This week I learned that it is incredibly difficult to keep your mind off sex when the alarm clock wakes you up with D'yer Mak'r by Led Zeppelin. It starts in the hips and just lingers...

So, here's today's dissertation on men. GQ took a vote on the world's most handsome man or something ridiculous like that, and Robert Pattinson was so far in the lead I gave up watching the results. The thing is, how can you look at RPatz and truly call him a man?

Here are a few men:






Here are a few that look like men, but who may never actually grow up...







And these guys will always be boys:







This morning I walked past a table full of engineers to get milk for my raisin bran, and suddenly all the talk and motion stopped, and they watched me, their heads going back and forth - like a crowd watching a tennis match. I saw them out of my peripherals only because I had sensed the pause in activity. It was disturbing. My brownskin twin was waiting for me by the fruit bowls at the opposite side of the caf near the entrance and I said, "That WHOLE table was watching me." She started laughing because she'd seen them watching me from the moment we walked in the cafeteria - from far away, she said the ringleader lit up when he saw me and whispered to his friends and they all stared at me the whole time. I felt violated. Did any one of them have the bojangles or consideration to walk up to me and say, "Hi?" "How are you?" "Who are you?" "What's your story?"

Nothing. Just visual gang rape. Granted, I was wearing my favorite dress which is pretty damntastic. Still. It all backs up a little paragraph I just read about the objectification of females, which another author had used in his book and asked the question, does this theory from the 70's still hold up?

This is excerpted from Ways of Seeing by John Berger and excerpted by Brian Kitely in The 3 A.M. Epiphany.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

I'm not entirely sure what all of that means, but I feel pretty strongly that the objectification originates when the male starts looking at the female, so how are we at all responsible for turning ourselves into the object? Hmph. What I want to do is get through the day without falling down - so I can't be looking all around to see who's looking at me. I have to keep my sights on the floor, yo.