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By Troy Patterson

Posted Friday, July 30, 2010, at 2:40 PM

ET

I write to you at one of the three peak

seasons for girl-watching in North

America. Sweater-sheathed Ms. October

will knock 'em out in the fall, and the

darling buds of May will spring fresh in their sundresses all too shortly, but

meanwhile this is sultry deep August

impossibly flimsy fabrics, exquisite

lengths of limb. Addled by murderous

heat, provoked by brutal hot-to-trotness,

I here risk gathering some modest notes

on visual experience and modern

manners.

Shall we define our terms? When I say

girls, I am employing a common archaismmeaning women, also known as chicks.

For the purposes of this discussion, any

woman who is older than a child and

younger than a matron is a girl. By

watching, I mean checking out. Despite

all the many philosophical inquiries into

beauty since the Greeks and into

sidewalk scenes since Baudelaire, there is

an acute shortage of discourse on the

subject of checking out hot chicks, a

silence all the more appalling becausethey are famously difficult to ignore.

To understand this lack of critical

inquiry, we might revisit aNew York

Observerpiece written 11 Augusts ago

by a hot and bothered George Gurley. He

described "a standoff between men and

women" in public spaces: "While the

happy gains of post-feminism may have

given women permission to wear skimpy

garments in the city heat, the earlier and

more sober gains of feminism have made

it very uncouth indeed for any civilized

man to acknowledge the delights that

meet his eye." Not much more interestinghas been said on the topic. What

academic work there is on the subject

tends to get bogged down in a male-gaze

sound bite from the critic John Berger:

"Men look at women. Women watch

themselves being looked at." That quote

is also a favorite of people producing

social-science papers on body image,

sexual harassment, and gender equity.

Those are all very serious issues, none of

which will be addressed here, this not

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A Dandy's Guide to Girl-WatchingChecking out girls in shorts tastefully.

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being a very serious article, I hasten toclarify for those readers already drafting

indignant letters to the editor.

The rest of us can get our bearings by

recognizing girl-watching and people-

watching as distinct activities. An

illustration: The alert people-watcher

observes that two girls going out about

town together, each clad in shorts, are v

ery likely to be wearing shorts of

precisely the same length. The girl-watcher, confronted in the flesh by a pair

of shorts-clad women, may not notice

the identical brevity of their garments,

concentrating as he is on how one of the

girls is wearing her shorts beautifully.

The pleasures of people-watching are

anthropological; those of girl-watching

are aesthetic.

Modern girl-watching began in 1954,

when Harper published . It is still the

great text on the topic, a delightful and

occasionally profound novelty book

constructed on the model of birding

manuals: "Although we believe that girl

watching has it all over bird watching,

we feel that these two hobbies do share

one important feature. They are both

genteel. They both respect the rights of

the watched ... A girl watcher neverleers,

nor does he utter any sound which mightbetray his joy."

Author Don Sauers wrote during hours

stolen from his job aswhat else?a

New York City ad man. Indeed, there is a

distinct vibe to the production, much

helped along by the va-va-voom

illustrations from Eldon Dedini. In fact,

Sauers went on to design girl-watching-

themed ad campaigns for Pall Mall and

Diet Pepsi. For nearly a decade-and-a-

halfuntil about the time of the Miss

America Protest of 1968the author

received invitations from the likes of the

Tonight Show, Expo 67, andLife (wherehe once helped out with a photo spread

about ski pants).

Sauers' recommended "girl watching

centers" in Manhattan include Fifth

Avenue between 49th and 59th Streets,

and 58th Street between Madison and

Sixth Avenue, selected on their strength

as shopping areas. Employing that

standard, the Manhattan girl-watcher is

today best served by Prince Streetbetween Sullivan and Elizabeth, where


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some girls distinguish themselvesthrough their alluring poise, others

through flamboyant bralessness. In order

to investigate possibilities further

uptown, I arranged a lunchtime

rendezvous with a friend who works on

the same block that Sauers did, Fifth

Avenue between 57th and 58th. Before

embarking on our field trip, we digested

the book's instructions on "mastering the

once-over," which are predicated on the

idea that "it is never in good taste to lookdown after watching a beautiful girl's

face." Rather, after sighting a striking

face, you quickly look at girl's shoes, then

"slowly, taking about three seconds, raise

your eyes ... remembering always not to

move the head." That last directive

reminded my companion of instructions

he'd gotten on his golf swing.

Put off by the fanny-pack'd tourists of

Midtown, we turned north, discovering a

great density of impressive subjects on

Madison between 59th and 72nd, which

is to say between Barneys and Ralph

Lauren's Rhinelander Mansion. This

stretch has its limitations, given the

notably homogeneous collection of

subjects it presentscf. the marvelously

diverse Union Squarebut we

nonetheless managed to excite our eyes,

each murmuring internally about finenecks and necklines. It happens that

Ralph Lauren isn't very far from Lenox

Hill Hospital; thus, near the end of our

excursion, I chanced to discover that it

can be entirely gratifying to check out a

girl clad from ankle to v-neck in sea-

green medical scrubs if she holds herself

well. I impulsively shared this

observation with my companion who,

contrary to protocol, moved not just his

head but his whole body and shanked.

Though Sauers' three-second bottom-to-

top once-over is quite a useful guideline,

adhering rigorously to it is not withoutcomplications. For one thing, the human

eye more naturally moves downward in

attempting to pursue an approaching

target smoothly; working up from a well-

turned ankle to a pretty face, it more

likely fixes a series of looks. Which is to

sayindulge me a whim here the most

correct girl-watcher apprehends passing

loveliness in a sunny flutteras a series

of little thrills to the soul. (Watching a

stationary girlor the mobile rear of agirlis a whole different thing and


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affords a rather more meditativeexperience of physical virtue.)

For another, the human eye has a whole

new range of eyefuls to reckon with these

days, as mores are not what they were in

Sauers' day. Any given girl might be

watching the watcher with aesthetic or

anthropological or plainly libidinous

interest. The counterwatching

complicates things, sometimes

enrichingly. And notions of decorumhave very agreeably shifted such that it

is not uncommon for girls pushing baby

strollers to strut as if working a catwalk.

And it may be the case that a liberated

girl may court extended mental

admiration in any number of waysby

coquettishly tossing her hair, say, or

pedaling a Schwinn while wearing a

miniskirt. The contemporary girl-watcher

may permit himself an extra moment of

wonder or an extra degree of frankness in

certain contexts, exercising his best

discretion in the matter of how little

discretion to exercise.

To be a gazer, some say, is to place

oneself superior to the gazed, which

works fine as a tenet of film theory and

feels notably more dubious as a premise

of girl-watching analysis. The girl may

be an objectified being, but it ispractically a subclause of the social

contract that we all objectify ourselves in

the mirror every morning. Meanwhile, the

girl-watcher is subject to the absolute

rule of his powers of vision and carries a

distinct whiff of comic pathos. Figure,

carriage, finish, charm, flesh, coolthese

are omnipotent. It is the nature of beauty

that the girl-watcher is helpless before

the wonders of nature.

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