Amanda at Pandagon has a nice post up about an issue that we’ve done some talkin’ ’bout here at MAID — men and their looking at women. She’s annoyed not with men (like us) who like looking at attractive women, but rather with men who can’t tell the difference between a kind of looking that’s appropriately discrete and a kind of looking that’s demeaning to the women being ogled and/or to the women (i.e. the girlfriends or wives) who the leerers are ignoring (or secretly trying to humiliate) while they’re checking out the other women.
It reminds me, though, of how silly it sometimes feels to write a blog about the nuances of being a relatively enlightened man when we live in a world full of complete yobs who are still stuck at the stage of emotional/intellectual development where they think the following (offered by some random commenter) is a valid argument:
How dare anyone think they have the right to tell another person what he/she should look at or think about? … Evolve. And, enough with the thought police already.
It’s not about rights, fool, it’s about a basic consideration for the feelings of other people, a consideration that begins at respect (for all people by virtue of their inherent value as human beings) and expands, for the people who are important to you personally, into an inevitably imperfect but never-ceasing attempt to be sensitive to what wounds them and what makes them feel good and how they exist in the world and how you can be supportive of them. It’s not being a thought cop, it’s being a grown-up.
That said, my wife likes it when I check out attractive women. It demonstrates, to her, that since she’s with a man who values physical attractiveness and is in touch with his sexual desire, and who finds her attractive and desirable, that she must, in fact, be attractive and desirable. For me, then, checking out other women is actually a form of attentiveness to my wife’s needs (I’m not kidding; I’ve actually become less discrete in my looking at other women for precisely this reason).
It’s not that there’s no value in abstract principles — e.g. don’t check out other women when you’re with your wife, or telling people where and how to look is invasive and controlling — but rather that most of these principles are really second-order principles, and that the first-order principles, the ones about respecting people and recognizing their humanity, should take precedence.
