Puttin" On The Pretty Frocks

As a male who finds other males sexually attractive, I can sit on the sidelines of the human heterosexual comedy and observe.  Something that always fascinates me is the women I meet who depend upon a male’s appraising erotic gaze.  Back in the seventies a colleague went to a conference in San Francisco, her first visit to the city, and came back thoroughly demoralized.  She was a beautiful, sexy woman, and a great dresser; “not one man even looked at me, they looked right through me,” she complained exhibiting real distress.  It was the first time that I had realized that women actually liked it when men gave them the eye.  Very recently a no-nonsense girl of the eighties, now about to turn fifty, startled me by observing with melancholy that men only cast a glance in her direction nowadays when she was walking with her teenaged daughters.My mother was an Edwardian belle who was always cautioning my sisters about the malignancy of the male erotic gaze.  Not that she would have phrased it so.  “Watch out for the mashers,” was more her style, “don’t expose yourself,” not that of course she meant something like flashing, but more modestly indicating too much notion of the body underneath the clothing.  I remember her describing the day in 1910 her father met her at the train in Chicago upon her return from boarding school in Boston.  She was sporting a new style, the hobble skirt, and as she descended the steps of the train, her foot and ankle were exposed through the opening, there for the “colored” train conductor assisting the passengers to feast his eyes.  Her father was enraged and scandalized.  Years later, in another of her anecdotes, she used to chuckle over her initial experience of Iowa City, when my father insisted that she put some fabric into the extreme décolletage of the gown she had chosen to wear to her first reception among the university faculty.  So she obviously dressed with some attention to display.  And yet this was the woman who was counseling her daughters on exposing themselves to the erotic gaze of men on the street.  It’s like the business of wearing a skirt.  I have never understood why when pants were deemed appropriate for women on formal occasions, any woman would continue to expose her legs. It is certainly the case that when my architect wife returned from motherhood to architectural practice, she never once in all the years that followed donned a dress, for any occasion, work, weddings, funerals.I know that one of the minor erotic joys of my life is gazing at men’s legs when they wear shorts. Imagine the pandemonium in the office if males were showing off their marvelous hairy thighs and calves.  I have never known males, myself included, not to assess women’s legs when they are available for viewing. And nowadays the fashion of so much opening in the blouses.  It immediately colors my sense of the woman.  The Muslim notion of covering a woman from head to toe to spare male sexual excitement at all times is to my mind ludicrously extreme; some women really do prefer it, I have been told.  But through greater familiarity and proximity males can become habituated to women at an early age so that they lose some of their exotic and thus provocative aura.  My daughters hung out in their youth with their brothers as well as the boys of the neighborhood, and I remember once suggesting one of these boys now a grown man as possible husband material, and my daughter laughed and said “He’s like a brother, Dad, for God’s sake.”