I was recently standing outside my house talking to a neighbor when a man in his 40s or 50s strolled by with his dog and said hi to us. I said hi back, returned his smile, and didn’t think anything more of it. It seemed to me that it was just one of those typical friendly neighborhood encounters people have all the time when someone is out walking their dog. My neighbor, on the other hand, saw it much differently!
“Did you see that?” she asked me, her face scrunched up in disgust.
“See what?” I asked, not knowing what she was talking about.
“That guy just leered at me.”
“Leered at you?”
“That’s right, and I just hate it when men do that!”
“Well, I did notice that he looked at you, but isn’t leer a pretty strong word for what he did?”
“Why do you men do that?” asked my neighbor, obviously still angry at what had just happened to her. “Don’t men ever figure out how much women hate it when you leer at us? And it starts out really early in our lives, too. In fact, when I first got my boobs in high school, I spent four long years walking around carrying books in front of my chest that I didn’t even need to read.”
“I actually have a little theory about all that,” I cautiously ventured.
“You have a theory about what?” she asked me, looking back with a hateful glare at the man with his dog as they turned the corner and stepped out of sight.
“I have a theory about why men look at women,” I said. “You want to hear it?”
“No!” she exclaimed, still angry.
“Oh, come on. It may even change your mind about the whole thing. You see, the fact that men can’t help themselves when it comes to looking at women is actually God’s fault, and not a character flaw.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how most men get a bad rap because of something they basically can’t do anything about. Looking at women is in our DNA. We can’t help it. And it’s the way God wanted it.”
“So, you’re going to blame God for the whole thing?”
“Absolutely!” I said. “To begin with, what do you think God’s number one priority was when he started playing around with the idea of Adam and Eve?”
“I don’t have a clue,” my friend assured me, “other than maybe wanting us to have a good life with a companion and end up in heaven, where thankfully there won’t be any pervs looking at me all the time!”
“Wrong!” I exclaimed. “God’s number one priority was for us human beings to keep having lots of healthy babies so that this fantastic species he created can go on forever!”
‘To begin with,” said my neighbor, obviously eager to rip a big hole in my theory, “aren’t you getting God and Mother Nature all mixed up? And what do either one have to do with most men being a bunch of sick looky-loos?”
“Look,” I tried to explain as scientifically as I could, “in order for the human species to continue to grow and get better and stronger and healthier with each new generation, men have to keep finding the very best female specimens of our species to mate with, and we do that with the eyes God gave us for that very specific purpose. In other words, if men weren’t always looking at women and trying to discern if they are the perfect mating partner for them, the human species would be in a real big hurt real soon!”
“Look,” said my neighbor, kindly trying not to totally throw my theory into the trash, “I agree that it’s only natural for men to check out women now and then, since us women do the same thing to men. In fact, I haven’t spent a small fortune on clothes over the years just to have men ignore me. But they don’t have to leer at us and get us all creeped out in the process. And since not all men are constantly doing it, your theory that they all have to do it doesn’t hold water. Thankfully not all men are looky-loos!”
“Oh yes they are!” I said. “And the only real difference is that some of us are just a lot more tactful when we do it than others are. And it never ends by the way. One of my grandfathers lived to be almost a hundred years old and he was still checking out his nurses in the old folk’s home until the day he died.”
“That is sick!”
“No, it’s not. It’s just God or Mother Nature or both of them, hand-in-hand, doing what is best for the human species.”
“Good grief, Daryl, the next thing I know you’ll be telling me that the reason so many men trade their wives in for a younger model is also God’s fault.”
“You want to hear my theory about that?” I asked.
“Absolutely not!”