Observers of People

About fifteen to sixteen years ago, I attended, at a different church, a Sunday school class run by a middle-aged couple there. This couple was keen on helping younger couples get through the first years of marriage by giving advice and using Biblical precepts. I liked both of them and appreciate their efforts to help others. The woman (to whom I will give the fictional name Doris) one day described herself as an “observer of people”, and explained this through the use of an example. It seems one day that she was eating out in a restaurant somewhere and a pretty young woman happened to walk by. Doris, being the observer of people that she was, set about noticing the reactions of the males around her. And lo and behold, just about all of them looked up at the pretty woman as she passed them. Doris was trying to make the point that men tend to be visually oriented regarding women. But wasn’t she also playing around with her eyes, too? And she had nothing to say about what the women around her were looking at, either.

Many years ago, I was watching one of those ten o’clock prime time TV network newsmagazine shows such as 20/20 or the like. Featured was a segment about an angry woman who videotaped men sitting out in public, obviously on their lunch breaks from work, looking at a pretty woman as she walked by. She would then confront any “offenders” she “caught” on tape and then proceed to yell at them, making a public nuisance as well as a fool out of herself in the process. And the woman passerby? A setup, sent by the embittered, disturbed woman herself to provoke the desired looks from the targeted men. So who stepped over the line here with their eyes?

When I go into a place like a coffee shop, diner, library, etc., invariably I will cast my own eyes around at the people there. It’s not a male thing or a female thing. It’s a normal, human thing. And just as often as not, I’ll notice women sitting around looking at me and others. Sure, men probably tend to rely on visual stimulation regarding the opposite sex more than the reverse. But looking at people doesn’t have to mean anything. Now just staring someone down, that’s an entirely different matter! But neither was happening with the men observed by “Doris” or the video crusader!