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.