Here’s the weird thing: the overall trend in terms of hits to this blog is upwards, though it’s been fairly flat these past ten days. On the other hand, the overall trend in terms of number of comments is down slightly, even as the number of visitors rise. But what’s really going way up is the number of emails I’m getting from folks asking questions about various aspects of what I’ve posted about. Requests for advice have jumped from about one a week to about three a day, which still puts me way below an “Ask Amy” but does make me wonder about this shift.
“Marian” writes a long note about her husband’s habit of staring at one particular type of much younger woman:
From the beginning, my husband has had the dreadfulL penchant of ogling a very specific type woman: young, blonde and petite. Shall I describe myself? 5′10″, dark brown hair and eyes, and as I mentioned, 47. When I say ogling, I mean ogling to an extent I have never encountered. For instance… there is a blonde, young attractive woman at the church we attend and for quite some time he would sit the whole service and stare over at her. He began making a point to attend that particular service, although he knows I prefer to go to a later one. I remember one service where he missed a congregational response because he was so engrossed in looking at her. When I confronted him about this he finally did admit that he thought she was pretty, and I asked him why that would cause him to stare incessantly at her. His reply, and I quote, “it’s like having a beautiful bouquet in front of you. You don’t want to just glance at it, you want to savor it.”
Again, my question is, why would any 50 year old, happily married man, feel a compulsion to stare obsessively at ONLY young, blonde women? He does not look at attractive women our age, nor does he look at young, pretty brunettes. He has admitted that is the “type” he is attracted to. Let me state I am in fairly good shape for a woman of my age, I’m quite eclectic and tend to wear trendy clothing and jewelry, and when I dress to the nines for an evening out on the town I get enough comments from friends, including men friends, that I know I am not exactly a troll.
I am not asking what I should do to solve the problem, that will be up to me. I am merely wanting to know your opinion about why he would continue to do this.
Marian and her husband have apparently seen a counselor, and my first piece of advice is to continue to do just that. As for the attraction to much younger blondes, I’m in no position to figure out why someone has the particular “type” they do have. I’ve never had a physical type to be attracted to; have never preferred women from a particular ethnic background or with a particular hair color. I’ve always been a bit mystified by men and women whose tastes are so particularly narrow. I do know from talking to some of my friends who do have one particular “type” that many of them settled on this type in early adolescence, sometimes as a response to one particularly powerful early crush or obsession. (One of my friends in school only liked brunettes, and that, he said, had everything to do with Kate Jackson, the actress from “Charlie’s Angels”. It was the show he was obsessed with when he first hit puberty, and she became the “it” girl of his dreams.)
But while I am hopelessly unqualified to analyze the roots of an obsession, I am qualified to say that unless Marian’s husband is suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, he’s got full control over his eyes and where they wander. The myth of male weakness says that “men can’t help but stare”, but the honest truth is that we long to attribute a personal unwillingness to exercise self-control to a universal masculine failing. “All men do it” and “We (men) can’t help it” are lies we tell collectively, and we say them so often and with such conviction that we do a good job of convincing ourselves (and sometimes, we convince the women in our lives as well.)
There are many versions of Marian’s husband’s remark about the beautiful bouquet. “Just because I’ve already ordered, that doesn’t mean I can’t keep staring at the menu” is one I hear quite often. These remarks are rooted in the sense that infidelity ought to be narrowly defined as a specific set of actions. But even for most folks who aren’t Christians (and bound by Matthew 5 and Jesus’s admonition about lusting in the heart), there’s a sense that we’d rather our spouses not long for and fantasize about others. Fidelity isn’t just about what we don’t do with our genitalia, it’s also about where we direct our hearts and our thoughts. As Marian’s letter makes clear, “merely” ogling has great power to wound.
But choosing a partner is not like ordering a meal in a restaurant. And women are not lovely bouquets of flowers. It’s demeaning and troubling to compare human beings to objects, even objects as lovely as roses. (Poets, of course, have free license. The rest of us don’t.) A bouquet doesn’t care how closely you scrutinize it; most women know how acutely uncomfortable it can be to have a man (particularly a man old enough to be their father) staring at them. It’s a rare young woman who has never been discomfited by the penetrating gaze of an older man. The power of that gaze to disquiet and to hurt is real. The French tulips don’t care how long you gaze; the young blonde at church being ogled by Marian’s husband very well might.
Similarly, the soup I ordered in the restaurant last night isn’t offended if I wonder out loud, even as I’m sipping it, as to whether or not I ought to have ordered the salad instead. “Continuing to look at the menu” sends a message to our partners that we’re not entirely comfortable with the finality of the decision we’ve made.
It is important to note that there’s a world of difference between the penetrating gaze and the appreciative glance. One thing we all have is a strong aesthetic sense. Most of us can appreciate beauty in another human being without experiencing actual desire for that person. Most men, for example, are much better at evaluating another man’s attractiveness than they let on. Most women know plenty of young men who fiercely deny even noticing whether their friends are handsome or not, but their denials have everything to do with homophobia and nothing to do with a genuinely impaired aesthetic sensibility. Women are allowed, in our culture, to be more open in their praise for each other’s appearance. But we don’t allow men to express aesthetic judgments unless they are accompanied by expressions of desire. Because we insist (entirely falsely) that men’s judgments about beauty must be tied to their libidos, we shame men out of praising the looks of their male peers. We also teach men that sexual attraction must go hand in hand with a recognition of female beauty. By insisting that real men only find beautiful what they also find desirable, we limit the potential of our brothers and husbands and sons to be full and complete human beings.
What all this means is that I have a great deal of difficulty in believing that Marian’s husband is ogling these young blondes out of a pure aesthetic admiration. His staring makes his wife uncomfortable, and no doubt also makes the women at whom he is gazing so intently uncomfortable. Whatever the origin of his fixation on blondes young enough to be his daughter, he owes it both to his wife and to the women he finds so fascinating to exercise control over his eyes. More importantly, we need to do a better job of equipping men to have two key things that most currently lack:
1. an honest vocabulary for beauty that allows them to develop appreciation for loveliness without sexual desire
2. a sense that they are as much in control over their eyes as over their hands.
In my own life, I have — like most folks — a keen appreciation for beauty. But I can separate an admiration for beauty from sexual desire. As a heterosexual man, I can admire the chiseled features of a handsome young athlete without wanting him sexually. I can acknowledge a beautiful woman in much the same way. But I am aware that aesthetic appreciation can slip into outright desire if I’m not careful. I remain gently vigilant, but not to the point of pretending to ignore that another human being is lovely to look at.
I’m also aware that I have a responsibility to look at other people in a way that honors all of my commitments. If my looking makes my wife uncomfortable, I need to rethink how I gaze. If my looking at someone’s outsides keeps me from caring about their insides, I need to rethink how I look. If my looking makes the object of my gaze feel awkward or confused, I need to change how I look. My right to delight in another’s beauty is not unlimited; it is restrained by my commitment to my spouse and my commitment not to reduce other human beings into mere objects. As a Christian, I am called to make a covenant with my eyes, not to cut myself off from the beauty of creation, but to make sure that my eyes do not lead me to want to appropriate that creation for my own selfish purposes.
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