Cads

Joanna had just penned an extended (and inspired) diatribe on the tendency of certain men to appraise members of the opposite sex as if they were things:

What I object to is the blatancy with which I’m being appraised - as if it were an intrinstic part of being female to be judged by some balding, middle-aged, bridge & tunnel gutlord. I’m not here to do my job or be your friend or whatever; I’m here for you to look at. That’s it. That’s the sum total of my purpose on earth: for you to look at. This morning, I was standing in the elevator, alone, with this dude (who I’ve never seen before in my life) and he actually stepped back a foot, turned to look at me and slowly looked me up and down for 6 floors until it was my stop. I wanted to punch him in the face.

You should go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful. But I have to confess that it did made me feel just a little bit … squeamish. And guilty. Which I don’t understand, because I’m not one of these people.

Am I?

Well, no, of course I’m not, I’m happily married, for one thing, and besides … I’m not into objectifying people. I’m a secular humanist, for God’s sake! Every person is a spirit sheathed in a body, and there’s no more sense in obsessing over people’s sheathes than there is in obsessing over their clothes. So, ok, if I am staring at someone, I’m staring at their spirit, alright? I’m spirit-gazing!

I was going to write a whole big essay on this subject, but … yeah, I don’t think so. Too much introspection involved, too much peering into the seedy underbelly of male psychology. So I’ll just leave it at this: men are cads. Every one of us. There’s no question of a man not being a cad; the only question is the amount of caddery involved. We should all be required to wear one of those t-shirts that changes color to reflect its owner’s fluctuating caddery rating. So it would turn white, say, for a Level 1 Cad (the lowest level, in which the appearance of a woman is marked, assessed, and cataloged, but no staring or unseemliness occurs); orange for a Level 5 Cad (mid-level, in which the head snaps up the eyes bug out and a narrow thread of consciousness reaches into the mind of a thinner, less bald antecedent in an attempt to extract an old pick-up line before (a) sense is regained; or (b) something hard and unyielding is walked into); and red for a Level 10 Cad (maximum caddery, which involves obvious, prolonged staring and perhaps even some sort of wolf-whistling ). Of course, Level 10 cads don’t need to be identified: they’re quite obvious.

Anyway. That’s all I have to say about that.