Ogres & Ogling

All right, so I've previously said that I don't think there's anything wrong with a man looking at a woman's body if she doesn't catch him. But I've also said men shouldn't ogle women. How exactly do these two things go together?

The answer, as so often is the case, is ... science!

Okay, not just science, but science with a dash of simple decency thrown in.

Let's start off with some biological facts.

First up: the human brain is a pattern-spotting machine. And I do mean "machine." The brain is hard-wired to absorb sensory inputs, process them, and categorize them without any input from our conscious selves. If you're walking in the park and you see a dog catching a frisbee, your brain knows the dog is a dog before you can think the word "dog." It knows that the frisbee is a frisbee and is either headed right at you (dangerous!) or going some other direction (possibly interesting, possibly irrelevant). It knows these things within milliseconds or tens of milliseconds. It knows which objects within visual range are trees, which are dogs, and which are people at a speed that is, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. Cognitive processing of this information (incoming frisbee ... duck! rabid dog, run! hmm, a sycamore) lags behind, in the range of hundreds of milliseconds or longer.

In other words, we cannot choose what we perceive. In order to keep us from getting killed on a daily basis, evolution has arranged for our brains to provide us with categorized information much faster than we can consciously make use of it.

Next up: our biological purpose is to reproduce. Whatever philosophical or metaphysical or religious beliefs you have, when it comes to biology, we are baby-making machines, not artists or doctors or used car salesmen. And in the game of evolution, the best baby-making machine wins.

But men and women are very different kinds of baby-making machines. Men provide a simple shot of raw material, and they've got more of that raw material than they can ever possibly use. It replenishes constantly, and takes a very small amount of time to deliver. Women, on the other hand, provide the manufacturing infrastructure, and their time-frames are thus vastly different. Once the factory commits to putting out its next unit, you're looking at nine months before the woman gets another crack at reproducing.

As men and women walk down the street, therefore, their pattern-recognition machinery is feeding their conscious minds all kinds of data, including data about potential mates, and that data differs greatly between the sexes.

The male brain is categorizing humans into male (no mating potential) and female (mating potential), while categorizing females into a range of suitability for mating (old: minimal mating potential ... extremely thin: possibly nonfertile ... pregnant: definitely fertile ... curvaceous: probably fertile). As conscious thought comes online and begins to contemplate the women passing through the man's visual field, he is already primed to be attracted to the ones evolution has programmed him to consider most promising as mates. To avoid pursuing further, conscious investigation into an attractive woman's mating suitability, the man therefore must make an active choice to push aside the information that his pattern-recognition centers are providing him. This active choice is necessary because from evolution's viewpoint, the man could potentially pass on his genes by mating with every single female he meets, and when a highly promising candidate shows up, he may only get one shot at her. So there's a strong evolutionary pressure for men to focus on and evaluate mating candidates.

The female brain is also subconsciously and constantly categorizing people. But the female evolutionary pressure is entirely different. The woman has only a handful of opportunities to pass on her genes in her lifetime, and she'd better make those opportunities count. As her brain categorizes people, therefore, it's not just putting men into categories of high mating potential and low mating potential -- it's also putting them into categories of sexually threatening and sexually nonthreatening. A sexually threatening male represents a reduction in the woman's control over how her genes are passed on. Her brain is attempting to recognize and choose the right mate on a highly selective basis, and all of evolution's efforts at honing her ability to judge mating fitness will go to waste if a man impregnates her solely on the basis of his fitness-judging patterns and not hers. An attractive man thus represents a relatively modest priority to the woman's categorizing machinery because no matter how suitable he appears at a glance, she needs to take her time and get the choice right. In contrast, the unchosen impregnator represents an immediate danger to her reproductive success, which means he's a higher priority to watch out for than the attractive man.

So while the caveman was constantly looking out for any and all hot cavewomen, the cavewoman had to be constantly looking out for mister perfect caveman while also being wary of lustful looks from mister less-than-perfect.

You can see this playing out on the street or in the mall, where a look and a smile from one guy will bring a responding smile from a woman, whereas a look and a smile from the next guy might make the same woman return a blank stare or look away. If you're a guy, you know that you're not really consciously deciding to smile at a woman most of the time, while if you're a woman, you know that your answering smile or coldness occurs before you have time to think, "Mmm, hunky," or "Eww, creepy."

These impulses are part of our physiology, and we can't be blamed, male or female, for having them.

What we can be blamed for is choosing to run with the impulse once our conscious minds catch up. As males, we can be aware that our prolonged attention could set off a woman's biological imperative to avoid unchosen impregnation. As females, women can be aware that, far from every man who glances at them being a pig, every man who doesn't glance at them is consciously restraining his natural instincts -- or has subconsciously categorized them as a low mating priority. So you should either credit the non-lookers for their self-control or feel insulted by the bad taste that's obviously been programmed into their pattern-recognition machinery by genetics.

Meanwhile, as a society, we can and should recognize all of this and discuss it openly. We should not tell men to feel guilty about being attracted to lots of women. We should not tell women that men who look at them are demeaning and objectifying them. These approaches increase rather than decreasing the tension between the sexes because they make men repressed and neurotic while making women paranoid.

Most important of all -- and here I'm going to get much more serious --  we must work toward becoming a rape-free civilization. The existence of rape, and the unforgivable degree of tolerance our society has for it, takes women's biological mistrust of lustful strangers and turns it into a conscious fear. That fear robs them of the ability to enjoy having their beauty recognized and, in turn, robs any moral man of the opportunity to enjoy a constant source of natural wonder, because no moral man would want to risk sparking a woman's fear of rape.

In other words, a woman's annoyance at having a man ogle her should not trump a man's discomfort at having to constantly restrain his perfectly natural impulse to look. But a woman's fear of rape does trump that discomfort. It's unconscionable that we allow that fear to persist instead of cutting off its source.

Unfortunately, there's a widely accepted notion that ogling equals objectification and that objectification encourages rape. But rape is not primarily a crime of sexual desire. It's a crime of anger and resentment, feelings that arise out of mens' perceptions of impotence, emasculation, and enforced repression (among other things). Men who rape do not do so because they're attracted to women; they do so because they are angry at multitudes of things in their lives and also angry at women. By choosing to sexually punish a specific woman, they create a focus for all of their other anger and derive a sense of power over the world. It is not power over an object that they desire; it is power over a person -- a person whom they are making into a proxy for all the other people in their lives who infuriate them.

So if men want to be free to ogle, they first have to eliminate rape. And in order to eliminate rape, we must as a society dissociate sex from power. Sadly, we almost certainly can't eliminate disparities of power from our culture, which means we have to find a way to fully empower all men to enjoy their own sexuality, so that the power/sex connection is broken. This is something we currently do a terrible job at. Instead of teaching men that masturbation is a terrific substitute for sex, we teach them that it's shameful and humiliating. We teach them that providing their own source of sexual release is an indicator of failure, which inherently links sexual failure to all other forms of failure and opens a channel for generalized anger and hate to become tied in with sexual gratification.

We also teach men that there's something wrong with them if they can't land a woman. This exacerbates men's natural urge to look, because how can they land a woman if they're not looking for one? What we need to teach men instead, and women as well, is that if you can't land a mate, it's probably because you haven't figured out how to make yourself happy. Happy people are attractive. It's just that simple. Our pattern-recognizing brains can spot happiness from a mile away, and instantly categorize a happy person into the "must-be-doing-something-right / I-want-to-hang-with-them" file. A bizarrely well-concealed truth in life is that if you can't make yourself happy, it's highly unlikely that someone else will be able to do so. This creates a double-whammy effect in that men who can't find a woman become frustrated and resentful of women, while unhappy men who do find a woman often become frustrated and resentful of that woman for failing to bring them the happiness they expected.

Finally, in addition to teaching men how to be happy and self-fulfilled so that we dissociate sex from power, we also need to overhaul our justice system and our cultural understanding of rape and sex crimes in general. Authorities of all kinds need to treat accusation of sexual misconduct with the highest degree of seriousness, so that victims have no hesitation in coming forward. Furthermore, women need to know not just that they are able to report rape and unwanted sexual contact, but that it's their obligation to do so. The good guys can't do anything about the bad guys if they don't know what's happening, and if the bad guys get away with it they're very likely to repeat or escalate their offenses, which means that failure to report sexual misconduct makes one partially responsible for the future victims of the offender.

In a world where women have no need to fear men, a casual glance will imply a compliment, not a threat, and even the occasional open-mouthed gawking will at worst be an annoyance. We're not entitled to live life without annoyances -- human beings are fundamentally annoying, and we just have to get used to that.

But we are entitled to the appreciation of beauty and to freedom from fear, and we need to work toward a world in which those two things are not in conflict.

In the meantime, we men must keep in mind that freedom from fear is a higher priority than appreciation of beauty, because a person in fear is also kept from appreciating beauty. We must relinquish our fear-free, unrestrained appreciation of beauty, because in the world's current state, heedlessly exercising our impulse to look creates fear and steals away beauty for women, whereas exercising control reduces perceived beauty but creates no fear for us.

Use your peripheral vision, guys! Look from behind sunglasses without turning your heads. Learn to make do with a view from the rear, where you can't be seen.

And women, if you see a guy's eyes flick furtively toward your breasts, be aware that it usually means he wants to stop and stare, and is having a brief failure in his efforts to control his gaze. He's not insulting you. He's not demeaning you. He's momentarily losing a battle with millions of years of evolution. It's a battle that most of us fight solely for your sakes on a daily basis, and yes, sometimes we falter.

Understanding these things gives us all a chance to make the world a better place.