the following:

Walking on 56th Street one afternoon, I noticed that the young woman beside me, a stranger whom I perceived to be dressed in high fashion, wore her blouse unbuttoned in such a way that one of her breasts was wholly visible to me. I walked beside her long enough to decide she wasn't a prostitute; finally, I couldn't stop myself from asking her, "Excuse me, but why is your blouse unbuttoned like that?" and she delivered me a look like a hard right to the solar plexus. In such moments, I am so baffled by women that my teeth ache.

Several female friends of mine found my behavior and my writing about it offensive. They took pains to share their thoughts with me, but the most rewarding response to my confession came in a letter from a gentleman from Stony Brook, New York:

Your last paragraph begs belief: You were baffled by her response? You "walked beside her long enough to decide she wasn't a prostitute" (doubtless peering fervently at her exposed breast!)? What alternative reasons did you conjecture to explain her unbuttoned blouse so that you had to ask which was correct? And did it really not occur to you that, in asking, you were being an offensive ass?

This was a chastising that I found so deeply satisfying that I almost wrote to the gentleman to thank him for it. But I also felt oddly righteous.

Mike, a character suffering no ogling confusion in Irwin Shaw's The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, makes a case for looking at women as a healthy-minded activity:

I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men in subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.... I look at women ... correct. I don't say it's wrong or right.... I love the way women look. One of the things I like best about New York is the battalions of women. When I first came to New York from Ohio, that was the first thing I noticed, the million wonderful women all over the city. I walked around with my heart in my throat.... I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets. They're all out then, shopping in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all concentrated from all over the world into seven blocks--the best furs, the best clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it.... I like the girls in the offices. Neat, with their eyeglasses, smart, chipper, knowing what everything is about. I like the girls on Forty-fourth Street at lunchtime, the actresses, all dressed up on nothing a week. I like the salesgirls in the stores, paying attention to you first because you're a man, leaving lady customers waiting.... I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses.... That's the story.

I want to identify with Mike. I want to look at women, and I want women to take my looking as a sign that I appreciate them more deeply than the men who don't. But I lack Mike's clear feelings on the matter.

Of course, much of what I'm talking about is manners. When you're about to go out to dinner to celebrate your wedding anniversary and your wife comes downstairs in her pretty new dress and you give her a whistle and a look and tell her, "Lady, I can hardly wait to help you take that dress off," who can say you're not the admirable diplomat of that occasion? And if you notice, as she comes into your office to discuss the grant proposal she's writing with you, that your female co-worker has just gotten her hair done, is it not appropriate to remark, "Hey, Genevieve, you look terrific today"? The social code encourages such acceptable looking. But if your female co-worker comes into your office in her pretty new dress and you give her a whistle and tell her, "Genevieve, I can hardly wait to help you take that dress off," nowadays, you're likely to find yourself quoting Shaw at a sexual-harassment hearing.

•

As the father of a teenaged daughter, I've come to understand that the matter (continued on page 169) Here's Looking (continued from page 108) of a young girl's getting dressed to leave the house is enormously complex. Her choice of what to wear is her choice of what signals she means to convey to the people who will see her. As she prepares to go out, she has a look for herself in mind. The range of possibilities available to her is staggering: If she chooses her baggy Army pants and her father's old stretched-out Irish fisherman's sweater to wear downtown, she's going to be almost invisible. But if she chooses her pink miniskirt with her white tank top, she's going to get a lot of attention, with only a small portion of it coming from the people from whom she'd like to receive it, or being the kind of attention she'd like to get from them.

These are matters in which very early in her life, with a collection of 19 Barbies and one Ken, my daughter began carrying out an apprenticeship. To choose what to wear is to exercise a power, the technology of which women master by the time they are in their midteens.

In warm weather, young women and men gather outside my office building at the University of Vermont, and the level of hormonal energy often runs so high out there that it renders invisible a professorial type like me. This is the ideal anthropological circumstance for observing the preliminary mating rituals of Studentus americanus universitatus. Spoken language may be essential for the male of the tribe, but in this setting, the female can get along very well on body language and wardrobe signals alone. Surprisingly enough, the ones who merit real scrutiny are the dropouts, the young women who for one reason or another have said goodbye to all that and have chosen to dress plainly. While their fashionably dressed sisters are standing, sitting or strolling in conversation with young men, the dropouts in their drab, loose-fitting clothes move through the crowd, alone and apparently purposeful. They are literally out of it, the "it" being the sexual fray.

Since they are so much in the minority--say, one for every 30 or 40 consciously adorned coeds--one can hardly help wondering why they've made such a choice. Do they hate their bodies? Are they lesbians? Religious fanatics? Victims of rape or child molestation? The fact is that they may simply not want to be looked at "that way." And it is remarkably easy for them to choose not to be.

But is this what I really want--women to stop constructing their appearances so that I will stop ogling them? In spite of my admiration for the ones who eschew it all, the truth is that I'd hate it if women stopped putting on their "summer dresses." It seems comfortingly evident that we two genders are collaborators in this ogling business and that we'll all feel a lot better about it if we understand both the fact and the nature of our collaboration.

Maybe we all do understand it; maybe I'm just one of a few men who don't know how to swim with the flow of contemporary sexual politics. Standing in a grocery-store check-out line, I can't help remarking on a women's-magazine cover with a provocatively dressed young woman and the caption, Say Yes to Sexy . Checking out other magazine covers, I am intensely reminded of how "sexy" is a way of life in a culture whose dominant force is advertising. Sexy is mainstream American ideology. But I can't help noticing, too, that not one person around me has "said yes to sexy," that the 40 or 50 of us there in the check-out area are your basic, drably dressed mid-Saturday-morning grocery shoppers.

•

If I follow a young woman who has "said yes to sexy" all over town, it may be that I've simply received some positive signals that weren't intended for me. Or else I've chosen to ignore any negative signals she has transmitted and allowed my actions to be determined by testosterone alone. In either case, faulty technology is the issue, and the result won't be fun for anybody.

On the other hand, if in walking behind her toward the English department's main office, I take note of my colleague Professor Ann Fisher's pretty legs, am I not simply registering once again the refreshing fact that I am a living creature? Out of my usual guilt, I may lightly slap my cheek and swear not to be affected by Professor Fisher's high heels, subtly shaded hose and smoothly shaved legs. (I still have that instinct to whine about what a nice boy I am.)

•

I think now of Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem The Wide and Varied World, which entertains the question of its epigraph, "Women, women, what do they want?" and ends with this dark answer: "We want what you want, only/we have to want it more."

Perhaps included in this "it" is our mutual desire for more freedom from sexual oppression. I find it painfully humiliating to be inappropriately provoked to desire a woman. With me, as with everyone else, it goes back a long way: I remember attending a high school dance around the age of 14 and walking across about 40 acres of open floor to ask Teresa Robinson to dance, only to have her glance up briefly and say, "No, thanks." Am I talking about mere social embarrassment? Obviously, that's part of it, but I'm also talking about self-worth, about feeling so diminished in value that you want to shrivel up and die. Manners may be on the surface of this topic, but at its center are crucial issues of dignity and debasement. I know it's reasonable for a woman to want to be desired by invitation only. I also think it's reasonable of a man to want the invitation to desire to be as precisely transmitted as possible.

Nobody's talking about putting an end to ogling. I've had occasion to remind myself of how healthy a pleasure looking at women can be. Professor Fisher and I are longtime friends, each of us married for the long haul. But, by God, I like the sight of that woman, and if her face and manners are any sign at all, she doesn't half mind the sight of me. Professor Fisher and I have an ongoing regard for each other. Professor Fisher wears dresses I like, maybe a little old fashioned in style and conservative in cut, but they give her a cheerful, dressed-up look. She keeps her hair a decently generous length. In my professional opinion, she has a smile that would make an angel gain altitude.

But this is easy, right? Looking at an old pal isn't ogling, except maybe by Moslem standards. Let's try something tough--a healthy case of ogling a stranger. OK: I am about to pull out of the grocery-store parking lot when a car pulls over beside me, and before I even look, I know the driver is a woman. You know how when your car is sitting beside another car, you can't help but let your eyes shift over that way, but you don't want to do it when the other person is looking at you? Well, this time when it happens, she and I lock eyeballs before we know what we're doing. It's warm weather; we have our windows rolled down; my radio is playing some aching, midafternoon hillbilly ballad; and all of a sudden, this woman and I are looking deeply into each other's eyes. Nothing for it but to smile a bit and look back straight ahead; we both do that. But I like what I've seen. This is a lady of my own generation, and her face is both lively and showing some wear. The history of her love life is more than one chapter long, I'd bet on that. I like her smile, which has a rueful discipline to it, a wry turn at the corners of her mouth. Just as the light changes, she and I turn back toward each other and exchange another glance, and this is the old heart squeezer; the look that says, Stranger, you've got your life and I've got mine, and we're never going to see each other again, but given a chance, we'd know how to spend some hours together, now, wouldn't we? She pulls out, I follow, and a block later, I turn right to go to the gym, and she keeps going. I'm still feeling the buzz from exchanging that last look with her, so when I turn off, I lift a hand to wave to her. I don't expect her even to see it, though she could if she glanced in her rearview mirror. Sure enough, she does, she lifts a hand and waves back. I drive on to the gym, squinting little tears out of the corners of my eyes.

All right, so maybe within speaking three sentences aloud, the woman and I would have hated each other. Maybe if we'd gotten out of our cars, we'd have been horrified at seeing what the rest of us looked like. That's at least part of the point: The lady and I didn't see a whole lot--and maybe that's the essence of looking, that you never get to see it all--but we liked what we saw. I liked remembering the sight of her so much that in the gym, before I changed clothes for racquetball, I went to the big mirror in the men's locker room and checked myself out, a dangerous act for a man my age and my weight. But I wanted to see what that lady might have seen in me that earned me a smile like hers. And you know, I didn't think I looked so bad.