I’d like to start by making four points completely clear.
First, I support the right of boobs to air their opinions in public places.
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Second, I have a reflexive dislike for the incessant promulgation of laws, ordinances, rules and regulations. I reckon half the population has something annoying in mind that they would like to see stamped out or restricted. Sure, I myself have sometime considered the advantages of an ordinance forbidding pea-brained bimbos from loitering in Meeting House Park Friday noons with intent to annoy . But if everyone got their favorite nuisance regulated society would be immobilized and half the population employed in policing the other half. In short, a couple of incidents, however objectionable to some people, are not grounds enough for yet another ordinance.
Third, I stopped thinking about sex entirely when I turned sixty-five so it does not personally concern me if some women choose to present themselves in public with bare breasts. For all I care they can go about bouncing, jouncing, jiggling, flopping, and sagging at will.
Fourth, although it may be my right, I wish to assure my fellow townsmen that I have no plans to bare my aged, pallid, paunchy, hairy, mole-studded naked torso to the public view. To paraphrase the Declaration of Independence “a decent respect for opinions of mankind require that” I spare them this gruesome spectacle.
The issue at hand seems simple enough at a superficial glance. Men are free to wear bras and have breast enhancements, so women should be free to expose their torsos to the warming rays of the sun. But unless you are fanatical enough to equate equality with uniformity and ignorant enough to believe that equality and equity are synonymous you will see there are complications.
Consider. The exhibitionist-in-chief has announced that men are “welcome” to the Meeting House Park display, but only if they don’t gawk or leer. Leaving aside the question of where she gets the authority to decide who is welcome to a public place she pays no taxes to maintain, we must wonder about her rationale for welcoming men but excluding boys from the show.. When I was a smutty-minded juvenile of 12 or 13 this would have been a gala event.
More significantly, our heroine shows a baffling ignorance of the male’s biological hard-wiring. I propound no theory, but I submit that gazing, gaping, and gawking at external female physical attributes is intrinsic to the male mental constitution. Can this woman be ignorant of the billions of dollars men spend examining these attributes? Is she unaware of surveys showing that 80% of men admit to viewing pornography while 19% admit to lying on surveys? Does she take no satisfaction from this thriving part of the green jobs sector? It has a lower carbon-footprint even than higher education, e.g., there are no dormitories for the women on display.
It is udderly futile and contradictory to forbid leering while advocating naked nipples. The gaping male is a constant menace to an attractive woman whether she is sitting, standing, walking, running, kneeling, squatting, bending, or laying prone, face up or face down. And if there were none but homely women in the world, the relentless male gaze would study them with equal intensity.
More, there appears to be no part of a woman’s body, hair to toes, that men do not take pleasure in studying and no part which fails to attract some variety of fetishist. I’ve never actually heard of an ear fetishist, but I feel certain that somewhere in our great Republic there are men gloating over their collections of stolen ear-rings.
Strict Moslem clerics, dedicated to keeping the male mind focused on Allah, have a clear sense of male biological imperatives. Cover the female body and the male leers at her hair. Cover her hair and the male fixes his lascivious eyes on her face. Cover her face and her eyes becomes the focus of forbidden desire. Only a total veiling, coupled with the promise of a whole platoon of virgins in the after-life serves to turn the male mind from thoughts of sex to thoughts of Allah.
That’s the way it is, has been, and ever will be. No legal sanction exists which will end it, although women can defend themselves against most overt leerings and droolings by contempt and disdain. Men rarely have the courage to defy them unless they are protected by a herd. But this is only possible because the culture supports women in disdaining unseemly excesses of the male gaze.
A woman who claims the right to a leer-free exhibition of her balcony is deluding herself by imagining that one part of the culture’s restraints can be freely discarded while the rest will remain intact for her convenience. A civilization’s culture is nearly as complex and interdependent as the physical environment.
