(Sorry Carolyn, I stole your thing...)


Now, we all know that objectifying women is a bad thing. Looking at them at sex objects is, without question, demeaning.

But... what about when women deliberately dress to attract that kind of attention? If there's some lass wandering around in nothing but a couple of belts, is it wrong to look? If they're striking poses, is it wrong to appreciate their figure?

I thought I could figure this one out on my own. See, I thought that when women are doing that it's because they feel the only way they can validate their self-worth is through male attention. Throughout their lives, they've been trained by a patriarchal society that they should be dolls to dressed according to the prejudices and bassist tastes of the privileged men in society. Given that, the best way to deal with it would be not to give them the attention they're courting, because that's positive reinforcement.

Then I thought that maybe I've got no right deciding these kinds of things because I've never been in that sort of position. So I thought I'd ask the people here, who tend to be intelligent and know what they're talking about...

I wish I could remember where I read this guy's really interesting piece on how he learned to stare--he talked about, among other things, being taught what appropriate behaviour was when confronted with tits by male cartoon characters whose eyes and tongue popped out and went 'wabba wabba', and how when he first saw a Playboy centrefold he thought the woman's aureolae were weird and ugly but eventually became conditioned to want to see tits.

I guess really the first (and only) thing I'd answer (since I need to go five minutes ago) is that you're barking up the wrong tree if you're trying to consider or reconsider your own ideas and behaviours using the term 'wrong'. It's not wrong to do whatever you want (though it might be wrong not to acknowledge you're choosing to). I guess if I were you I'd ask myself, 'do I want the person I'm interacting with to think I'm a jerk or a creep, or to feel uncomfortable interacting with me?' If the answer is yes, then ogle away!

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscienc ... glance.php

Interesting article. This bit in particular:


The article seems to be saying that women feel objectified and stared at whenever a man is talking to them, regardless of where his eyes might be.

When the women here are talking to men face-to-face, do you have to surpress the thought that he's checking you out? Is it something that automatically appears in your mind and you have no control over?

(Just to make it clear, I'm not asking anyone to answer for all woman kind or anything, just for yourselves. I'm curious as to the answer and asking, although crude I know, seems better than just assuming...)

More links, from digging down into that first article:

http://ocw.usu.edu/English/english-1010 ... times.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/ ... photograph

<i>The article seems to be saying that women feel objectified and stared at whenever a man is talking to them, regardless of where his eyes might be.</i>

Actually I think it says women's behaviour changes when the men are presumed to be staring at their bodies, though not at their faces.

To answer your specific question, I've long since given up feeling I need to interact with anyone who's not treating me the way I want to be treated. I certainly don't feel (and didn't feel when I was younger) 'checked out' every single time I interacted with a man, but that kind of thing does happen often enough, and in enough inappropriate circumstances, that I get wary when I even suspect I'm being ignored as a person (and then just walk away).

Oh, here's another thing that might help--I've heard women say (to men in general) 'I don't wear low-cut dresses/miniskirts/whatever because I want YOU to look at me.' I know for myself that that never crosses my mind. In the summer I like to wear low-cut sleeveless tops, because (I think) I have great-looking tits and great-looking upper arms. When I put on a low cut tight sleeveless top in the morning and look in the mirror, I think to myself 'hey, you look great.' I never think to myself 'I hope men look at me.'

If presented with a view I try to oblige and look. If I'm then admonished I apologize. Both parties seem to understand the apology is less than sincere. The person being viewed, if interested in me, which always seems to be true else no admonishment, gets a flattered look on her face and conversation ensues. If the person viewed isn't interested in me I just get a F-Off look and that's the end of that.

As best as I can understand, women like a man to look at them if they are interested in the man, or would be flattered if said man was deemed worthy of looking, otherwise it's offensive. Since men have no way of telling whether a woman is interested in them without the looking we give every woman a look. I think it is more of a form of communication.

It is a strange ritual, one I don't really like that much, but there it is. I always kind of had to force myself to play the game otherwise you never got a chance to get to know the woman to find out if she was fun and interesting.

I really have no concept of what goes through people's minds and I just try to follow the social norms currently practiced as best I can grasp. I assume the ability to understand these strange rituals and a willingness to follow meaningless tests is some kind of primeval breeding thing like the display dances performed by birds and insects.

Kind of like this debate, there's really only one socially acceptable answer and what a person really thinks seems immaterial.

I am female. I have some nice curves. If I dress to display those curves, I have no problem with men appreciating what they see. If I didn't want them to see it, I would not show it off. I don't have a lot of respect for females who dress and pose in a revealing fashion then get upset when males around them politely admire the show. One of my pet peeves are women who wear t-shirts with "Bitch!" proudly stated on them. These same women, will tear your head off if you actually refer to them by the label they have chosen to wear.

I also don't automatically assume that men in a face-to-face conversation are checking me out. Until the men or man in question give some sort of indication that they are checking out my physical attributes, I assume that the conversation is just a conversation.

I also do not think it wrong for a female to politely view a well-built male with appreciation. The key word for both genders is "politely". One can look and admire without resorting to leering, crude comments, or attempting to grope the other person. A smile and appreciative nod is fine and something that should be viewed as the compliment it was meant as.

Hm.. Wow. Something that I have had my own interesting experiences with from perhaps the most bizzarre perspective. I am male, 34, light enough skinned to be considered white (another topic entirely), and gay. Comfortably and totally gay. I have been angrily accused more times than I care to count for "checking" a girl out while in conversation with her when my eyes never left her facial area (except perhaps to admire her choice in earrings or hairstyle for aesthetic reasons but I really have no interest in womens breasts or any of the other curvy places at all other than to acknowledge that they exist). I have also been accused of being "metrosexual" and using "gay" as a way to cover up misogynism, sexism, and patriarchal tendencies. Outside of all those statistically few interactions compared with the healthy friendships, loves, and family, I'm a hopeless romantic and tend to emotionally bond with women more closely than I do with my male friends with whom there is no sexual interaction or feeling.

In most cases, the women were between the ages of 17 and 23. I'm not sure how much that matters really, but I went to college for psychology so I tend to look at those things too. The socio-economic range of experiences run across the board, as well as ethnicity so it's not really a rich/poor issue or percieved racial tension, I think it has more to do with popular culture as in all of the above mentioned interactions, the women involved had been highly influenced by some of the more radical feminist ideals that went beyond an assertion of equality and bordered vengeful thinking. There is a fine line in every movement for equality where the oppressed minority has the option to adopt separatist or supremacist ideas of their own as a knee-jerk response to the indignity of oppression. It has happened countless times, and one area where many people have a hard time dealing with in consideration for sensitivity towards the issue which generally only tends to exacerbate the matter.

Anyway, before hijacking the thread entirely, I'll say I agree wholeheartedly with Carolyn. I'm an anarchist. I believe in freedom. You have the freedom to be as creepy as you want but having been ogled by creepy men twice my age in gay bars I can tell you it does not inure me to want to hang out with you at all if you did that to me. You have the freedom to be creepy, I, and anyone you may wish to creepily ogle, has the total freedom to walk, briskly jog, run, drive, bike or jetpack away as quickly as possible by whatever means we deem fit be it "polite deception', calling you out on your creepiness, or outright running away screaming. Just don't delude yourself that your not choosing to engage in a behaviour that any reasonable person could see makes others uncomfortable.

SteamCollective, I'm curious... those guys twice your age ogling you at the bar. Would you have thought they were as creepy if you'd found them attractive?

The general answer to my question, I think, seems to be 'appreciate, but don't ogle' (I mean, I don't especially want to come across as creepy). Where you cross the line seems to depend, as Waterbug said, on how wanted your attention is. I mean, would you feel differently if someone you thought was attractive was 'checking you out' as opposed to someone you thought was unattractive?

Or maybe it's not that. Maybe it's in how you do it. A quick glance over a pint of beer vs. a lingering stare. But in conversation, it's harder. If you're wearing a top that's thrusting your boobs in my face, my eyes are going to be drawn to your boobs. Same way if you're wearing bright, flashing earrings my eyes are going to be drawn to your earrings, or if you're wearing a 'lady's day at Ascot' hat, my eyes are going to be drawn to your hat. If I wore suitably tight trousers then eyes, I'm sure, and regardless of their owner's intent, would be drawn to my crotch. Is that a reasonable assumption, about eyes being drawn to places where a person chooses to put emphasis? If it is, then how should blame be proportioned when unintentional ogling occurs?

(Incidentally, I'd be interested in other people's opinions on SteamCollective's experiences with being accused of ogling and using 'gay' as an excuse. It seems to me that the people in question were incredibly self-involved, seeing in the world exactly what they wanted to see and what supported their own world-view, to the exclusion of everything else. Perhaps this is a symptom of youth more than anything. I certainly know I was guilty as hell of it when I was in my late-teens/early twenties. Hopefully I'm not as bad as I used to be Also, SC, if you'd rather we not talk about this, then please just say. I'm assuming that you wouldn't have mentioned it if you weren't okay with us talking about it, but never hurts to check.)

Something else useful for you:

http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest ... chrodinger’s-rapist-or-a-guy’s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

The advice on approaching women seems pretty sound and, really, kind of common-sense. I mean, most of the points are just norms of social interaction.

I didn't know that women view social interaction with men as such a threat, though. Is that the case in countries outside the US, the UK in particular (as, you know, that's where I live).

According to the Rape Crises website, 1 in 4 women in the UK have experienced rape or attempted rape. That's a lot higher than the 1 in 6 mentioned in the article. However, 97% of callers to the rape crises helpline knew their attackers before the assault, and 'The most common perpetrators of rape are husbands and partners'. So is such a fear of strangers really felt by women in the UK?

(Incidentally, this article was interesting.)

As a side note... the phrase, 'Schrödinger’s Rapist' is horrible. I mean, I understand the intent, but the point of Schrödinger’s thought experiment wasn't, 'you don't know until you look'. It wasn't. It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't. It was a carefully thought out scientific experiment within set parameters to prove--or disprove--a very particular scientific principle. Okay? Stop abusing scientific rules and experiments for pop culture pap!

Yeah, I have issues...

You're asking if we're as scared over here as they are in the US?

Have you heard Cal talk about how it makes her feel to walk down a street with someone behind her? I know for sure I've mentioned how I feel about going to music lessons where I know I'm going to be alone in the house with my teacher, who just happens to be a man.

We absolutely and sure as hell get the same thing over here. It's a constant process of evaluating threat every time someone you don't know talks to you at a bar, on a bus, on a train, in the supermarket, in the street, anywhere.

Check out the thousand odd comments to that article Carolyn posted. That's enough to indicate that it's common experience here.

If what the post described were the norms of social interaction, why would she even have needed to write it, and why would so many people around the blogosphere have found it so valuable? The most significant thing about it for me was the idea that any indication that our boundaries are being ignored is a sign that the person won't respect any of our other boundaries either.

Two stories. First, you remember I told you about the guy who tried to 'help' start my bike at the gas station--I told you I was genuinely afraid to confront him and just tell him to piss off. I was really afraid that if I made him angry he could do me physical harm--nothing easier than to nudge a bike off the road with your SUV. At the time I rationalised it as 'well better safe than sorry, you never know,' etc. But what I realised after reading that post was that I was in fact directly responding to the message he was clearly sending me--that in fact he really did have no respect for me or my wishes and would not hesitate to harm me if I didn't accede to what he wanted. He was sending those signals clear as day; I just wasn't willing to acknowledge them at the time and didn't realise it until I read the post.

Second, when I taught engineering I used to tell my students to be prepared, when they first started work, to get the boring easy jobs. No one's going to put you in charge of a project your first day on the job. I remember my first assignment on my first real construction job was to draw traffic cones on a plan, I shit you not. The worst thing you can do, when faced with a boring trivial assignment, is to whine about and/or fuck it up because it's beneath you. What I told my students was that they had to realise their managers were watching them closely. Their willing and competent performance at a minor task would lead to them being given a more difficult and challenging task; their bad attitude and incompetence at a minor task would lead to them never getting anything more interesting to do. Your behaviour in minor things is a mirror, fairly or not, of your behaviour in major things.

Finally, the Schroedinger 'experiment' was not a 'carefully designed thought out scientific experiment' at all. It is a 'thought experiment' which serves to illustrate a concept, and that concept is not 'you don't know unless you look' but rather 'observation cannot be separated from outcome', which I think is also the point of the post about 'Schroedinger's rapist'.

I suppose I'm approaching things from a slightly odd angle. I've learned the rules of social interaction by route, pretty much, so in my head there's lines of code like, 'if person is reading, they don't want to be disturbed', and 'if you get monosyllabilic answers, person is not interested'.



Makes a lot of sense.



I was always under the impression that Schrodinger's point was that the cat could not be both alive and dead at the same time, and so quanta had to have a state before they were observed, which is in contrast to what Bohr was arguing (think it was Bohr). Schrodinger's Cat is often used by people to explain a situation where looking at something determines it's nature, and Schrodinger's point was that idea didn't necessarily work in practice.

Mind you, it's been a while since my last physics class.

I was actually just coming downstairs to erase that last post, because I didn't want to be lecturing you, but too late!

I used to date a guy who learned interaction by rote, and have known two other people who do it--it seems if you're both intelligent and observant this system can work pretty effectively. I suspect, though, that you end up being good at it only when you realise your 'instinctive' or 'natural' responses aren't working, which I bet is a stage a lot of people never get to. Seriously, though, it's not that the men the author is referring to/addressing don't instinctively understand 'looking away means doesn't want to talk to me' etc., it's that they're just not that interested; they'd prefer to get what they want than to take the other person's wishes into account. (This is actually something I've only come to understand over the past few years--when I think to myself 'don't (these people) know how to behave?' I can answer 'of course they do, they just think they don't have to follow the rules, which they're perfectly aware of, when they're dealing with women.') Actually, the fact that you wrote that gives me a better understanding of why you wrote this post in the first place--I didn't really understand that you're looking for a 'line of code' about when and how to look at women you don't know without coming off as a creep.

Re Schroedinger's cat--there's a difference between an experiment and a thought experiment (just like a difference between intelligence and military intelligence); the purpose of the former is to test a hypothesis, and can be said to be 'scientific'; the purpose of the latter is to flesh out an abstract idea with a concrete/specific/physical example, and is thus more like an anecdote, analogy or Socratic dialog than anything we might call 'scientific'.

Ah, see now that makes sense. Like people who park in disabled spaces when they're not disabled or talk on mobile phones in the cinema--they know the rules, they just think they're above them. Only in this case, the undertones and possible consequences are a little more sinister.



The popular understanding of the experiment seems to be that you get a cat and shut it in a cardboard box. It bugs me because that's meaningless. The whole point of the experiment was the Geiger counter and the time limit etc etc etc. All those constraints and conditions. But yeah, it's not an 'experiment' in the proper sense of the word.

(Actually, speaking of Schroedinger's Cat, it appears someone has an answer: http://io9.com/5497720/first-quantum-effects-seen-in-visible-object)

And I'm really glad you replied--I've spent the last half-hour convinced you hated me!

Haha you're too sweet to hate! I apologise if I sometimes sound frustrated--it's entirely my fault. If you're asking an honest question, or making an honest mistake (online or in person), I can either choose to engage or not; normally I prefer 'not', but paradoxically I'm MORE likely to challenge someone when I respect them and the process they're going through then when I don't, in which case I say to myself 'well he/she is too stupid to bother to talk to, what's it to me if they don't get it'.

And yeah, it's probably much more charitable to think 'oh, that person doesn't know any better, someone ought to tell him/her how rude it is to talk on their phone in the library, then they'll be embarrassed and not do it again'--but in some cases (remind me to tell you about the red and white ball sometime) it really is true that the person knows what the rules are but really just doesn't care--rules are for other people.

'Too sweet to hate'... is that like 'too big to fail'?

Was it you that said you should only start worrying when people stop getting frustrated with you, because then they've given up on you? If I ever make a tit of myself and you don't dress me down, then I'll be really worried...

I once saw a list online somewhere of, 'ten ways to tell if you're an asshole', and the first one was, 'you think the rules don't apply to you'. Because I make a lot of mistakes by simply not knowing the rules, or not knowing how to follow them, I guess I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I mean, not all the time, especially not while driving, but most of the time.

Knowingly showing no respect for someone's personal space is a huge red light. I mean, some people have reasons, but I see the point about it being a huge danger sign to women.

Unfortunately I can't find the list....

Here it is:
http://www.themishmash.com/2007/11/8-telltale-sign.html

There's only 9 and thinking the rules don't apply is number 2... Oh, well. I remembered the important bit, at least.

So...ask me again why I left the USA.

I assumed you came over here for the weather...