It’s
high noon.
I’m
out for a walk albeit preoccupied with a work related matter,
and walking faster than I ought. But it feels good to get
out in the fresh air. It’s summer in the city and everything
looks prettier.
My
road-runner pace whisks me up to a pair of long, shapely legs
and undulating backside. I slow down to admire the view: the
tight shorts cutting into my favourite parts, the bared midriff,
elegant shoulders. Whether intentional or not, a signal has
been sent and I’ve picked up on it. Like the peacock
flashing its dazzle of feathers during the mating season,
this woman is advertising her desirability and availability,
or so it seems. What I can’t see is the wedding ring
on her finger, and that she is a mother of two small children.
So
why is she flaunting everything except the one thing we should
want to know which is not worn on her walk but her fourth
finger? Since she is de facto unavailable, why is
she purposely sending out a false signal? And when we discover
the ruse, how upset should we be? Enough to start up the male
equivalent of #MeToo? Once again hopes (and favourite body
part) raised and dashed.
In
the animal world, once a mate has been procured all the flashing
and rump swelling that announce the mating season ends. With
the hierarchy of rights and privileges over feeding and females
established, and the next generation already on its way, life
returns to normal until the next mating season. In the animal
world a mated and mothering female ‘does not’
send out signals indicating she is neither: that contradiction,
that mispresentation is strictly a human prerogative (aberration)
– that nonetheless enjoys broad acceptance in the West.
Surely
the legions of the tricked and sold again male contingent
should want to know how other cultures and religions deal
with that distinctly female propensity to send out false sexual
signals. And in respect to unintended consequences, both bewitching
signaler and the designated-aroused will want to better understand
the delicate balance between custom and the law.
Towards
the end of the Victorian age, flirting was a behaviour that
was restricted to unmarried females and reserved for specific
occasions. Since then it has become more inclusive and overtly
sexual, and without any restrictions regarding occasion and
time of day. And while flirting, as a prelude to courtship,
is expected of unattached females, in the modern era mated
females are not singled out or stigmatized for the exact same
behaviour even though they are not available. The reasons
speak directly to the gradual empowerment of women during
the past half millennium.
Unofficially
women’s liberation began in the 15th century with the
invention of moveable type and the launching of the world’s
first information age. Since then, a slow century at a time,
women have been on the march, shattering one glass ceiling
after another, eventually earning the right to own property
and money, to vote, and more recently to participate as equals
in every aspect of public life.
During
the past fifty years women have fought protracted battles
for control over their bodies and sexuality, and have discovered
– like men -- that exercising power is a pleasure that
is difficult to refuse once enjoyed. Beginning with the popularization
and proliferation of visual media -- television in the 1950s,
the Internet in the 1990s -- female sexuality has never been
more on display in the public arena. Riding the coattails
of this new wave of permissiveness (exhibitionism), unavailable
mated women discovered they too could join the parade. That
they understood they were sending out false signals was not
a deterrent next to the satisfaction and enjoyment to be had
from being able to excite men, now reduced to disposable objects
in the servicing of female vanity and self-esteem. Initially
a guilty pleasure, high octane flirting has evolved into a
4-season rite of spring that most men – but not all
– go along with. We note that similar behaviour in a
Muslim country might result in ostracism, confinement and
even a death sentence.
In
Saudi Arabia there are only .3 rapes per 100,000: in the US.
29.6. Allowing that rape, worldwide, is a hugely under-reported
crime, might there be a relationship between the strict Islamic
dress code which desexualizes women and the relative infrequency
of rape? And if affirmative, do we conclude that Western women
are willing to live with the menace of sexual harassment and
worse because their love of exiting men overrides their concerns
over the risks, just as we as a culture are willing to live
with thousands of alcohol related deaths and injuries because
we love our drink?
In
the West, a walk along any busy downtown thoroughfare puts
the distracted eye in contact with hundreds of mated women
who have expressly -- and often with the consent of their
conquest-proud husbands and boyfriends – made themselves
sexually desirable despite their manifest unavailability.
It is not without irony that when these sexy women return
home at the end of the day it is the husbands’ distinct
privilege to have to witness their calculated desexualization:
they kick off the heels, wash off the makeup, slip out of
figure-complimenting designer clothes into baggy sweatpants
and complain about their day. So much for priorities in the
age of consent.
How
should men be expected to react to the dizzying, disorienting
barrage of sexual signals in whose midst they are caught like
prey in a spider’s web? In respect to the informal codes
of flirting and the laws of the land, the majority of men
will play the game according to the 
rules
established by women because they know in advance, through
practice and inculcation, that many of the women are not available.
However, a minority of males, due to either confusion, arousal,
naiveté or cultural dysphoria, will interpret the signal
as an invitation to initiate personal contact, which will
be refused if the woman is already in a relationship. As far
as the attached woman is concerned and with the hard-earned
blessings of the feminist movement, it is her prerogative
to reassure herself that she can still excite interest in
the opposite sex, and men are expected to be informed on where
the new line has been drawn and not to cross it without explicit
consent. Or so it goes in theory.
But
we know from the 6 o’clock news that rules only apply
to people who heed them, especially informal ones. And while
the injunction #NoMeansNo has never been more forceful, there
is overwhelming statistical evidence that women who send out
false sexual signals are more likely to be sexually harassed
than women who do not. And for those odd-men-out who are unable
to disentangle their physical need from the signal that is
directly implicated in its excitement, rape is the tragic
end game for both parties: the injured woman will never again
be the same, and those men who are found out and found guilty
will suffer the full consequences of the law. But despite
the numbers and heartbreaking stories of violated women who
are damaged for life, women, including attached women, continue
to send out explicit sexual signals in the public domain,
which by default places the onus on men to exercise restraint.
And men are listening. With the launching of the #MeToo movement,
men have indeed begun to radically modify their behaviour
in the workplace. 
That
said, is it fair to ask – albeit we know it’s
not correct – if men are being asked to disproportionately
assume the burden of restraint?
In
the spirit of leveling the playing field, and given that men
are more easily aroused than women (#MeTooAgain), should men
and sympathetic women make the case that sending out false
sexual signals in the public domain not only violates fair
practice codes, it is no longer necessary now that there are
safer venues where women can cater to their vanity. Thanks
to digital streaming, women, in private, can now lay bare
the full panoply of their sexuality without compromising their
unavailable status, and men will no longer have to deal with
consent ambiguities. In the digital universe -- a one-size-fits-all
heaven that dwarfs Islam’s highly touted Jannah (72-virgin
paradise) -- everyone meets in the winner’s circle which
in theory should significantly reduce the need for unavailable
women to advertise their sexual desirability in the public
arena.
In
flirting’s defense, anthropology makes the case that
the convention is an adjunct, an elaboration of the grooming
instinct, which is universal in the animal world. For reasons
of hygiene and mating, there isn’t an animal species
in the world that doesn’t groom. Even birds of a feather
can be seen pruning themselves and their significant other
for hours on end on telephone wires and arboreal perches.
The goal of grooming is to stay clean and healthy and look
good.
But
where grooming ends and flirting/teasing begins is a nebulous
gray zone that is becoming increasingly fraught with danger
as the West now plays host to immigrants coming from very
different backgrounds as it concerns sexual comportment in
the public and private spheres.
In
the West, being sexually desirable 24/7 is inculcated in young
women from their earliest years via provocative music videos
and glamorous female role models in television, cinema and
fashion. Women are expected to be sexually primed at all times,
just as confounded men are expected to heed the consent injunction
regardless of the signals that have been issued.
We
note there is no such confusion in the Muslim world. Once
girls reach puberty, they are bundled up in mobile tents (burqas)
with slits for the eyes and horizontal strip-netting for breathing.
And to further discourage women from arousing men, after they
are disappeared into burqas for life (the verb “to burk”
means to suffocate) they must submit to a sunna,
a religious ceremony that culminates in the excision of the
clitoris.
So
we shouldn’t be surprised that recently arrived immigrant
Muslims, who regard the West as depraved and heathen and its
women as harlots, are responsible for a disproportionate percentage
of rapes.
Women
and only women are responsible for the manner in which they
present themselves in the public domain, just as men are not
yet as programmable as machines. Men arouse and frustrate
easily, and there’s an argument to be made that attached
women have been as short sighted as the skirts they wear in
respect to their unwillingness to empathize with men whom
they have willfully excited. And with people from unlike cultures
sharing the same public spaces as never before, more and more
men are likely to be confused by the false signals some women
are sending out, and a certain percentage of these women will
live to regret the solipsistic world they have ensconced themselves
in. That immigration policy has catastrophically failed to
acculturate new immigrants to the customs and ethos of their
new country offers no consolation to victims of harassment
and rape.
As
women continue right the wrongs of the past and wrest a fairer
share of power unto themselves, and as the balance of power
shifts in their favour in their relationships with men, they
would do well to not only enshrine their gains but to include
themselves in the public debates and informal conversations
that do daily battle with the universal predisposition to
abuse power.
