Un Chien Ingles

You don’t know what hotpants are. Not really. You know they’re short, but what is it exactly makes them hot, and differentiates them from just plain… shorts? You read the word in the paper, “The model was wearing hotpants.” and you only get a vague picture in your mind. You’ve never been a fan of pictures in your mind. You much prefer them in your eyes.

You don’t like the word ‘voyeur’. It makes you sound sleazy and wrong. You prefer to think of yourself as a looker. A looker, at lookers. Sometimes you wish you could stop. But it’s hard to walk down the street without turning your head. Shop window reflections offer refuge, but even then you’ve been caught. How many times have you almost crashed your car because your eyes left the road for a few seconds longer than they should have? You can’t help it - you’re biologically impelled. There’s always somewhere to look.

The inviting cleavage. The manifest bra strap. The tasselled skirt, like pull chords on a curtain. The halter-top. (You didn’t know what one of those was either, not ‘til you saw the pictures in the catalogue.) The skinny fit jeans and bare-to-the-world midriff. The mini-skirt. The slit skirt and tights. The sheer black stockings. The dress. Is it possible that once upon a time, you didn’t even know the difference between a skirt and a dress? What do words matter? The visual, that’s what matters. Only the visual.

“It’s rude to stare,” your mum used to tell you when she caught you looking at girls. So you tried to learn how to do it so she wouldn’t notice. Pretend to be looking elsewhere. Rub your eyes and peer through the cracks in your fingers. Get her distracted by something in the opposite direction so she couldn’t pinpoint the trajectory of your gaze. It was natural for a young boy to want to look, but you didn’t want her to think you were a pervert. Your ruse didn’t always work.

“How would you like it if wherever you went, people kept ogling you?”

Rather that than them looking right through you, you thought… but you couldn’t say that to her. Not to your mum. Because.

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