haha oops wrong thread. 
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Ooh ooh, I have another one.
Eyes Wide OHGOD!!
I can do this all day.
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Everyone who disagrees with this should go listen to the “latest” This American Life podcast, Testosterone. I don’t like the blurb they wrote for it,
Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire.
because it’s overly reductionist. In fact, Ira Glass had said they almost shot it down for being too reductionist. But the part where a trans man talks about what happened when he started getting hormone treatment almost made me cry, because I could relate so strongly with it, including and especially a nearly maddening desire to ogle. A round feminine behind and legs have been squeezed into a pair of tights. She may be a brilliant microbiologist, 10x more intelligent than me, but there’s a voice in the back of my head screaming, “JUST LOOK AT THAT ASS ALREADY!” It’s…frustrating.
The same with the guy who talks about his moment of greatest desire being the time he caught a glimpse of a frind’s training bra. Seriously, at that point in our lives, we’re flooded with hormones, the effects have been studied, it’s not mysterious, it’s biology. It’s up to us to try to control it, and we all do to varying degrees of success.
I wish there was a handy logical fallacy to bring up here, demanding a peer-reviewed study on ogling. I mean, all I did was a quick Google search which found this ABC article that is light on details. And in this one…they start with a discussion of objectification theory. So right away, it’s not a biology or neurobiology experiment, it’s a sociological experiment. The interesting thing they found was that men and women both apparently objectify women.
Now the thing that frustrates me here is that for every combination of words and phrases I could find, it tended to be about a dozen articles written by either feminists or women mocking or trying to discredit any research (or the researchers themselves) into any connection between biology and objectification. Which one would think, if it’s important to have data to either prove or disprove the notion that there’s a biological component, woudn’t it be important to, I don’t know, do the actual science?
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I think that regardless of the science of ogling, it’s important to remember that the ultimate responsibility to control urges (be they biological or sociological) lies with the ogler. I might have a strong biological inclination to pee, but it’s up to me to make sure that I do that at the right place and time that is socially acceptable.
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Here’s an Amazon review that I wrote. My brother-in-law says it means that I’m really a conservative (EDIT: not the review, but my opinion of sweatpants).
I have to say that I don’t mind the leggings trend, having lived through the mid-90s when one of the trends was wearing jeans (or overalls) that are incredibly baggy, to the point where one assumes there’s a discernible, human form underneath those garments, somewhere.
I can remember being in a milieu (i.e. college) in which someone might have suggested that this is simply a bourgeois hangup. (OTOH I don’t recall anyone shamelessly urinating in front of me, either.) Or why do we have stalls around the toilets? What do we have to be ashamed of?
After a couple of years or so, a stranger approached me in a grocery store parking lot (clarification: in Austin) and asked whether I considered myself open-minded. I replied, “well, sure, yes I do.” “Oh great, then may I take a moment to tell you about the Society for Krishna Consciousness?” Then I realized that, in the future, the correct answer to his question would honestly be “No. No, I am not. I am pretty well set in my ways.”
As Popeye the Sailor says, “I yam what I yam,” bourgeois hangups and all.
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Well, yeah. The thing that comes up on Reddit at least once a day is the person saying that looking is like glancing at the sun: you do it for an instant. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I’ve seen it said that for a man, it’s just a moment, the urge hits, you glance, you glance away, the urge is satisfied, the effects are over.
Interesting analogy, since not peeing can have terrible consequences.
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What are the consequences of not looking?
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We lost a lot with the fall of Rome. Glass windows, running hot and cold water. Communal gender neutral toilets…
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Well, when I was younger, having that little voice in the back of your head annoy you for longer.
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Who decides what the voice in your head says or does?
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I wish there was one for people doing something horrible and then claiming it is “human nature” or “genetic” instead of a learned cultural behavior. None of us get what we want.
All I do know is that for hundreds of years (at least) men have largely excused horrible behavior, whether it be to women or other ethnic groups or peoples, with some kind of reference to human nature and (later) to biology and genetics. Didn’t you hear that’s why Black folks and whites can’t live together and get along? That’s why men can’t help but rape women… etc. Strangely, they’ve largely been proven to be wrong or at least that biology is not the dominant factor in play.
So, because of this, I think the burden of proof on “It’s just biology!” is on the people making those claims, not the other way around.
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BBC posted an article about this today, but I think it’s not very insightful. Basically it amounts to “some people think that leggings are controversial”, in case you were unaware. (And what is with the BBC predilection for one-sentence paragraphs?)
My issue is that I grew up believing that the purpose of clothing is simply to cover the body, which protects it, keeps it warm, etc. The notion of obscuring the body for its own sake was never at issue. So I think there’s just a fundamentally different conception of “modesty”. If the skin is covered, then one isn’t naked, and this fulfils some debatable social duty. There isn’t anything being “revealed” if you are seeing a person’s clothes, rather than their skin. But those who disagree do so quite vehemently.
I like to avoid upsetting people, but I am always interested in how people develop social norms, what their obligations to each other are. Sometimes trying to get people to make their expectations explicit only brings conflict to the fore without dealing with the motivations behind it.
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This happened in my home state 5 years or so ago. It was all over the internet for a couple of days, so some of you may have seen it.
Her leggings are not sheer, and only a few inches of them are visible between her slouchy boots and dress. Still, a fellow student felt fit to blame her for his own thoughts and lingering gaze, rather than considering where his thoughts and feelings might be coming from, and what part he played in them.
This isn’t terribly surprising, given the LDS rhetoric and lessons of virtue that are imposed on girls and women.
Still, it’s not too far from some of the comments here or within our culture.
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This is completely mad. Sorry, but I have to say this.
Let me explain. Sure, we all have an urge to look at members of the opposite sex who flash their secondary sexual assets in a revealing way. That part is true.
The parts that are wrong are:
-it is not only men, women do it to
-you are not forced to act on it.
What you describe is a cultural thing. The idea that women (and only women) should not reveal any sexually attractive part of their body is a very cultural thing. You will find lots of cultures where parts of the female anatomy which are considered “sexual” in the USA are considered “sexually neutral” (for example breasts, there are many cultures in Asia or Africa where women go bare-chested and men think nothing of it). You will also find many cultures where a woman who dressed attractively will indeed attract comments, but nothing more serious than that.
Further, what is particularly puzzling abut the culture of the USA is that men cannot be attractive. It is also recent: Marlon Brando in the movie “A streetcar named desire” had women faint when they watched him in a tight T-shirt. Yet the USA does not do this kind of film any more.
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I agree, I think that sums it up fairly well. Also I wonder how people reconcile “looking at” a person, versus simply seeing them. Do you want to look at whatever you are seeing now? You must do, or you would be seeing something else! A distinction is being implied between different kinds of attention and awareness.
But as a USian, I am not as convinced about consensus regarding the supposed sexuality of breasts, or unattractiveness of men. But I have a reputation for doubting consensus! If people can’t explain how breasts are sexual (and they never can) I simply refute it as vague sexist nonsense. That is another factor in my distrust of most dress codes. How can one condone the school their kids attend having a sexist dress code, and assume that this won’t affect them somehow? Norms get perpetuated by a reluctance to question and re-negotiate them.
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I never said there was a “consensus”. I said it is presented that way in the main US medias, which is very different.
There is no consensus on the attractivity of breasts, for example. There was a nice study about the US citizens of African descent who showed that they were less interested about this particular part of the female anatomy than the US citizens of European descent (in average, you will always find the odd example), by I cannot find it at the moment. As to the male body being generally unattractive to women, need I say more to demonstrate it is a silly idea?
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Are you certain a man wrote this?
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Birds have a similar gamete economy and yet it is their males that display.
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Human males display, often elaborately, but are nearly universally unable to admit it.
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