Here’s an observation from the annals of the obvious: everywhere you go, strangers talk about the weather. And if you live in Toronto, where I do, they always talk about how absolutely crappy the weather is or recently has been or will be in the immediate future. The winters are long and slushy, with winds that rip through your clothing and through your skin and through your bones and feel like they are carrying pieces of your soul out the other side of your body and leaving a biting dead cold behind. The summers are like a sauna in which you’re trying to commute to and from work, choking on the soupy heat, while some moron with feathered hair keeps spraying more water on the rocks and asking if it’s hot enough for you. So in winter everyone you share an elevator with brushes sleet out of their hair while they whine about the cold and make a lame joke about global warming not being all it’s cracked up to be; in the summer they just sort of slump and ask if you’re lucky enough to have an air conditioner at home.

The summer has some clear advantages, though. In winter,^{1Which has hockey, which would in other circumstances be an insurmountable advantage.} when you’re slopping down the street with wet socks trying to see if you can still feel your nose — yup, it’s still there, and it hurts like a bitch — all the members of the opposite sex, as well as members of other sexes, are wearing scarves and hats and puffy sweaters under even puffier coats and heavy pants and boots and basically unless you have some kind of wool fetish^{2Which, if you do, good for you, weirdo.} means it is the least sexy time to be around strangers.^{3All the obvious crap about fireplaces and ski chalets you’re busy getting ready to fire off a comment about notwithstanding.} In summer, on the other hand, very attractive people wear very little clothing in very many of the places you go on a given day. This is a consolation for the doggier elements of these hot days that is hard to understate.^{4I know, that’s one from the annals of the obviouser. So?}

Cleavage. Legs. Those bony joiny parts between the shoulders and the neck. More legs. Side cleavage. Shoulder blades. Belly buttons. Even, in the past decade or so, pelvic bones. Plumber butt (though preferably not on plumbers). And recently (after a long break), this kind of thing. These are a few of my favourite things…

I used to feel guilty about being so taken by the sight of the girls in their summer clothes,^{5Bonus points to anyone following closely enough to notice that this is two posts in a row whose titles reference Springsteen songs.} the residual Catholicism of my upbringing cross-breeding with a few first-year lectures on the varied evils of the male gaze. Then I realized that: a). Pretty much every man, everywhere, is magnetically distracted by the sight of exposed flesh, and the lightheadedness, butterflies and rapid heartbeat that come on when, say, one encounters a situation like this across from him on the subway are not necessarily voluntary; b). There is no harm in finding someone breathtaking — my admiration in and of itself is not sleazy or degrading^{6Yes, yes, there are obnoxious and intrusive ways of admiring someone. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’ll get to that.}; and c). as I am constantly reassured by friends who are women who wear particularly revealing clothes, they aren’t wearing mini-skirts in an effort to hide their legs. Besides—as per point a)—the choice is whether to walk around feeling guilty or to walk around feeling inspired by beauty; simply not noticing is not an option on the menu.^{7Blinding myself to avoid sin? Not this heathen. And along the same lines, trying to insist that women should cover themselves for the sake of my moral purity (as they do in some countries) seems evil and miserable on any number of levels.}

The Funniest Man On the Internet, speaker of unspeakable truths, adopter of unspeakable name, ^{8It’s “blognigger.” Stop looking at me like that. It’s his name.}had a post about this that pretty much summed it up:

Listen: there was a girl on the F train today that was so unbelievably dope, that I cannot possibly describe her using ascii text. [...snip...] Now: let me confess that it was all I could do not to leap over the yuppie laptop cases lining the subway floor and sink my teeth into her neck like Blackula. Looking at her full, succulent breasts, much like the breasts of the girl in the picture above, I could feel a palpable tension building inside myself, commanding me to engage her person.

What do you think, Park Slopers? “What a bunch of sexist, misogynist bullshit.” Is that it? NO; Bullshit YOU! Then why did God and Jesus and Darwin give me these fucking chemicals in my head then, Park Slopers, that cause me to sweat and ache to obtain the succulent fruit of the female form???

[snip...snip] Men—ALL men in the universe, unless they are really, really gay, belong to a secret club that consists of all men in the universe. Members of the secret club secretly observe ALL women they are not romantically involved with, evaluate them physically, look at their asses when they walk by, and THEN, on occassions where a fantastic treasure is encountered, grown men who don’t know each other, regardless of race, class, nationality – shit I’ve connected with a HOMELESS KKK GUY on this – grown men who don’t know each other will make eye-contact and CELEBRATE these sightings with one another in a twisted yearning of frustration and awe. Together, they acknowledge the gift that Jesus has bestowed, and that they are blessed to share together. YES: CHASSIDS ROUTINELY THANK JESUS UPON WITNESSING THESE SUBLIME FEMALE SPECIMENS.

To which I’m tempted to just say Amen^{9 Except when do I ever do that? Never, that’s when. I am a man of many words.} and thank you Jesus—I have looked on women with lust in my heart and I saw that it was good. (I would point out that his exception—really, really gay men—is no exception at all. Those men, from what I’m told, belong to another, not-so-secret club that has exactly the same reaction except they evaluate other men. The difference is way more subtle than is commonly acknowledged, more of a National League–American League thing than a Klingon-Vulcan thing.)

Anyhow, another way in, briefly: at various times since I started this blog, I’ve gone YouTubeing for the scene in Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman gets beat and beat and beat in the boxing ring and keeps getting back up, because I think it says something important about the message of that movie and about how men should approach various things in life. I haven’t found that scene. What I have found, posted by many, many different people, is this, which clearly also says something important about men:

It should go without saying that in admiring passing women on the street (or in the office, or in the club, or wherever), like in so many things, discretion is the better part of valour. A few slightly lingering glances? Yes. Open leering? No. Open-mouthed drooling? Never, never, never. As for catcalling or winking or making that little “V” symbol with your fingers in front of your mouth while sticking out your tongue? Those behaviours deserve punishment, preferably corporal. You’re a man—not an animal, not a child—which means having some modicum of control over yourself and, importantly, making other people feel comfortable and unthreatened. The whole of human progress is about suppressing and taming our instinctive reactions so we can get things accomplished, physically, socially and otherwise.

The worst thing about goofballs acting like horned-up chimps when they see a woman in hot clothes is that they might scare or humiliate that woman, which is just straight-up evil. The second worst thing about it is that they might dissuade that woman (and women in general) from flashing some skin in the future, which makes walking around in the city a hell of a lot less interesting. But the third worst thing about it is that it degrades what is essentially, I think, something sacred and transcendent. By reinforcing the impression that the admiration of the female form is something pervy. It is, sometimes, but only by the definition that all men everywhere are pervs. But it is not always or only that.

This is a difficult subject to discuss—though I have discussed it with men old and young and in between, with manual labourers and leftist activists and stuffed blue suits, and have found remarkable consistency in approaches (as b-n pointed out above)—and in a lot of ways it’s more, uh, comfortable to deal with it in fiction. I once had a bit of a goofball of a character in a short story I wrote try to explain it by saying that the shape of the female body seemed to answer an existential question his body was born asking.

Some goofball leering and drooling conjures up the mental image of of sweaty, skeezy desperation in a locked bathroom, red-faced and gasping and dirty. I can admit that sometimes male sexuality is like that. But the way I am moved by a glimpse of stocking (or, usually, more) is more along the lines of the way I was moved standing atop a glacier on a mountain in Colorado. There’s sexual arousal mixed up somewhere in how I feel catching a glimpse of cleavage, but there’s also wonder and awe and adoration.

SHORTER: this > this.

And that’s nothing I’m inclined to feel guilty about. It makes the nicest days nicer, and the most unbearable days tolerable. But then you guys already knew that.

Photo by Cuauhtemoc Suarez used under a Creative Commons licence.

Tags: male condition

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Posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 1:39 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.