My Eyes Are Up Here

Having just gotten a Vasectomy and a resulting nasty infection, I feel that I have been given a small glimpse into the life of a woman and her body.  Once I returned to public view, every time a woman asked me how I was feeling, she looked at my crotch!  And I started to think.  What if that happened to me my whole life?  What if every time a woman spoke with a man, she fought to not look at his crotch?  Waiting until he looked away to steal a glance, only to get caught when he looked back; or the bold ones just talking to his crotch.  How would men feel, you know, if you take the ‘man’ part out of the equation?  (We are different animals, after all.) 

                From the ripe age of about 13, boys, and later, men, have fought a quiet, internal battle.  Those that are gentlemen successfully win this battle; those that are not stop fighting this battle once their innocence fades.  It is a difficult battle.  For the first 10 years of our pubescent lives we just want to see the female body.  A girl and a stiff wind causes strange things to happen; sometimes just a stiff wind.  What’s a boy to do?  I propose that as a society we should start a desensitizing program as part of the middle school curriculum.  Get it out of their system so they can grow up to be nice, eye-contacting-gentlemen.  Understandably, we would be fighting thousands, perhaps millions, of years of evolutionary hard wiring.  But we are now (allegedly) civilized as a society. 

                Do European men fight this battle?  I don’t know.  Do European woman care?  I don’t know that, either.  But I think the female form is less taboo overseas.  The human body is not kept so secretive in their societies.  Of course, they’ve been societies longer than we have.  And our society has its roots in male dominated religious zealotry, where women had no voice.  So let us unite, and get naked together!