Women ogling men!

There's a debate going on in the press and on the radio at the moment which all started with a revelation in one of the Sunday papers that men ogle an average of ten women a day. Not only that, they can't help it. It's a reaction that is in their genes as well as their jeans. Remember that recent photo of President Obama turning his head to watch a cute ass moulded in bright red satiny material ascending the steps behind him? His wife and daughter were behind him, but he just couldn't help himself, and nor could the aide who was alongside him.

The female chat show host I was just listening to voiced the opinion that this was purely a male phenomenon, and showed lack of respect for the man's partner. Well, if they really can't help it, partners don't figure in the equation. It's an involuntary reaction, like a sudden sneeze, or flinching if a bird suddenly flies out of a bush right next to your head.

When I was much younger and less secure, I hated it when the guy I was with looked at other women in the street. It really did cause me distress and to get my own back, I started eyeing up the male talent. Actually, this was nothing new. I remember ogling my first man when I was a mere eleven years old. He was waiting for the same bus that was to carry me to my school in the centre of Liverpool and he was gorgeous. He had long hair and a beard, the hippy beatnik type I have always gone for. Shame that next day he was there holding hands with his boyfriend! I found out later that they both attended the art college over the road to my school - the same one that John Lennon went to.

From there, I progressed to eyeing up the talent in my O-level Russian class - as the classes weren't big, we shared a teacher with our brother school, the Liverpool Institute. Then it was off to university and a whole new world of males to gloat over.

I moved to London and my best friend and I would wander up and down the King's Road on Saturdays, 'bulge spotting'. We made no bones about it. This was the late 1970s, an era of crotch-strangling trousers, and our well-trained eyes would home straight in on the lumpy area of interest. When a particularly spectacular saveloy, or even a Cumberland, was spotted, we would giggle, nudge each other and mutter, "Lunch!" As in lunch-box, Lindford Christie style.

Even in my forties and fifties, I couldn't held scanning streets, buses, shops and beaches, though by then the lunch-box wasn't the target, but more the general overall appearance of nice build, nice bum, shapely legs, good hair and a smoulder in the eye. Once I started going on holiday to Turkey, I was like a kid in a sweet shop, so many gorgeous goodies that I didn't know which way to turn. Did I help myself? Of course I did!

Now that the flickers in the knickers have subsided in a kind of post-menopausal detumescence, it takes a lot more to stir me than a saveloy. I still have to admit to a weeny bit of ogling, though. Tomorrow, I have altered the time of my appointment with the chiropractor (alas, the infirmities of age!) in order to watch a parade of troops returning from Afghanistan. All those lovely, fit boys in uniform. Perhaps I have finally morphed into a Dirty Old Woman. Phwoarrrh!!!! Dirty Old Woman? DOW? EnDOWment? What would Freud say, he who invented the phallic symbol? Samuel Johnson said, 'When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.' I say when a woman is tired of men, she is tired of life. There's nothing like a quick ogle to keep the spark of life glowing, even if the flickers in the knickers have long gone out.