What Are You Looking At?

It’s a curious thing that women like to look good, but they don’t want to be leered at in public. More and more, I’m convinced that women want to look good for each other, as a kind of competition thing. My precious won’t cop to this directly, but I often rib her about getting gussied up when we’re heading out for dinner or a movie. If she’s happy with the man she married, who is she trying to impress?

It’s an unfair question. She wants to look good for herself, she says. Looking good feels good, she says. And besides, just because we’re married doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to look good for me—although she didn’t say that, I did.

Men, of course, do this in their own way too—though probably less consciously. We have our style and we stick with it. Maybe it’s a Titleist baseball cap, a T-shirt, and jeans. Maybe it’s an Armani suit. One of the funniest things is catching a guy wearing clothes he’s not used to wearing. We all know that fashion is about ninety-five percent confidence. You can see a power executive’s shriveling confidence from a mile away when once a month he puts on the pressed and starched Levi’s in an effort to loosen up for custody weekends.

Anyway, our style sort of advertises the type of person we are; on some basic level it tells you what you’re dealing with in another human being, though this is never a sure bet. My wife may dress like a slut, but that does not make her a slut, necessarily. And even though I dress nicely for the office—I have a satisfying long-term relationship with Banana Republic—my wife would be the first to tell you that I am a shameless slob. I may shave and shower every day, but hell will probably freeze over before I am able to properly clean the kitchen.

So anyway, my point was about boob jobs. Why are so many women getting them, while at the same time insisting that men not notice? Do you think women are secretly flattered when men check them out approvingly, while they know they have to toe the PC line publicly? More important, did Steve’s wife get a boob job, and is it kosher for me to ask?

I have said in the past that I’m not particularly obsessed with boobs the way some of my friends are, and yet being a normal red-blooded male, I couldn’t help noticing that Steve’s wife, Suzy, has an astonishing chest, and it beggars the imagination how she is able to go around without a bra the way she does. Now, I would never want to be caught by Suzy or Steve even glancing at her chest. I make a special effort never to let my eyes wander below her chin, but it’s become such a conscious effort that I have to admit it’s making me a little uncomfortable. Why am I working so hard to not look?

I don’t know what the answer is, and I’m not quite ready to broach the subject with Steve. We married men, despite our overall degraded state, do have our boundaries, even if they are arbitrary. It is generally considered bad form ever to speak about your buddy’s wife in this way. It’s perfectly fair to make general comments about beauty, but the moment you go into specifics is the moment you’ve overstepped the foul line. But in certain circumstances, I’m thinking a very close male friendship could lead to an opportunity to ask—in the most delicate, clinical way of course—are those real?

Now I understand from my precious that women are very particular about what is considered a safe and healthy assessment. It should be discreet and tasteful, and sunglasses are a useful tool. There is a fine line between checking out and leering; men need to understand that women have been ogled much of their lives, and they are highly attuned to the wide range of attentions both welcome and unwelcome. Women know all too well that “checking out” can easily cross into creepy and threatening territory.

Men have virtually no experience on the receiving end of being ogled, for the simple reason that women don’t do it—or when they do it, they are expert at hiding it. (They also fart, but you would never know it. Maybe not even after you marry one.) We thirty- and forty-something men are smart enough to know that we aren’t supposed to be checking out women other than our wives, but we also know that there’s probably nothing wrong—and indeed, nothing really very sexual—about noticing the finer points of the other women that pass through our field of vision. Our wives don’t need to feel threatened by this, as long as we come nowhere near crossing the line into obvious and gross male behavior.