The wandering eyes of a catwalk newbie
11th September, 2007
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If you're standing opposite her, the nose makes a nice point of focus but if her knees are level with your eyeballs, you face a more complex dilemma. What to do with your eyes? It's a question that has plagued males for centuries when confronted with a female person of spectacular mammalian development.
I once spoke to a woman whose buttressed breasts were an architectural wonder and who turned up for our chat wearing an ensemble that displayed them both to significant advantage. Like rockmelons sitting on top of a fully laden shopping bag, they threatened to dislodge with her every movement and land on the coffee table between us. The moment we met, the red alert light began flashing inside my skull, illuminating a sign that read: "Don't look down!". Do so in that first moment and you are a dead man surrendering high ground that you will never regain, for the first look will be the precursor to the second and then the third. Your only hope is to alternate your gaze from her eyes to her nose. Do this for 45 minutes and your eyes and neck will ache with the effort. It is, however, acceptable to risk a quick glance at a moment of temporary distraction. This can occur when you spill your coffee and she leaps to her feet to avoid a caffeine bath or you wave at a non-existent person behind her causing her to suddenly turn in her seat. This problem confronted me recently when I found myself in the front row of a swimwear parade in the Brisbane Queen Street Mall. Ordinary fashion parades are simple enough as you merely cast a glance over the models, wonder why they all walk as if afflicted by some form of palsy and why their expressions suggest terminal constipation. But it became apparent within seconds of the first bikini-clad female appearing on the runway that this occasion posed a hitherto unimagined challenge: where to rest one's eyes? The front row was very brightly lit and there were television and still photographers aplenty, so slumping in my seat drooling from the corner of my mouth was not an option. So exposed are you in the front row that it is not difficult for anyone to follow your line of sight. Let your eyes rest for a second on a scantily clad chest and you're finished, exposed before the city's chattering classes as a depraved pervert. Lower you gaze any further and you are in truly deep and dark waters. Alternately you can stare at their faces, which means leaning back in your seat and tilting you head, or stare straight ahead and fixate on their ankles. "Aha!" I hear my detractors cry. "He has a foot fetish! The man should be publicly flogged and locked away." One after another they came swaying down the catwalk as my eyes flickered from head to elbow to ankle and back, fearful of remaining focused on any one bit for more than a second. As they retreated I concentrated on their shoulderblades, being careful not to let my gaze linger on a provocatively curved buttock. It was the navel that came to my rescue. Navel-gazing, I had thought, was the province of academics but I suddenly realised that it formed a handy point of concentration when confronted by massed semi-clad females. No-one could question my motives in looking at navels, surely? Thus it was that I spent what seemed to be an hour staring at various navels as they wriggled up the runway. This worked well but nobody had told me about the blokes, several of whom appeared in swimwear, all with bodies that suggested they had been born in a gym and rarely left its confines. Where do you look when half-dressed male models are strutting their well-buffed stuff? Anywhere you like, as it turned out, for a quick glance around the guests, 99 per cent of whom were women, revealed that not one of them cared where I looked as their eyes were locked as one on the studs - and not a single one of them was looking at navels. |
