Today is a healthy Monday, and a word I was first introduced to in a contemporary arts class has been running through my head all weekend as I wander the Las Vegas strip with my husband and four of our friends.  I loved this word right from the start: Scopophilia, the pleasure of looking.  Vegas has to be one of the best place to people watch.  You’ve got the obvious go-go bar top dancers, your young hotties in heels heading for the nightclubs and the regular folk like us - a mash up of touristy types and locals taking it all in.

At dinner I happened to mention that I’m pretty good at picking out the kind of woman that gets a longer look from my husband.  He thinks he’s discrete but I notice everything and I don’t have a problem with it.  The men in our group countered by saying that we must check out men, too.   Fair question, but actually, we don’t!  We all agreed we spend most of our people watching time on other women.  This isn’t really anything new to report as women have been known to dress for other women for ages, so it only follows that we check each other out.  I believe it has it’s roots in caveman days when when you had to be able to size up the competition to know where you stood.  If that babe in the next cavern had wider childbearing hips and had ingeniously accentuated her assets with a mammoth skin wrap cloth, then she could potentially steal your mate and your protector would be gone.

I don’t believe we consciously fear losing our security anymore, but I do think we enjoy looking at other women for support and acceptance.  It’s how we figure out which haircuts work and what fashion statements we’ll be buying into in the future.  I know I’ve made many a mental note to pick up this skirt or that piece of jewelry after having seen the look worn gorgeously on a friend or a random stranger.  People watching lets us know where we fit in and helps us to figure out how to stand out when we want to, and how to blend in when we don’t.

And about the comment I made that we don’t look at men; let me clarify.  The three happily married women with me (OK, so we wouldn’t qualify as a true scientific test group) all agreed that we don’t scope out males to ogle, but, if we’re at a restaurant, say, and our server is particularly attentive, we will comment on it and appear to cross into cougar territory momentarily.   A somewhat nondescript guy holds the door open for you at a Starbucks and suddenly he’s the cutie with a great smile.  I think the bottom line is that women need interaction to see a man’s true handsomeness, whereas a lot of men just enjoy harmlessly looking at a pretty face or body for a few seconds.

I think there’re a bunch of theories about height, strong jawline and attache case in hand being triggers o which women respond as they indicate a good leader and provider.  We don’t need these clues any longer because so many women can take care of themselves, but it’s interesting to me to think what’s left of our programming from way back and how much we subconsciously use now in modern day relationships.   If you look at the kind of movie star that was big in the 50’s like…John Wayne, how about Clark Gable and the guy from Casablanca… Bogart….and now compare them to our male sex symbols of today….Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Cruise, Hugh Jackman…these guys are cutie patooties, not big and rough and manly in the same way at all!  Our heroes reflect what’s happening in society.  I’m no expert, just a blogger chatting away, so I don’t have answers to why we love boyish-looking movie stars over the brawny types of yore, but it is a fascinating subject.  I’ll have to ask my girlfriends what they think…not that we talk about men all the time : )