Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

While walking my dog yesterday, I was ogled.

I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and the T-shirt had kind of fallen down to cover the shorts up. So I yanked it up a little and just then I heard, "Yeah! You look good! You know you look good!"

The culprit was a guy sitting under a tree across the street. He was near the bus stop, and I figured he was just passing through.

Here's a column I wrote on the subject, published in the Milton Standard-Journal on July 17, 1998.

Heyyy, baby!!!

Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend on the sidewalk cafe of a State College coffee shop. Film buffs both, we were discussing the likelihood of Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) ever receiving an Oscar.

"The Academy hates him," said Nate. "I think a personal achievement award is the best he can hope for."

Suddenly, a white Jeep whizzed by full of guys who looked straight out of Trainspotting. One guy, with spiky platinum blonde hair and sunglasses, shouted back at me, "You're soooo money!" And then the white Jeep disappeared in the traffic, blaring Iggy Pop.

Where had I heard that before? Oh, yeah ... It was an expression favored by one of the lounge lizards in Swingers. Like the '80s expression "totally radical," he used it to describe anything he liked.

As I always do when this sort of thing happens, I turned around to look for the person they were shouting at. No one. OK, it was either me or Nate, and something told me it wasn't Nate. I sat there with my mouth open, wondering the same things I always wonder.

Just what did they mean by that? Were they making fun of me? If not, what's the point of shouting it from a speeding, Iggy Pop-blaring Jeep?

Reminds me of a poem by Denise Levertov, called "The Mutes." She writes about "Those groans men use/passing a woman on the street".

Levertov wonders:

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue
but meant for music?
Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

She poses the possibility that men make these sounds out of a desperate sort of grief, an inability to connect. She calls it "language stricken, sickened, cast down/in decrepitude."

And as for the woman, the tribute

goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors
spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.

Ultimately, the woman thinks she understands the message:

the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding
keeps on translating: 'Life after life after life goes by
without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.'

I agree with Levertov that such tributes can be threatening as well as flattering. I've spoken with several female friends about this subject and they say they never know how to take these "compliments." When a guy grunts out "hey, baby" or "foxy lady" on the street, you can't help feeling a little invaded.

From the first time a truck driver beeped at me (I was 15, wearing shorts and walking to band practice), to this past week's bizarre encounter, I've learned to ignore it fairly well. Like Levertov says in her poem, "a woman, in spite of herself,/knows it's a tribute:/if she were lacking all grace/they'd pass her in silence."

But it's like listening to your own heartbeat when suddenly somebody yells, "You're beautiful!" through the stethoscope. The message gets distorted in the telling.

In the movie Girlstown,Lili Taylor all but physically tackles a park maintenance worker who yells at her every time she passes. In her verbal attack, she confronts him and tells him that she doesn't want to be treated that way, that he's an idiot if he thinks it'll get him anywhere.

He's shocked, as if an actor in a movie had suddenly stepped down from the screen. When she enters his space, as a person, he apologizes to her meekly. He even buys her flowers.

Women leering seems to be a group activity. It seems that enough testosterone has to be present to produce the "unga bunga" mentality (another shortcut seems to be alcohol). This is why you seldom see one guy on a street corner yelling at "babes." So maybe it's asking too much, to expect men to refrain from this "male bonding" ritual.

Still, it's important to remember that women are not just images on a screen. We're a television that can stare back. And we may remember your "compliment" -- and you -- for all the wrong reasons.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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