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Dang!

Does this bother you as much as it does me? I mean, come on. Can't one guy get on a plane shirtless? Or at least wearing a shirt so tight that the buttons are bursting around his gut? Or maybe with pants so tight you can tell if the quarters in his pocket are heads up or heads down? How about wearing a thong with nothing over it?

Okay, fun's over. This post is really about "Two women were recently singled on out separate Southwest flights and told that their outfits were 'inappropriate.'" We never seem to read this about men, though. Hmm...

I've read some and not all of the supporting material. I also did a Google search on inappropriately dressed men. 207,000 entries. I scanned the first 100. They all dealt with men's reactions to inappropriately dressed women.

Obviously, I don't know how to search correctly.

Or is it that we're simply a male-oriented, sex-obsessed culture that still thinks of women as either objects or property instead of people?

Do remember that this post is being written by a male of the species. I'm as capable of recognizing an attractive female as the next male.

Oh, wait a second. What is "attractive"? In college, male friends constantly wondered how I managed to date some of the most attractive women on campus. At one point, I dated a woman whom everyone else was lining up for. I stopped dating her on the second or third date, I think. Was she stunning? Yeah, I suppose. I really can't remember.

What I can remember was that she was so completely self-centered and boring (and this from someone who describes himself as boring) that it was painful to be with her. Whom did I spend time with? A woman everyone described as "a good friend". To me, she was a dream. I couldn't get past her intellect and conversational skills to see that she really was rather plain, after all.

Wait a second. I'm sorry. I'm suppose to write something like "I could never see past her hourglass figure to appreciate what an intelligent woman she was", right?

Stimulation is in the mind before it's in the body. What causes the mind to be stimulated? Cultural specific mating behaviors. What falls into the category of "cultural specific mating behaviors"? Well, strangely enough, one such thing that falls into that category is clothing that either reveals or draws attention to either primary or secondary sexual attributes.

Primary or secondary sexual attributes? Yes. Sex organs are primary sexual attributes. My beard is a secondary sexual attribute. My ability to grow a beard comes from heredity and various hormone levels in my body. We tend to not display our primary sexual attributes (as a culture) and we claim it's for health reasons. I'll agree there's a public health concern in some and not all cases. We tend to display secondary sexual attributes (as a culture) and we claim it's fashion. I've had facial hair since I was a highschool freshman and a full beard since I got out. It has nothing to do with fashion. I hate shaving twice a day.

Now between the "clothing that either reveals or draws attention to" and the "stimulation" itself is this odd little thing called "the human mind". Supposedly the human mind has the ability to perform rational thought, to make decisions. Something like, "Yes, that is stimulating. I can choose to ignore it, though, and not be stimulated."

I must balance this against my grandfather's advice to me, "Palle piene conton dono la testa e distrae il lavoro" ("Loaded testicles confuse the head and distract from work").

Impressive secondary sexual characteristics are always interesting from an engineering perspective, and yes, they'll catch my eye. One of my dearest friends is a woman with a 38dd-26-37 figure. She wears a t-shirt with very tiny print on the stomach area. It reads "Enjoying the shade, are we?" But what really impresses me is that she can hold her own in conversations in a dozen different fields ranging from xenobiology to atmospheric studies to music and reads in three languages.

{You know, completely as an aside, this topic kind of dovetails with my recent articles on eye-tracking studies, don't you think? I mean, really, it's all about what we choose to focus on, what to see, what the eye is pointing at when the brain sends the mind the "My god did you see the hat that woman was wearing?")

What, exactly is inappropriate dress? Perhaps the Hamamatsu shown here? Would you feel comfortable if someone sat next to you on an airplane wearing this stunning piece? Now this little honey, she really has me going. You can just tell she has something on her mind, can't you?

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Links for this post:

• Eye-Tracking Studies: Just Say "No!"
• Help visitors focus and reap the rewards
• Second Life? I don't find you interesting in Real Life

• Audience Focused Optimization

• XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
• DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
• Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.