Why an attractive woman is always to blame
How is it that as women we can never get it right, even in the 21st century? About ten years ago, my then British boyfriend spent months trying to persuade me that I should wear shorter skirts, lower-cut tops and more aggressive make-up (according to him, I didn’t look feminine enough). A few years later, one of my ‘Cypriot male mistakes’ almost killed me for walking down Ledra Street one afternoon braless (he claimed I was also shameless). And this week, I heard on the news that a German driver almost threw a young woman off his bus because her cleavage was distracting him from driving.
Apparently, the driver suddenly stopped the bus, opened the door and shouted at the 20-year-old chick, who was sitting just behind him: “Hey you, your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can’t concentrate on the traffic. If you don’t sit somewhere else, I’m going to have to throw you off the bus”.
The woman moved to another seat, humiliated. Then, I guess, she crawled off the bus through the back door trying not to distract the driver any further (God knows, what else he would do or say) and went to complain to the bus company. However, its spokesman stood firmly behind its man, saying: “The bus driver is allowed to do that and he did the right thing. He cannot be distracted because it’s a danger to the safety of all the passengers.”
It has been proved many times, not only empirically but also on religious and scientific levels, that sex cues ruin a man’s judgement and that some men are more susceptible to such an influence than others. I will give you some examples:
1) Empirical: an American male music critic recently admitted in his review of Wagner’s Tannhauser in Los Angeles that he couldn’t watch the performance because there was such a sexual frenzy on the stage, including a totally naked soprano, he had to close his eyes in order to concentrate on the music.
2) Religious: in Islam, if a woman walks in front of a man while he is praying, it invalidates his prayers because he loses purity of thought.
3) Scientific: a year ago, researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium showed a group of men pictures of either landscapes or attractive women and also asked them to assess the quality, texture and colour of either some bras or t-shirts only to establish that those who had been exposed to young women and lingerie were afterwards more likely to accept an unfair offer than those who looked at nature and other clothes.
Dr George Fieldman, principal lecturer in psychology at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, explained the results: “The fact men are distracted by sexual cues fits into evolutionary experience. It’s what they are expected to do. They are looking for opportunities to pass on their genes. If a man is being asked to choose between something being presented by an attractive woman and an ugly man, they might not be as dispassionate as they could be.”
His words are again confirmed by facts. In Turkey, during a local version of the US reality show Beauty and the Geek that pairs socially inept but intelligent men with beautiful but not-so-intelligent women, “the beauties” took Luciano Pavarotti for Bill Gates, called president George W. Bush Clinton Bush and identified Elvis Presley as the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. The show has been described by Nimet Cubukcu (a woman and the minister in charge of women and family affairs) as “the most vulgar public demonstration of gender discrimination that has appeared on television screens” but full-of-testosterone Turkish men have loved it and it has become a top TV hit.
“We like to think we are all rational beings, but our research suggests that people with high testosterone levels are very vulnerable to sexual cues,” says Dr Siegfried DeWitte, one of the researchers who worked on the Leuven study. “If there are no cues around, they behave normally. But if they see sexual images they become impulsive.” However, he also adds: “It’s a tendency, but these people are not powerless to fight it. Hormone levels are one thing, but we can learn to deal with it”.
His latter statement takes me back to Germany and the “correct behaviour” of the bus driver and his bus company. If a well-known scientist says it is possible to control the urge couldn’t he just try to deal with his hormones, adjust the mirror and get on with the ride?
Well, I guess not. For no matter what wrong happens to good men in this world it is always an attractive woman’s fault.
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