This past Tuesday, for me, was one of those hyper-libidinally charged days when, for whatever reason — the barometric pressure, an imbalance of the humours, a naughty dream — I just found myself leering at a good percentage of the girls around me on campus.
There were the two Japanese girls in the student center who filled out their jeans like … yum, and who, as if responding to my fantasies, followed me into the elevator and then accidentally fell into me, giggling.
There was the elfin girl with the short hair, wearing her overcoat open so that it framed her body as she walked, who kept touching her tongue to her lip while she was chatting on her cell phone, who prompted me to think to myself, as if I’d suddenly become a man of an earlier era, "Oh, you’re a little vixen, aren’t you?"
There was the sorority girl–a Theta, I think–who sat in front of me in the class I was auditing, who was dressed down but whose pale skin glowed and whose lips were red and luscious.
I didn’t feel guilty about my leering, but at some point during the day I did think to myself, What Would Robert Jensen Do if confronted with the same smorgasbord of beauty on a day when his libido was juiced up? (Robert Jensen, coincidentally, is a professor at UT, so in some sense he is confronted with the exact same smorgasbord of beauty.) Would he chastise himself for objectifying all the girls? Would he correct his terminology, remembering that they’re "women," not "girls"? Would he subject his impure thoughts to an inquiry, trying to determine the reasons why he focused on a particular body part, or motion of the hips, or ethnic stereotype (what is it about Japanese girls and giggling, anyway?)?
I don’t know. Maybe Jensen isn’t as hard on himself as one would extrapolate from his book, in which he said, among other things, that he tries to eliminate from his masturbating and his intercourse-having all images or fantasies that are derived in some way from pornography.
Or maybe he is that hard on himself. Which sounds awful. Because just looking feels nice, and nicely excruciating, sometimes.
