Thursday, August 28, 2014

Caveman Speak

Buying that Dungeons and Dragons manual got me thinking about some of my olden days of role-playing, and for some reason, the game that popped into my head was one my group only played very briefly: "Og, the Caveman Game."

The genius and downfall of Og was its merciless restriction on language. The character sheet included a section with eighteen words listed, and you got to roll to see how many of those words your character knew and could speak. The range was 2 to 5 if I remember, and if you picked "eloquent" as your caveman's special ability you got a bonus two words. The list was: you, stick, small, shiny, me, hairy, big, go, rock, bang, cave, water, sleep, food, fire, smelly, thing, and (presumably just to be funny) verisimilitude. You could also petition the game master for the right to choose a word that wasn't on the list.

I picked you, me, and go, and in what I considered a stroke of genius, convinced the GM to let me add "fuck."

In case you've never thought about it, there are sooooo many ways to use the word fuck. With that one pick, I not only gave myself an edge for romancing the cave-ladies ("you, me, go fuck?"), I could also tell someone they'd disappointed me ("you fuck me."), threaten them if they were thinking about betraying me ("you fuck me, I fuck you!"), tell someone off ("go fuck you"), express dismay ("fuuuuck me!"), and of course, swear in a satisfying way whenever something went bad, as any role-player knows always happens sooner or later. The next best swear word was "smelly," and only one guy picked that. Everyone else was stuck just growling frustratedly at our misfortunes, while the one guy got to lamely say "smelly," and I got to shout "fuck!" By smacking my fist into my palm, I could also use it as a synonym for "hit," "fight," or "attack."

Eventually, after a lot of laughs, we gave up on Og because it didn't have an experience system to let you learn new words, which meant that we ran through most of the clever combinations of our vocabularies pretty quickly (even "fuck") , whereafter an adventure of even minimal complexity quickly became more a game of charades than a role-playing session.

But, fuck, was it ever a lot of fun at the start!

Progress Report 2

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Monday, August 25, 2014

My Next Character is a Nudist Druid

Okay, so here's the weirdest thing about that review I described last post: the guy complained about a tiny strip of unclothed abdomen, but much earlier in the book there's a picture of a lady druid in a fur bikini. Bare legs, bare belly, bare shoulders, barely covered breasts ... but he picked the archer with her tiny patch of uncovered waistline to rag about.

The only explanation for this (other than that he just overlooked her) is that the reviewer recognized that there was absolutely nothing the least bit sexual about her pose, and as a druid she would logically be expected to disdain the conventions of ordinary society anyway.

Which made me go further and realize ... it would be perfectly reasonable for a D&D druid character to be a nudist. Put some gear in a backpack and just let everything else hang out. Walk through villages with all the townsfolk staring, argue with constables who want to make you put some clothes on, turn yourself into a tiger when people complain ...

Now I just need to find an unsuspecting group that's ready to play the new edition.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Dungeons and Dragons Grows Up ... the Oversensitized Aren't Quite Satisfied

I used to play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger. Very fun game -- creative, social, entertaining ...

So when I heard they were bringing out a new edition, I wondered if I should be interested. The company went through this routine five or six years ago, and just flipping through the books in the bookstore told me they were aiming for a pre-teen/teen/MMO audience, not somewhat older aficionados of fantasy games such as myself.

Well, there couldn't be any harm in looking the new edition up online and reading some reviews, could there? Maybe a few longtime gamers would chime in and let me figure out whether it was worth looking at, or if all of us in the 35+ crowd should write the game off for good.

Wow, were there ever a lot of reviews piled up in a short period of time! And most of them seemed glowing, especially those by people who claimed to have played every edition of D&D since it was invented.

Might be worth a trip to the store to flip through a physical copy, I started thinking.

And then I came to a review that included a brief paragraph about the portrayal of women and minorities, which said there was a lot of minority representation in the artwork and that the female characters were almost all appropriately attired, except for one female archer on page 137, who had a bare midriff.

Bare midriff? Whoa, I am all over that, son. Where are my car keys?

At the store, I had to search around a little to find the book, but once I did, I went straight for page 137. Bare midriff! Oh, this is going to be good!

Page 140, too far. Page 131 ... overcompensated ... 133 ... 135 ... 137!

And there it was:


Holy shit, did you come all over yourself? Because I know I barely held it in. Salivating for more of this inappropriately attired lady?



That's it. That's the lurid display of skin that the reviewer found exceptionable enough to need remarking on.

Don't get me wrong. The guy didn't go on and on about how horrifically sexist this picture was. He didn't describe it as exploitive or titillating. He just said it had a bare midriff. But this is the example he cited to demonstrate that the women in the book were not 100% appropriately attired. Which means he thought this was inappropriate.

When you look at the entire picture, it's clear to anyone with any exposure to D&D or fantasy stories in general that this woman is intended to be a barbarian. Her midriff is bare because she's a barbarian, people. She doesn't care about social conventions. I mean look, she obviously doesn't even shave her armpits, right? (joke) And even as a wilderness-schooled outlander, she doesn't have bare legs or a naked shoulder. (Or maybe she has a naked shoulder, but we can't see it behind her hair, so I hardly think we can cry foul about its nudity.)

You can't even see her bellybutton!

Here's the scoop on this new D&D Player's Handbook (which, yes, I bought, because it is absolutely bloated with gorgeous fantasy artwork that is highly story- and character-oriented and I find I really would like to play the game again). Out of the 166 figures that I counted going page-by-page through the book (monsters not included):

99 are male.
47 are female.
20 are indeterminate.
13 are ethnic minorities.

The last of those sounds pretty skimpy until you consider the large number of pale blue elves and grey-skinned half-orcs and reddish tieflings. There are a substantial number of white European figures, but they do not dominate the book. In fact, in the section where you pick your character's race, the example shown for "human" is a black woman. 

Of the females, 13 show skin in the form of bare shoulders, necklines low enough to detect the curvature of breasts or actual cleavage, or a stretch of thigh. Quite a few others have contoured armor that makes it clear there are supposed to be breasts inside, but the contours are gentle, not bulging, and many of those figures would not be discernibly female if the armor didn't provide a cue, because they're elves or other races with slender builds and gentle facial features. 

Many of the 20 indeterminate figures are indeterminate because they have on bulky, non-contoured armor, and their features are androgynous enough that you simply can't tell their sex.

And this is all clearly deliberate. There's a human warrior who appears in three different pictures, and in none of them can I say for certain whether he's a guy with unusually soft features, or she's a woman with a muscular, stocky build like you might expect in a lady who chooses full plate armor for protection while swinging her sword. In one picture the character's jaw looks a little on the square side, but in another there's a delicate, feminine braid running through the hair.

Frankly, I'm astonished at the extraordinary degree to which the art in this book avoids even a hint of sexual sensuality. As a guy who cut his teeth on the fantasy artwork of Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones, I just can't understand anyone calling that archer's tiny flash of midriff "inappropriate." Unless they'd put unisex clothing and hairstyles on everyone in the book, I don't see how the creators of this manual could have hit it much farther out of the park as a victory for respectful, person-centric depiction of women.

There is a brand of feminism that seems to consider female skin below the collar or above the wrist/knee an instant signal of sexism. People being watchful for exploitation have become so sensitized that they no longer accept female anatomy as a valid element in artistic or cinematic works.

In point of fact, there's a rich tradition of seductive witches, alluring succubi, lusty barbarian swordsmen, and other sexually provocative types in fantasy storytelling, and there's nothing wrong with any of those tropes, except when they become crutches for lazy writing. In a book aimed at teens and adults, shading a handful of the images with mildly erotic undertones  should be absolutely beyond reproach. Sex is a part of our humanity; there's no reason it shouldn't be part of a roleplaying game. But the creators of this volume chose to leave it out (or rather, out of the artwork, since the text openly tells players that they should feel free to create characters of whatever gender/orientation combination they'd like). I won't criticize the art directors for that; there are plenty of oversexed publications out there they they may feel a legitimate need to counterbalance.

To complain that they didn't go far enough, though, betrays an uncontemplative, reactionary force of habit, not a true concern for issues of human rights or respect for individuals' sexuality.

Whew. Now that I've got that off my chest, can anyone tell me where to find an actually inappropriate image of bare female midriff? Because I feel kind of cheated on that score.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Bossy

I've seen this before, but it annoyed me all afresh when I saw it just now in the Facebook feed for the Colbert Report. I'm transcribing from memory, but I think this is pretty close:

The next time you hear someone call a little girl "Bossy," stop them and say, "That little girl isn't being bossy. She's demonstrating executive leadership skills."

People, listen. Some little girls are bossy. Some little boys are bossy. When we see them being bossy, we absolutely need to call them out on it. Bossiness is not an "executive leadership skill." It's the substitution of brute intimidation for genuine people skills. It's a terrible detriment to our society, and it needs to be discouraged -- across the board.

This is the kind of empowerment we don't need: an empowerment that says dictating to others without respect or politeness is the right of men and therefore should be the right of women as well. No. It's not anybody's right to badger someone else into submission, ever.

Also: the next time you see someone judging a situation on the basis of a single word, you should stop that person and say, "Excuse me, but it appears that you have what's called a 'trigger word.' That's a word that provokes an unreasoning, reflexive, and usually negative reaction often disproportionate to or entirely inappropriate for the actual circumstances. You might want to seek professional help for that."

Slow Day for Book Sales?

How exactly is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, from 2009, the number one bestseller in books on Amazon.com right now?

Is today National Try to Become a Psychologist Day?

Monday, August 18, 2014

Your Daily Dose of Societal Unfairness

So I read this article, and it made me angry. I anticipated a lot of the article's content from the title -- it's pretty obvious our society puts immense pressure on women to bear children, so I figured at least part of the piece would be about the author's experience having to contend with people's shock and disapproval that she would choose to remain childless.

What I wasn't prepared for was the idea that a woman's physician would refuse to refer her for a sterilization procedure even after several years of the woman asking. As the author points out, men can choose to have a vasectomy more or less whenever they want. How preposterous and condescending is it to tell a woman she can't similarly protect herself from unwanted pregnancy, especially on the grounds that she might change her mind and regret the decision? Hello-o! That's every decision of any importance in any adult's life!

Just so I have this straight, a woman should wait until she's 30 to choose a hysterectomy because that's a life-altering action that can't be undone. But she's free to choose to have children at whatever age she likes, because ... that's not a life-changing, irreversible decision?

Honestly, maybe it would be a great idea to force everyone to wait until they're 30 to make big decisions. But if so, it should be a general principle, not a single arbitrary restriction placed on women alone.

We live in a pretty messed-up world sometimes.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Quest for Eyeglasses: The Final Chapter

So obviously everyone is dying to know how it went when I returned to the Walmart optometry shop to pick up the glasses I ordered. Who helped Ian try his new glasses on? Was she hot? What inappropriate thoughts did he struggle with while seated across from her?

Well, it turns out there was a guy on duty when I showed up. Perfectly nice guy. I think he had a close-trimmed beard, maybe sort of reddish-brown hair? He put forward a much more personable demeanor than the female optician who helped me order the glasses the other day. In the end I thanked him or he thanked me, one of us said, "Have a great evening!" and the other one said, "You too!"

In other words, it was one of those absolutely forgettable moments of interaction that we all experience daily or at the very least weekly. Both of us, I think, sincerely meant the pleasantries we exchanged as we parted, but they were nonetheless pre-programmed and formulaic. I remember less of what he said or looked like and more that he disappeared into the back room for an exasperating length of time in order to reform the earpieces on my glasses.

Thus, because my male instincts put no time or effort into assessing him for his mating potential, he has already started to fade from my mind. Whereas the receptionist, the optometrist, and the first optician all remain firmly fixed there -- not just as pretty faces or bodies, but as personalities, as people.

I'm a strange person. Maybe other men are not this way. But when biology urges me to look at a woman, it does not cause me to depersonalize her. It causes me to process her unique facets more deeply, remember her longer, and wonder more about what's going on in her head than would be the case if I felt no tug to look, but merely passed by without ever contemplating her individuality.

I do not look in order to lessen; I look in order to appreciate and to learn.

At some point I'm going to write a post about why men should not indulge their urges to ogle. But that post is not going to equate ogling with objectification or exploitation, because in my personal experience it does neither of those things. Speaking only for myself, it is a yearning for connection that arises from sexual instinct but is not merely sexual.

If you want to criticize me for ignoring someone's personhood, you have to criticize me more for the nice-but-quickly-forgotten bearded guy this evening than for the three women I described earlier in the week.

Sorry, bearded guy. Now I feel bad about not looking at your name tag and at least knowing who you were.

Not all that bad, though. After all, you did make me wait an awfully long time while you bent those earpieces.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Progress Report

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Wait, Did You Mean "Feminist" or Did You Mean "Sexist Pig"?

It's not lost on me that there's an apparent irony in having "feminist" in my blog header but spending my first three posts talking about women I've recently checked out in public. I would, however, defend myself from charges of hypocrisy on several fronts.

First, the header also says I'm a writer of weird erotica, and none of my entries to date has contained any weird erotica, or even discussed it, so maybe some patience is just in order.

Second, I would hope that readers can tell the difference between internal and external behavior, since any clear-eyed reading of this blog so far ought to reveal my philosophical dedication to treating people well regardless of what might be going on in my head.

And third -- and most important -- feminism is about freedom and decency, and men and women will never be truly free around each other if they don't understand one another. I could maintain the fiction that it is inappropriate for men to perceive women sexually or to think of women sexually outside the confines of romantic relationships. But in doing so, I would be attempting to deceive everyone about a fundamental aspect of my own sexuality, and I would be colluding in a societal conspiracy to (1) mislead women about the workings of the male mind, and (2) manipulate men into denying the validity of their own sexuality. None of that could possibly contribute to a true freedom of interaction between the sexes. Rather, it would constitute a deliberate miseducation of women and repression of men.

Men want to look at women.

Men want to have sex with women -- not with a woman who is their spouse/soulmate, but with women, plural.

The fact that men want these things does not necessarily mean that they should get them. But it does mean that telling men not to want them is counterproductive. Some men will simply ignore what society is demanding, while others will comply but endure lifelong self-loathing for their inability to expunge these "inappropriate" desires. The rebellious men will end up treating women badly while the compliant men will be incapable of demonstrating the true openness and intimacy women deserve.

Women are harmed when we tell men to deny their nature. That outcome shouldn't be desirable to any feminist, no matter how much we might prefer that the internal workings of men's minds conform to our long-held notions of propriety.

We can and should demand that men treat women well. We can and should demand that promises of fidelity are kept, that unwanted attention is not thrust upon anyone, that basic respect is the right of every human being. But we cannot insist that men's internal responses are society's to mandate, any more than we can rightly expect homosexuals to simply "decide" to be straight.

If after all this you're still thinking, "He's just rationalizing so he can keep perving over every attractive woman he meets," then I can only shrug and say I'm sorry you see it that way.

Perving is fun.

You should try it sometime.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I Wasn't Intending To Write a Trilogy ...

So. As you all know from reading the previous two posts, I went to the eye doctor recently to have my prescription updated and was surprised first by the voluptuousness of the optometrist and then by the fact that her receptionist's winning smile displaced her the next time I indulged my sexual fantasy habit.

I kind of thought that was the end of it. But things come in threes, right?

And of course, if you get a prescription for new glasses, the next step is to get new glasses.

I didn't set about having the prescription filled straightaway after my appointment. The eyeware stores attached to optometry offices tend to be more expensive, and my wife said they had perfectly good, cheap frames at Walmart when she went to get her glasses made earlier in the summer.

Having already had very good results following my wife's eye-doctor advice, I decided to take her up on this pointer too, but it took me a couple of days to get over to Walmart. You know, because it's hard to work up any excitement for going to Walmart.

As it turned out, the optician who helped me had neither the sensual allure and immodest neckline of the optometrist, nor the beaming, genuine smile of her receptionist. Instead, like many Walmart employees, she seemed either disinterested or perhaps just extremely tired.

I have a great deal of sympathy for people who work at public-interface jobs and have to deal with endless streams of customers all day. I worked my way through college behind movie theater concession stands, and it's very easy to have your brain and senses dulled by the monotony and your energy sapped by dealing with customers (who, in almost any business, are endlessly inventive in finding new ways to test your patience and sap your will to live).

Coming from that perspective, I have to get really, really rotten service before I become upset, and the Walmart optician delivered better-than-rotten service, so I had no particular complaint. But thanks to her detachment and the inordinate amount of time she spent entering the details of my order into the computer, I had plenty of time to observe her and compare her to the previous two women in this saga.

All three of them fell into the age range of mid-twenties to early thirties. All three had appealing facial features and figures well within my tolerances. The receptionist had her glasses and smile. The eye doctor had her amiable professionalism and curves. The optician had her lab coat, a heart tattoo peeking out at the top of one breast beneath the coat, and ... more or less an absence of personality. That's not a judgment on how she might behave outside of her job, or even at her job on a different day or when a different mood might strike her -- it's merely an assessment of the face she turned to me.

Where I'm going with this is that, of the three of them, I felt least treated as a person by the optician. We carried out a transaction, a practical function was served, and no unpleasantness tainted our dialogue. But despite my attempts to be upbeat and pleasant, I received no human warmth from the experience. And that's fine -- I was paying for glasses, and she is paid to fit people for glasses, and personal warmth is not something I should expect as a right and certainly not something I should expect as a part of a purchase. To believe otherwise would be to view our basic humanity as a salable commodity. Nonetheless, as a result of her disengaged demeanor, I found the optician significantly less attractive than either of the other two women.

Which brings us to my point. Or maybe just closer to my point, since this is turning into a pretty complex post. I can't speak for all men, but there is a quality of libidinous appraisal within my psyche that I have come to accept as natural and inescapable. It's not a result of being socialized by our patriarchal society to perceive women as objects; quite the contrary, I spent most of my childhood and adolescence profoundly alienated from what I thought of as the macho male culture around me, and refused to participate in the prevalent girl-watching and comparative discussions of women's secondary sex characteristics that my peers (and occasionally my father) would engage in. A powerful hunger made me want to take part, but I scorned and repressed that hunger, and chastised myself for its presence. With age and experience, though, I've come to accept that reflexively evaluating women's attractiveness is simply something my brain does, most likely because millions of years of evolution have programmed it to do that. There's nothing wrong with it unless I allow it to influence my treatment of people, and I work very hard to make sure that doesn't happen.

Having accepted this instinct toward the assessment of attractiveness, I'm now able to observe things like the upshot of this three-part story.

Being treated nicely is attractive.

Being treated as though you are a person -- with emotions that can be positively or negatively affected by someone else's behavior -- adds tremendously to the appeal of whoever is treating you that way. Seeing someone react happily to you makes you feel capable of bestowing happiness.

My animalistic brain may on a regular basis be thinking, Wow, I'd like to have sex with her ... hmm, I might be interested in having sex with her ... oh, I'd definitely be all about having sex with that one, but those thoughts can be hugely dialed back or shut down entirely by impersonal behavior.

In other words, even on that atavistic level, I am not merely looking for things to have sex with. I'm looking for people to have sex with. The person is important -- critically important -- to the desire.

When my eyes try to roam, they are not objectifying women but personalizing them -- taking a sensory input of clothed-bipedal-organism-with-eyes-nose-and-mouth and, rather than allowing that input to pass through my sphere of perception as an unregarded object, looking instead for a particular part of her humanity. It is a personalization that gives a great deal of weight to sexuality and sensuality, but is about the person, not just her body.

I'll be writing more about objectification and the impropriety of ogling later. But I think it's important to note that male lust -- which is something we men must keep in check every day of our lives -- is not simply about satiation and possession. It is about a particular kind of engagement that is part of what makes us human.

By the way, I did end up having a sexual fantasy about the optician later on. (Curiously, I still haven't gotten around to mentally getting it on with the smoking hot optometrist.) What's interesting about that is that in the fantasy, the Walmart employee was much more involved with me on a personality level than she was in real life, and it was important to me to imagine her enjoying the encounter much more than she seemed to enjoy our real-life interaction -- and I don't just mean sexually enjoying it, but personally enjoying it, as a mutual activity being carried out by two human beings.

Plus, it was really hot. Maybe I'll write it into a story sometime.

Friday, August 8, 2014

The Allure of a Smile

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently had my first visit with a new, female, thoroughly hot optometrist. Through the course of the appointment, I had every expectation that I would be sexually fantasizing about her later. She had silky black hair, beautiful skin, a curvaceous figure, and those breasts whose maddening degree of exposure so bedeviled me all through the examination. Beyond that, her demeanor and personality exuded a friendly, smart, positive presence of the kind that I find always adds to a woman's attractiveness. Given her extreme physical and personal charms, and given the immense frustration of having to perpetually wrestle my eyes out of their attempts to dive into her cleavage, an indulgence in lewd fantasy seemed inevitable.

But when the next available opportunity presented itself, and I set the stage by imagining myself returning to the optometry office, I couldn't help but put her receptionist behind the receiving desk. And when she called the doctor up, a curious twist occurred. Instead of seductively leading me back to the examination room, drawing the door closed, and revealing the contents of her sleek, form-fitting green dress, the doctor simply answered a couple of questions I had and excused herself to go home for the evening, after which I banged the secretary on the office floor.

Why in the world did this happen (imaginarily)?

The receptionist wasn't an unattractive woman, but she certainly didn't possess the lush figure that her employer was blessed with. And while her slimness and modest curves would probably have looked quite good in an outfit as revealing as the optometrist's, she wasn't wearing an inherently sexy dress, but a plain blue one with a neckline high enough that it avoided showing off even her collarbones. She had glasses too, and wore her hair up instead of free and flowing. Her nose was a bit large, although just a bit.

So what caused me to pass her boss by and gratify my desires with the receptionist's imagined concupiscence instead?

It was this: upon arriving at the office that afternoon, I went to the reception window, where this woman looked up and smiled. Not a giant smile of solar radiance - just a genuine expression of welcome. She asked me the requisite questions, still smiling, and she had me fill out the typical forms. Then, while I waited, she engaged two additional patients a few minutes apart, each of whom had distinct, individual requests - and each of whom received a distinct, individual smile.

Don't get me wrong; the optometrist smiled too, with a smile that was pretty, pleasant, and sincere. But it was a professional smile in the doctor's case, the smile of someone content in her work and aware of the importance of giving the patient a positive interaction.

The receptionist's smile was happy. Despite her lesser position, undoubtedly lesser financial security, lesser status, lesser physical proportions, less perfectly molded facial features, and basically, to all outward appearances, lesser everything, she had a truly happy smile.

And when I imagined my return to the office and imagined her greeting me, I also imagined that smile. Then, when I imagined the doctor appearing at her summons, I imagined the doctor's smile as well, and it simply didn't compare.

So my psyche banished the doctor away and took joy in the receptionist's entrancing happiness.

In real life, I interacted with both women politely and personably, doing my best to express my gratitude at the attention and help they each provided me, as I attempt to do with everyone I engage with at stores or offices, because people deserve that. In both of their cases, it required less energy and came more naturally than it would in the case of a surly grocery store clerk or a lazy restaurant server. But I tried to deal with them as equally as I do with anyone.

Once free in the unbounded realm of my imagination, though, I could not escape that smile, or resist the urge to possess and more viscerally please its owner.

The world is brightened by smiles. If we can be happy, we should do so, and we should share that happiness with those around us.

The results, as it turns out, are more attractive than mere raw sensuality.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(Okay, full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I'll eventually get around to a fantasy about humping the optometrist too. I'm only human.)


Thursday, August 7, 2014

So Let's See How This Works

I went to the eye doctor today to get a new prescription. My previous optometrist had dissatisfied me in a couple of ways, none of them big, but enough that I wanted to try someone new. So I made an appointment and went to a place my wife had gone to and considered acceptable. She'd mentioned that the doctor was female, but I really paid no mind to that detail, expecting to find myself being helped by one of those doctor-y types wearing a white lab coat over nondescript clothing.

It kind of took me by surprise, therefore, when the doctor showed up young and pretty and, frankly, stacked, and in a cleavage-revealing dress to boot.

(Let me take a moment here to say that even though I'm an erotica writer, and I'm starting off my first blog post by describing an unexpected encounter in the close confines of an examination room with a hot chick of an optometrist, this is not going to morph into a porn scene or any kind of sex scene at all. So don't get your hopes up for a steamy "Better like this? Or better like this?" fantasy.)

Now, here's the deal. I'm of the opinion that there's absolutely nothing wrong with a guy looking at a woman's body, unless she catches him doing it. If she catches him doing it, especially in a professional interaction, it's crass and rude. This means that unless circumstances guarantee that she won't notice, it's rude to even try to sneak a peek.

There I am, then, running the gamut of eye-doctor tests ... several of which involve her sitting on the opposite side of a machine from me, with the machine covering her face, but, because of the construction of the various devices, leaving a partial or even complete line of sight to her chest. And the animal instinct part of my brain is saying, "She totally can't see you, there's a big hunk of metal between your face and hers, go ahead and stare at her rack." But the rational part of my brain is saying, "Dude, no, she's looking directly through the machine, at your eyes." And as fate would have it, my eyes are crappy enough that I have to go to the optometrist, but I actually have really good peripheral vision. So the decolletage revealed above her low-cut, silky green dress is like a magnet tugging and pulling at my eyes, and I'm having to constantly fight it through the entire appointment.

The worst moment comes when we get to that point where she's shining the light straight in my eyes checking my pupil responses or whatever the hell they're doing when they shine that light in your eyes. Zap! It's like an interrogation chamber spotlight stabbing into my vision, blinding me, trying to make my eyes tear up or squeeze shut. But I know I'm supposed to keep them open, so I'm struggling to do so, and at the same time struggling to not look down and away from that light at the exposed upper curves of her breasts.

At that moment, she taps her earlobe and says, "Look right here."

Pure horror and panic. Oh shit, did I slip and look down at her tits? No, I've been working hard not to this whole time. But I've definitely been seeing them. No, only in my peripheral vision. I did not look at her tits. Did I?

And after a split second of that (in which I did manage to keep my eyes locked firmly on her earlobe), I remembered that optometrists always say that when they're shining the light in your eyes.

And that's where I am with you, my friends. You have here a situation in which I am allowing you to look into my psyche. I'm throwing the windows of my soul open to the world, and I'm scared more or less shitless that someone's going to think I'm looking at their tits.

I'm going to work very hard to avoid being rude and obnoxious in this blog. But I'm also going to try to be honest, and that's going to mean saying some things that a subset of readers will take the wrong way. Already, there must be someone out there who's thinking, "This guy just thinks of women as walking sets of breasts," even though this entire post has been about how hard I work to avoid making women uncomfortable with the natural, reflexive instincts of my male brain.

But I'm pushing ahead with it anyway, because the goal is for me to see things clearly, and hopefully help others see things clearly as well.

Except for my optometrist, whom I really, really hope is not reading this right now.