Mashers

My mother who was raised in the Edwardian era, always used to make us children laugh when she warned her daughters of "mashers" lurking everywhere in public spaces, particularly signifying the dangers of close proximity on public transportation.  But I have to say in the polite repressed world of my youth and then fatherhood I heard many stories from sisters, daughters, casual women friends, stories of smutty insinuations, gropings, hard cocks pressed against thighs, even exposures- this was in front of my teenaged daughters, for God's sake, on a respectable suburban street, by a man who stopped his car, jumped out and unzipped his flies as they were walking along to school.  When I finally learned of this it was more their amusing anecdote than a crisis story.  My mother constantly warned my sisters against entering a room alone with a male and not leaving the door open.  I was thus so conditioned that when colleges changed their rules for visitors of the opposite sex to dorm rooms, I as a professor always spoke out against it, people thought I was a fuddy duddy.  When I made two woman friends in Italy I, the brother of four sisters, was interested to see how they managed to be perfectly friendly to their masculine friends and acquaintance, accepting the ritual of constant masculine flirtation and invitation as a societal norm of Italian relationships but never allowing the pseudo stylized erotic to be in the slightest way erotic or invitational; it was all style, and meant nothing.  When I taught at Stanford I knew a brilliant aggressive woman professor who always no matter what replied to any male who made any remark that had even the minimal chance of being interpreted as a come-on "fuck off, you son of a bitch."  I have always despised the Muslim use of the veil but those women who champion it bring up the unwanted attentions of males all day every day, but sometimes I wonder when you hear the stories surfacing now about the veil's validity for those who want it.  As a gay male I am in an interesting position to study the obsession.  Heterosexual males are restrained from openly gazing at women sexually by their codes of proper behavior; construction workers on the job, as we all know, have license-- or used to- to stare, whistle.  A friend of mine has described the constant stream of males who pass her on a crowded Manhattan street who called out sottto voce "ya wanna fuck?" or something similar.  I have spent my life learning not to cast my erotic gaze on nearby handsome males wherever I am, not to make even verbal advances, since this natural form of male sexual aggression is absolutely or used to be dangerous in almost any circumstance.  Jokes are sometimes made describing a gay guy in a locker room of naked straight athletes.  It has its amusing salacious aspects, but essentially it is an exercise in painful repression.  But it is the obligation of males straight or gay to develop their defenses against arousal.  That is what being a gentleman is all about.  One must not become a masher.